I'd say the biggest thing from holding me back from overall contentment in life is being completely and truly selfless. I am better than I used to be but I am fairly competitive, self conscious, and a bit of a whiner when things don't go the way I want them. What is/are some good advice/practices that will help me to dissolve the self?
"The key to happiness is warm heartedness. compassion gives you inner strength, more self confidence, and changes your attitude." - Dalai Lama also... "Someones else's actions should not determine your response." DL
Let go of yourself. Know that you and all around you is impermanent.And Practice compassion on to all life because of its interconnection and ultimately realize Karma.
I also find it hard to be truly selfless, at first all I could think was "If I am kind to everyone and everything around me, I will be rewarded with good karma." but that was of course, being selfish, and I would not. Helping others to help yourself does not count as selfless-ness, it took me a while to really click with that and so I started to imagine that if I continued doing kind things for others, and recieved NOTHING in return, not even the joy of knowing you have helped, it would still be an amazing thing. And now I tell myself before I make any action or think any thought, "how does this benefit others?" and if the answer is not at all, I shall find an alternative that will. Try this exercise yourself, I hope it helps you as much as it helped me.
A very easy way to selflessness is to see yourself in all beings. Satisfy your hunger by feeding a homeless person. Rejoice in the victories of others, even in the face of yuor own failure. Remember - there are no two things. The whole universe is one, and that one is your own true nature, your true self.
I don't believe in selflessness. Everything you do will benefit you in some way. Or at least you believe it will.
Insight shows us that true benefit to us will come in the wellbeing and benefit of all beings. Such selfishness is also selflessness. In the end, though, there is no distinction between self and other at all. We are playing with words around an imaginary line.
I agree, most acts that one undertakes will in some way benefit yourself or another, even if this wasn't intentional. But I think there are some exceptions, and if you were doing an act purely to benfit another, the reward you may get shouldn't really count. If you see what I mean. But being selfless is vey very difficult. I will try and get through the rest of the day by being selfless, but I have a bad feeling about it already
Go deeper and deeper into yourself, until you realize that there is no self, the self is an illusion. In our center we are all one, our differences were only a peripheral thing, there is no other. Once you realize this, you realize that your actions affect the whole, that if you are being compassionless towards others, you are being compassionless to yourself, if you show compassion for others, you are showing compassion towards self. This realization in itself will give way for compassion to rise on its own, no longer are you separate, you feel the pain of others as if they were your self. Separateness is an illusion!
In other words we have compassion in a frustration either towards the others' corporeality or mental action? This is NOT an illusion instead.
The self is composed of past, future, and many other things. If you can simply hold your attention / focus on the present moment as it is, then that automatically produces selflessness. Note, there is a difference between thinking/contemplating the present moment and actually being in it. Pure nonjudgmental observation is key, see if you can do that.
