How to overcome selfishness? How to avoid becoming a selfish person? The answer to these questions is simply avoiding “self-flesh-ness”. Yes, you’ve heard it right… don’t be self-flesh. Be a more spiritual man instead of a material person. Become more heavenly rather than earthly. Become a spirit over your body.
People become selfish because of their love on the things of the flesh. The flesh desires the things that are not eternal. These things give rise to greed, iniquity and selfishness. If you will ask why a person becomes selfish, you will find out that what makes him that is his love of money, lust and fame. A man, who puts his heart on money and the like, will not care to do charity, humility and equality. This is because these good virtues will surely take away his material possessions. And because he loves his material possessions, he will certainly protect, defend and will sacrifice things just to not lose them.
One reason why we can’t easily get out from selfishness is that our mind, heart and soul are attached to our flesh – our body. Whether we like it or not, we need to eat, we need to drink, we need to have a shelter and we need to have money to exchange for those things. We are created with the materials that come from the Earth itself. Our body is composed of earthy materials, such as the nutrients and minerals that we usually consumed out from the food we eat. However, we don’t need to detach our spirits away from our body. We simply need to overcome our body, instead of being its slave.
The main reason why we can’t escape from selfishness is that we are weak to defeat it. We are weak because we don’t understand the spiritual things. We don’t understand them because we don’t practice them constantly. We don’t practice love, kindness and self-control in a consistent manner. Rather, we are stuck in practicing the demands of our flesh, such as greed and envy. If we will always practice the acts of the flesh, we become spiritually weak. Hence, if you want to become spiritually strong, always practice the acts of the spirit, just like your regular routine of exercise.
To become selfless instead of becoming selfish, you need to become more spiritual. Imagine if your heart is set on the heavenly things. Imagine if the intentions of your soul is on the spiritual things, such as love, compassion, generosity, kindness, joy, humility, forgiveness and peace. Will you become selfish? Will you become iniquitous?
To effectively overcome selfishness and self-fleshness, we must practice the more difficult spiritual acts. One of them is practicing grace. Grace is harder because it is more than justice. It is the act of giving people even if they don’t deserve it. It is the practice of forgiving people, even if they don’t warrant it. If you can be gracious, how much more can you become generous? If you can give people more than they deserve, how much more can you give those that they deserve? If you become selfless, how much more an unselfish?
Grace is a great act; it can only be done by a person who has a virtue of love. Therefore, if you want to conquer the selfishness in you, practice love, practice grace, and practice the great spiritual acts until you become spiritually stronger – stronger enough to control your flesh and overcome selfishness.
