The Web of Life, Part 10: The Nature of Selfishness

Everybody should do—in their lifetime, sometime—two things. One, is to consider death: to observe skulls and skeletons, and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up. Never. That is a very gloomy thing for contemplation, but it's like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death, and the acceptance of death, is very highly generative of creative life. You get wonderful things out of that. And the other thing to contemplate is to follow the possibility of the idea that you are totally selfish. That you don't have a good thing to be said for you at all. You're a complete, utter rascal.

Now, the Christians have avoided this, because although they say, in their Episcopalian form of confession, that We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, and we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. Too much, you know? We have offended against thy holy laws. We've left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us. But! It ought to be different. And we are going to do our best to amend, with the help of God's grace. And that is a real con act, because if you equate health with genuine love and perfect unselfishness, then, in that sense, there is no health in us when we look at ourselves from this point of view.

Now, when you go deeply into the nature of selfishness, what do you discover? You say, I love myself if I seek my own advantage. Now, what is the self that I love? What do I want? And that becomes an increasingly, ever-deepening puzzle. Now, I've often referred to this. When you say to somebody else, I love you, it's always rather disconcerting to the person to whom you say that. If you imply that you love them with a pure, disinterested, and holy love, they automatically suspect it as being a little bit phony. But if you say, I love you so much I could eat you, that's an expression—it's a way of saying to a person, You attract me so much that I can't help it. I'm absolutely bowled over by you. I'm gone. And people like that. Then they feel they're really being loved, that it's absolutely genuine.

But now, I love you so much I could eat you. Now what the devil do I want? I certainly don't want to eat the girl in the sense of literally devouring her, because then she'd disappear. Hmm. But I love myself. What is me? How do—in what way do I know me? When it suddenly occurs to me that I know me only in terms of you.

See, when I think of anything I know and that I like, then it's always something that can be viewed as other than me. I can never get to look at me—real me. It's always behind, it's always hidden. And I really don't know it well enough to know whether I love it or not. Maybe I don't. Maybe it's an appalling mess. But certainly, the things that I do love, and that I want from a selfish point of view, when I really think about them, they're all something else that's, in a way, outside me.

Now, we saw that there is a reciprocity. A total, mutual interdependence between what we call the self and what we call the other. That's the warp and the woof. And so, if you're perfectly honest about loving yourself, and you don't pull any punches, you don't pretend that you're anything other than exactly what you are, you suddenly come to discover that the self you love—if you really go into it—is the universe. You don't like all of it, you're selective about it—as we saw in the beginning, perception is selection. But on the whole, you love yourself in terms of what is other, because it's only in terms of what is other that you have a self at all.

So then, I feel that one of the very great things that C. G. Jung contributed to mankind's understanding was the concept of the shadow. That everybody has a shadow, and that the main task of the psychotherapist is to do what he called, to integrate the evil, to, as it were, put the devil in us in its proper function. Because, you see, it's always the devil, the unacknowledged one, the outcast, the scapegoat, the bastard, the bad guy, you see, the black sheep of the family. It's always from that point that—which we could call the fly in the ointment, you see—that generation comes.

In other words, in the same way as in the drama: to have the play it's necessary to introduce a villain, it's necessary to introduce a certain element of trouble. So, in the whole scheme of life, there has to be the shadow, because without the shadow there can't be the substance.

So this is why there is a very strange association between crime and all naughty things, and holyness. You see, holyness is way beyond being good. Good people aren't necessarily holy people. A holy person is one who is whole, who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites, and so there's always something slightly scary about holy people. And other people react to them in very strange ways; they can't make up their minds whether they're saints or devils. And so holy people have, throughout history, always created a great deal of trouble, along with their creative results.

Let's take Jesus, for example. The trouble that Jesus created is absolutely incalculable. Think of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the—heaven only knows what's gone on in the name of Jesus. Very remarkable. Freud's a big troublemaker, as well as a great healer, you see? It all goes together.

So, the holy person is scary because he is like the earthquakes—or better, still—he's like the ocean. See, the ocean, on a lovely sunny day, you can say, Oh, isn't that gorgeous? You can go into it, and relax, and float around. But boy, when the storm comes does that thing get mad. Terrifying! So there is, in us, the ocean, you see? And Jung felt that the whole point was to bring the two together, and—by a kind of fantastic honesty—to penetrate one's own motivations to the depths.