The sincerity of service: how we fool ourselves by imagining our virtues.
One of the most embarrassing pieces of knowledge to have is to know when someone is doing something for his own entertainment, but is convinced that he is doing something for someone else.
It makes one feels ashamed for such a person, and it makes me shocked by the cultural defect which has trained this wretched individual to imagine that he is serving someone or something, when he is instead obtaining personal gratification….
No culture of today provides any generally applicable theoretical or practical method of drawing attention to it. And yet it remains one of the major stumbling blocks to human progress.
Instead of showing that disguised gratification-seeking is a masquerade, and just as inhibiting as any other make-believe (you can’t do anything else while you are engaged in pretence) many human cultures sanctify and employ this flaw. Instead of saying, ‘You are amusing yourself by engaging in this or that national, cultural, religious, spiritual game,’ they may say: ‘This is not a game: it is serious. In fact, it is the way to heaven.’ For lack of a high enough level of understanding, leaders of thought operate shallowly….
The only hope is for there to be someone present to prescribe, from time to time, what a person should do and what he should not do, to strengthen his real efforts, to prevent himself becoming a parrot or machine, or to stop sanctimoniousness from getting the upper hand.
It is unpopular to say that someone might know better than the individual himself as to the course which he should pursue.
Unpopular, yes. But one cannot hope that everything right will always be popular. The people who go on raving about that they ‘must sacrifice’ are the last people who, for their own sake, should be allowed to make sacrifices. But what happens? Every organization known to you is on the lookout for just these people, in order to fuel itself from their sacrifice.
Understanding this is what we call seeing oneself and seeing others….
It is for you to study this theory and watch it in practice, and keep yourself open to work and study, act and live without forming a part of an unnecessarily over-simplified pattern, which is the way the majority of people operate.
Indries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way.
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