Defining Human Goodness
From the
Life is Meant to Work
Prepare yourself for a New Reality
teleseminar
A pivotal question at the bottom of how civilization has organized itself is “Is humanity inherently good, or is it bad, or is it simply weak and corruptible?” The bottom line way we define the answer to that has to do with what we believe people would do if they weren’t controlled. And that has to do with the issue of self-interest. If people are not controlled, or if they don’t control themselves, they will go toward their own self-interest. And so the issue then becomes how we perceive what self-interest is.
The idea that self-interest is bad, is based on the idea of original sin. In other words it is based on the idea that if people pursue what they desire, what really matters to them, including human desires, they will break Divine laws and will cause harm to others. But the problem here is not inherent in the nature of self-interest, but in how we conceive of what self-interest is.
When many religious perspectives or spiritual philosophies define human self-interest, they are actually defining human emotional defense systems, which get built up as a result of having made limiting decisions. And when they are advocating letting go of desires, this is also the framework they are referring to. People’s emotional defense systems result in them going toward substitutes for what they desire rather than the real thing. And these substitutes are generally harmful to oneself and others.
But humanity doesn’t live solely in their emotional defense systems, and we are in an evolutionary process through them. Desiring these symbolic substitutes is not the nature of humanity or human desire. People going toward these kinds of desires (that can often be addictive, and that we associate with shallowness, perversion or lacking in self-discipline) does not have to do with the inherent corruptibility or weakness of human beings, or the nature of human desires. Self-interest is inherent in any living creature. It’s not the self-interest that is the problem, it is the substitutes for it that are the problem. And the substitutes are created because of the denial of the real thing. The way to enlightenment is not a denial of our self-interest, or of our human experience, it is the recognition and embracing of the truth of what it is. It is coming into experience, not avoiding it — which means the difference between realizing that the nature of reality is positive, that if we come into what is true, it leads us to the highest good of all concerned.
On the one hand most of humanity doesn’t have any concept of the depth of the distortion of our perception of reality, and how much we are living and forming our perception of reality from an upside-down and insane perspective. But on the other hand, there is little concept of the inherent goodness of the human soul, that what the truth is about who we inherently are is total goodness, not in spite of our self-interest, but because of it. This is because what we really desire leads us to love, truth, connection, meaning, everything true and real. What it is human beings truly desire is a part of the truth of the universe. It is beyond any false persona or egoic self. It is what can bring us out of the perception of the limited physical world we were born into, in which we forgot who we are beyond the physical experience.
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