The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
–William Hazlitt (1778 - 1830)
Let’s take another look at the basics of Creation. The only thing that the Creator created is our will to receive, our egoism. This is our essence. If we learn how to “deactivate” our egoism, we will restore our connection with the Creator. When we act unselfishly, we will regain equivalence of form with Him as it exists in the spiritual worlds. Deactivating our egoism is the beginning of our climb up the spiritual ladder, the beginning of the correction process.
One of Nature’s ironies is that people who indulge in selfish pleasures cannot be happy. There are two reasons for that:
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Egoism is a Catch-22: if you have what you want, you no longer want it. To understand why, think of your favorite food. Now, imagine yourself in a fancy restaurant, comfortably seated at a table as the smiling waiter brings you a covered plate, places it in front of you, and removes the lid. Hmmm… that deliciously familiar scent! But the minute you start to eat, the pleasure diminishes. The fuller you become, the less you’re enjoying the meal. Finally, when you are full, you can no longer enjoy the food and you stop eating. You don’t stop because you’re full, but because eating is no fun on a full stomach. Satisfying your desire for food has quenched the pleasure from eating it.
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A selfish desire enjoys not only satisfying its own whims, but making others dissatisfied. To better understand this reason, we need to go back to the basics. Phase One in the Four Basic Phases wants only to receive pleasure. Phase Two is already more sophisticated, and wants to receive pleasure from giving, since giving is the Creator’s state of being. If our development had stopped at Phase One, we would be satisfied the minute our desires were fulfilled and wouldn’t care what others possessed.
However, Phase Two—the desire to give—compels us to notice others so we can give to them. But because our basic desire is to receive, all we see when we look at others is that “they have all kinds of things that I don’t.” Because of Phase Two, we will always compare ourselves to others, and because of Phase One’s will to receive, we always want to be better than them. This is why we take pleasure in others’ deficiencies.
The second reason is also why the poverty line changes from country to country. According to Webster’s Dictionary, the poverty line is “a level of personal or family income below which one is classified as poor according to governmental standards.” Thus, by definition, poverty and lack are relative, not absolute.
If everyone around me were as poor as I am, I wouldn’t feel poor. But if everyone around me were wealthy, and I only had an average income, which in the west is more than enough to live on, I’d still feel like the poorest person on Earth. In other words, our norms are dictated by the combination of Phase One (what we want to have) and Phase Two (comparing ourselves to others).
As it happens, Phase Two, our desire to give, which should have been the guarantee that our world would be a good place to live in, is actually the reason for all the evil in this world. This is the essence of our corruption. The desire to give is not enough, replacing the intention to receive with an intention to give is what we need to correct. This is what will make us similar to the Creator.