So...everything you do, no matter how selfless, is actually selfish if you look closely enough?
-Pink Floyd, TdSotM
1. What it says 2. The prose and length of how it is said
I will be thinking of this for the rest of the day, thank you.
The Way of Zen, by Alan Watts
The lyric expresses a longing to know more, but alas, we are forever confined to our senses; similar to Kant's perspective, which suggests that, although we can know information about a thing (i.e., via the senses, "touch" and "see", as the lyric suggests), we can never know a thing in and of itself (i.e., outside of our senses). We can only ever experience a sense-based representation of a thing, and not the thing's true nature.
Moreover, we cannot touch (i.e., experience) or see (again, experience) anything outside of the present moment. No matter what changes, we are locked in the moment, because there is no past or future, in the sense that we can experience those concepts now (i.e., there is only the present moment in time). Everything that has ever happened, occurred in a series of present moments.
The lyric expresses these truths, while intertwined with a saturnine feeling; that is, we are bound by our senses, and bound by the moment, but we long to experience more. However, it is all we ever have; it is: "all your life will ever be."
The idea that if we help each other when we are in a position to. (Low cost for us. High cost for other).
Also don't cost others suffering.
How you look at it. Are we being selfish or selfless is up to your personal preference of optimism / skepticism. It doesn't really matter.
Ideally if you believe in a type of consciousness rebirth - Likely not taking anything from past life but as we were never dead our consciousness probably* mutates to being a different person.(Do you really think you "Are" the person you were at birth?) -
Then you will want to have enlightened self interest. Personally I believe causing others suffering (Eating animals ect) is a kind of cannibalism / self inflicting harm.
Why is it that we think of ourselves as OTHER?
Survival is at our core but otherwise it is foolish not to work together.
I'm afraid society is moving towards a kind of semen race to the top. Mindless acquisition of material goods to satisfy the ego. We can do better.
I think if you deplete the term like that, it becomes meaningless, but the difference in scale between "I'm helping these people to glorify my name" and "I'm helping myself directly" is significant enough that the term still has meaning. We have a Newtonian scale concept of selfishness that works even if we don't have a quantum scale concept that works.
When a poor is helped by a man and gets education and somehow he becomes rich, he also wants to help poor people because of gratitude not because he wants to feel better about himself. Its a selfless act not selfish.
First, your self's subjective view of the world, is of course centered at/on/from the self. It's the origin of your coordinate system. (Note that the way I am using "(your)self", here is different from the way that J Krishnamurti uses "the self" in his writing)
Secondly, if you use something like chaining whys for root-cause analysis (like in the Toyota TPS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys ), you pretty soon get to something that looks like: "I ought to do a selfless thing." Why? "Because it is good to be selfless" Why? "Because everyone says so?" Why? ... you either end up going in circles or you want yourself and/or others to think well of you -- accruing in prestige and/or favorable treatment.
Being guided through this process while in a light hypnotic state is a quicker way to the core of it than most people can easily reason through on their own: