Closing your heart is how to become selfish. Keep yourself in, and someone else out. This may be the motto of those who, every time, proclaim themselves first. They may have taken selfishness as equivalent to survival. What can protecting your solitary heart be but a kinder light to put selfishness in?

Beloveds, when you protect your heart, you are protecting yourself from your own love.

Love yourself, yet not squander love on yourself. Take care of yourself. Live in the world, and make it a world of love. Never mind excuses. There are a million excuses. Every minute of the day you are choosing selfishness or love. Let’s admit it. Selfishness is not love. Selfishness comes from an outburst of need. When you no longer see yourself as needy, you won’t act in what is seen as a selfish way. We are talking about you now and not someone else.

You can have a yen for the last piece of pie and know you are fine without it. You don’t have to have it. Your survival does not depend upon it. You don’t require the temporary appeasement it gives. You are capable of cutting the last piece of pie in half or giving all of it to another who craves it more than you. What have you given up?

Be sure to understand that unselfishness does not mean sacrifice. Unselfish means thinking of what you can give freely from your heart. It is adding an arrow to your quiver, not taking one out. One who gives from his heart from strength and not weakness does not sacrifice. He is not denying himself. He is fulfilling himself.

All have heard about sharing. It is good to share. At the same time, you do not share in order to share. Sharing is something natural for you even if you had never heard the edict to share. In the world, when all is not shared, that is unnatural. When you have a well, it is natural to give others water to drink. When you have a well, and you don’t want to give water to others to drink, you are withdrawing from another what is not yours in the first place.

You may say to yourself: “Why should I share my water with a stranger? He may spill it.”

There is the unendurable question: What if you were in a desert, and there were only a few drops of water remaining, would you keep the drops to yourself?. No one knows the answer ahead of time. You do not yet know what generosity may lie at the heart of you. When your heart wants to give water to another, really chooses to, wherein can lie sacrifice?

I suggest that you not find yourself in a desert without much water, and if, somehow you do, I suggest that you find another spring of water to lavish on yourself and the others with you.

I suspect that if no one ever had been selfish, there would always be enough water for all. And enough begins in the heart. It is the heart that has to be enough. It is the heart that has been in short supply.

Happiness does not lie in selfishness. Selfishness is a pretender to the throne. When you are selfish, you are taking advantage of yourself. When you are selfish, you are not being good to yourself. You are withholding from yourself. Selfishness is short-sighted. Really, selfishness is blind. And you are someone who can see with your eyes and heart wide open.