After reading the interview with Bahram Elahi on altruism on this website, I was struck by the idea that “Those who care about their process of perfection should include the practice of altruism in their spiritual program”. In my first post, I tried to understand what altruism really was and how to tackle this practice in a daily program. Now I would like to explore the second half of the question: why practice altruism?

What I have discovered by working on this point and by trying to experiment altruism, is that this practice turns out to be highly beneficial—particularly to oneself. One could say in a somewhat provocative way that with altruism you can turn a profit! It is of course quite paradoxical to choose to begin a discussion of altruism from this perspective. Shouldn’t an altruistic action by definition be disinterested, carried out with the sole intention to accomplish your duty as a human being and/or to seek God’s satisfaction? Ideally, we should be altruistic for the sake of being altruistic; here I am, however, talking about profit. Read more

Ostad Elahi’s philosophy is, as we know, grounded in the personal efforts made to gain greater self-knowledge not with the perspective of self development but of spiritual development. However, as soon as you set out to concretely experiment this philosophy and undertake the work of spiritual self perfection, you are bound to encounter several forms of resistance.

For my part, ever since I have started making efforts to keep some of my character weaknesses in check and to develop my human qualities and my faith, through a variety of practices, I have observed the same pattern: at the beginning of each new practice I am highly motivated and focused on my objective and my efforts do not encounter any insurmountable obstacles. But then it doesn’t take long, maybe a couple of weeks, before my attention begins to dwindle and—unless I receive some help from the outside—I fall back into the same old negligence. Read more

Some time ago, on this website, I came upon the interview with Bahram Elahi on altruism. One sentence in particular caught my attention: “Those who care about their process of perfection should include the practice of altruism in their spiritual program”.

Over the years that I had been “interested” in my perfection I had sensed that trying to help others was a practice that conformed to divine ethics. Only now, however, did I grasp the importance of this practice, expressed in the term “should”, and the notion of a “spiritual program”.

I decided to focus more deeply on the matter and at once was faced with two questions: why and how. Read more

To do good, as we all know, is not only helping, supporting and comforting others.  It is also and above all doing it with as selfless an intention as possible, by trying to put aside our own egotistical interests. I say “as selfless an intention as possible,” since experience shows that perfect selflessness is an ideal hardly ever attainable. Making this an absolute condition for a truly ethical act, may hinder our motivation for something that we know is out of our reach anyway. To speak of acts as-selfless-as-possible is not only to recognise that what seems to be generosity is often no more than disguised ambition (La Rochefoucauld); it is an incentive to trace in ourselves more subtle forms of egotistical interests—of the kind that would go unnoticed, were it not for distinctive signs. Read more

Effort is generally defined as the amount of energy we must expend to achieve something that can be difficult or even painful. It is generally agreed that “in the absence of effort there can be no result”. Conversely, “any effort must necessarily produce some result”. But some results may not seem quite enough to us. Indeed, we often take for granted that self-development programs, coaching techniques and the like naturally lead to quick and palpable results for those who seriously commit to changing themselves. In practice, however, things are far from obvious, and high expectations can be the source of major disappointment. How should we deal with the fact that, most often, the actual results of our efforts are not what we expect them to be? Read more

Repressive policy: no compromise allowed with the imperious self

The process of self-perfection, for Ostad Elahi, consists mainly in practising ethics. If I wish to perfect myself, I must see to it that the way I behave and whatever I do, say, or even think, be ethical. That sounds gigantic; it is, however, what we should be heading for. After all, perfecting oneself means nothing other than striving to achieve such a high goal.

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But what exactly is practicing?

In everyday language, practicing is generally understood as “practicing a religion”, that is observing a set of rites and instructions, such as prayers, fasts, dietary laws, commemorations or specific ceremonies on certain occasions. People usually tend to reduce spirituality to religion and to consider that practicing means abiding by more or less dogmatic rites, prescriptions and restrictions. Such misunderstanding makes it impossible to consider the possibility of believing without belonging to a religious group or conversely, impossible to practice religious rites without believing in their spiritual foundations. Difficult as this latter attitude may seem to understand, I have personally encountered such cases. Read more