How to decrease self-centeredness?

[HeWillProvide]

how do you escape thinking only of yourself?

 

[juno24]

how do you escape thinking only of yourself?

Do something for someone else-- even if you don’t want to (or maybe especially if you don’t want to). You cannot be thinking 100 percent of yourself if you are giving of yourself to someone else.

 

[JimR-OCDS]

how do you escape thinking only of yourself?

The reason we think of ourselves first is, because of the wounds we received in our early years of life. The result of these wounds is that we have developed emotional programs, in order to protect our ego and we use these programs, whenever we feel threatened, or resist reaching out to others. We build many mask, in order to hide our inner shame.

The way out of this of course, is through faith.

Faith, forces us to turn toward ourselves, and evaluate our relationship with God. Many people can not handle this, and will abandon any further development in faith. However, for those who are willing to grow closer to God, by giving themselves to God, God will return you the person that he had in mind, when he created you. In other words, the process is getting to know self. Anyone who grows spiritually, will come to know themselves, and by doing so, will also accept themselves as they are, and their dependence on God. They will experience, how God loves them, unconditionally. This experience of God’s love, draws us closer to God, but also, through His grace, transforms us, to love as God loves.

So, the only way, is to abandon oneself to God, in prayer.

In Christ Jesus
Jim

 

[RobNY]

Faith, forces us to turn toward ourselves, and evaluate our relationship with God. Many people can not handle this, and will abandon any further development in faith. However, for those who are willing to grow closer to God, by giving themselves to God, God will return you the person that he had in mind, when he created you. In other words, the process is getting to know self. Anyone who grows spiritually, will come to know themselves, and by doing so, will also accept themselves as they are, and their dependence on God. They will experience, how God loves them, unconditionally. This experience of God’s love, draws us closer to God, but also, through His grace, transforms us, to love as God loves.

So, the only way, is to abandon oneself to God, in prayer.

In Christ Jesus
Jim

Hey Jim,

That reminds me of a passage I read from The Three Ages of the Interior Life, which I hardly understood when I read it, but understand better now. The life of prayer is a life of turning more to God, and it happens so slowly and imperceptibly.

As soon as a man ceases to be outwardly occupied, to talk with his fellow men, as soon as he is alone, even in the noisy streets of a great city, he begins to carry on a conversation with himself. If he is young, he often thinks of his future; if he is old, he thinks of the past and his happy or unhappy experience of life makes him usually judge persons and events very differently… . . .

If a man is fundamentally egotistical, his intimate conversation with himself is inspired by sensuality or pride. He converses with himself about the object of his cupidity, of his envy; finding therein sadness and death, he tries to flee from himself, to live outside of himself, to divert himself in order to forget the emptiness and the nothingness of his life. In this intimate conversation of the egoist with himself there is a certain very inferior self-knowledge and a no less inferior self-love.

He is acquainted especially with the sensitive part of his soul, that part which is common to man and to the animal. Thus he has sensible joys, sensible sorrows, according as the weather is pleasant or unpleasant, as he wins money or loses it. He has desires and aversions of the same sensible order; and when he is opposed, he has moments of impatience and anger prompted by inordinate self-love. But the egoist knows little about the spiritual part of his soul, that which is common to the angel and to man. Even if he believes in the spirituality of the soul and of the higher faculties, intellect and will, he does not live in this spiritual order. He does not, so to speak, know experimentally this higher part of himself and he does not love it sufficiently. If he knew it, he would find in it the image of God and he would begin to love himself, not in an egotistical manner for himself, but for God. His thoughts almost always fall back on what is inferior in him, and though he often shows intelligence and cleverness which may even become craftiness and cunning; his intellect, instead of rising, always inclines toward what is inferior to it. It is made to contemplate God, the supreme truth, and it often dallies in error, sometimes obstinately defending the error by every means. It has been said that, if life is not on a level with thought, thought ends by descending to the level of life. All declines, and one’s highest convictions gradually grow weaker.

The intimate conversation of the egoist with himself proceeds thus to death and is therefore not an interior life. His self-love leads him to wish to make himself the center of everything, to draw everything to himself, both persons and things. Since this is impossible, he frequently ends in disillusionment and disgust; he becomes unbearable to himself and to others, and ends by hating himself because he wished to love himself excessively. At times he ends by hating life because he desired too greatly what is inferior in it.(1)

I can’t quote the rest of the passage, but it details how prayer becomes more continual and the person’s soul becomes more God-centered.

-Rob

 

[pray4peace]

I think the best way to decrease self-centeredness is to focus on others and serving them. We decrease and Jesus increases.