What is the purpose of helping others?!

Question from the Internet:

“What’s your purpose in helping others?”

I am sure you heard about the principle of “love your neighbour as yourself”. Most religions and spiritual teachings and even many politicians are using it. It is another matter that we could never actually implement this principle.

Most people think it is some mystical or religious slogan or something we can use for political propaganda or as a basis for nice songs, but that it is not realistic. After all, how could I love others as myself when most of the time I do not even know how to love myself?

Moreover, with our inherently self-serving and self-justifying nature, we are programmed to care for and serve only our self-interest and we do this, we succeed and survive mostly at the expense of others.

So how could we implement his unrealistic principle, how could make it our purpose of helping others?

In our default state, we help others when we benefit from it. We can give donations, do physical effort, we can even sacrifice our own existence to help others — as long as we benefit from it in some way. This is not evil, we should not feel guilty about it, this is how we are programmed by birth.

But again, how could we love others or help others when we are programmed only to love and help ourselves? And why should we even try it?

The fact is, that since we have evolved into a globally integrated and fully interdependent world, we simply cannot succeed and survive without building “Nature-like”, mutually responsible and mutually complementing interactions and cooperation with each other. In a global world with global problems, there are no individual or national solutions. We can see how desperately helpless we are as long as we try applying our instinctive, egocentric and subjective “solutions” to any problems we face.

So we have reached a state where helping, caring for and serving others mutually is the key to our problem-solving and collective survival.

Still, how can we adapt ourselves to this when our inherent nature is still 100% egocentric, subjective and individualistic, where I still get the greatest pleasure when I succeed at the expense of others and can prove that I am higher, better, more powerful and wealthier than others?

We need a unique, purposeful and highly practical “Integral Education”. This education can help us understand, moreover, help us viscerally feel how much interconnected and interdependent we all are.

As a result, we will start to tangibly and realistically feel that personally, myself, I am simply a single cell of a single, closed, living organism, where the “others” I seem to perceive around me are also part of the same single, living organism — thus, in fact, they are all part of “me”.

Only when we fully understand and viscerally feel this can we implement the suddenly very practical principle of “loving others as myself”, since from now on there is no “me against others” as we are all part of the same single Human Being.

Then the purpose of “helping others” becomes effortlessly natural since by helping others I am in fact helping myself.