When you were growing up, you were probably reprimanded on multiple occasions to share with siblings, friends, cousins and others while you played. It was so easy to want to keep your precious toys close to you and not let anyone else touch them. Sure, the other kids probably wouldn’t hurt your toys, but the toys were important to you. When you are grown, those early lessons of self improvement you learned stick with you, making it difficult for you to be selfish as an adult.

In general, it isn’t good to be selfish. It makes you feel good to share what you have with others who need it. For instance, if a coworker comes to you and asks for help with a project, you could say no because you have your own work. However, you drop what you are doing and help your coworker because he was nice enough to ask. Your own work might suffer a little, but you would feel far too guilty if you left your coworker hanging.

Despite the positives of not being selfish, you can also benefit from being selfish, at least some of the time. If you have ever talked to someone about self improvement, you may have heard that putting yourself first is important too. You don’t need to always put everyone else before your own needs and desires. In fact, if you do, you are far more likely to find that people are taking advantage of you. You deserve to be happy and have your needs met too.

When you put yourself first, you will feel more confident and can lead a happier life. You don’t need to turn others down all the time, but you deserve to be treated as a person as well. Therefore, when someone makes a request from you, take a little time to consider that request and then make a decision. Weigh out the pros and cons of helping that person with their request against denying it. For instance, if you go back to the coworker example, the project your coworker needs help with is due next week; however, the project you are working on is due tomorrow. It would be much better to say no and finish your project first.

Putting your own needs first can be hard for some people. You may be trained to always put others’ needs before your own as an act of kindness. Through self improvement techniques, you can learn when it is okay to say no and when it is okay to say yes. You should never sacrifice your own happiness for the sake of someone else, even if it means hurting someone else’s feelings.

In the end, your happiness is in your own hands. If you don’t focus on self improvement and learning the difference between being selfish in a bad way and being selfish in a good way, you may find yourself taken advantage of by everyone around you. From coworkers to family, you may find that it is so difficult to say no, you end up overextending yourself and ultimately sacrificing your own satisfaction.

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Since the time of the philosopher Descartes, Western culture has suffered an unfortunate separation in its understanding of how the body relates to the mind. The two are seen as being at odds with each other. In some of the worse scenarios, mind itself is what is of value, or is representative of the true self, and the body is denigrated into the vessel through which your mind operates. Mind and body thus divided results in the idea that what one does with one’s body is of no significant consequence or value. The body, and therefore nature itself, is therefore open to exploitation and possible misuse.

An assumption that is made often in the West is that the mind somehow subsides in or animates the body. Mind is viewed as the core force, that aspect of the human person that really matters. Your number one enemy according to this idea is your body, which seems to contain its own set of desires that work contrary to the purer intents and purposes of your mind. Severe asceticism and the denial of help to those who suffer bodily is one of the end results at the rational far end of this philosophical dichotomy. If someone’s body doesn’t really matter, is it really evil if he starves?

In order to stave off bad attitudes and practices, there are those through history who have proposed that the mind is not all that matters, being carried about by an otherwise corrupt and worthless body, but mind and body both matter and are of value. How? At this point, all logic becomes as choppy as the rapids on a dangerous river. A few have offered that the two aspects are indeed separate, but that body and mind somehow interpenetrate each other. How this is so is a bit harder to explain, however. Your mind may be literally in your heart, but if your heart fails and is replaced with a new heart, has thing somehow changed the reality of your mind and who you are? Some would say yes, but most scientists would say hogwash.

The rationalistic approach assumes that the mind and the experience of consciousness is just a fluke of evolution, a subjective interpretation of natural chemical processes in the body. Mind in this view isn’t elevated above the body, but both mind and body are brought down to the same level – the former viewed as the biological manifestation of experiences that are conducted in the processes of the latter. If both mind and body are viewed as being basically the same thing – physical organs working together in the comprised living organism of the human animal – then both lose value beyond immediate experience and usefulness.

Another ancient view from the east proposes that both mind and body compose the reality that is the human soul. The notion that mind and body both exist in a paradoxical and mysterious unity was once the accepted assumption in many parts of the world. Both your mind and your body have significant value because both comprise the unity of the self.

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It’s the perennial question: Superman or Batman? Who’s better? More importantly, which one is most like you? We’re not just talking about comics here, but about the theater of the mind, the interaction between mind and body, and the synthesis of all that comprises your mind, the engine that runs your consciousness and fuels your psychic energy, your ambition to live by the truth, be authentic, and grow in mindfulness.

Do you run on an endless supply of natural power, a genius of immense proportion to whom all things come easily? Do you always get what you want without even trying? Are you, like Leonardo, apparently seamless in your ability to bring the figure out from the stone as though it costs you nothing? Or, rather, are you like Durer, slaving away to produce praying hands, symbols of your hope that you will be granted the grace to subsidize your hard work and effort? Are you all-powerful like Superman, or hard-working and sweating hard like Batman?
Another question you might ask when you consider the powers of your mind and your goals, is how aware you are of the unity between your mind and body, and other factors that contribute to true and authentic, mindful personhood, is the difference between nature and technology. Are you, like Superman, naturally endowed with supernatural insight? Or have you gained wisdom through rough experience, and adjusted your sights accordingly? Do brilliant thoughts come to you as if from heaven? Do great problem-solving ideas rain down into your brain in plentitude? Are you the guy with all the answers? Or, do you have to think hard, consider, rethink, test, practice, read, study, and then think again? Do things come to you easily, or despite the rich resources you have in your possession, do you have to work like a dog to get anywhere?

Do you just seem to know everything? Do people turn to you as the perennial answer man, or the Martha Stewart of metaphysical mind conundrums? Are you never or rarely wrong? Or, do you admit to not knowing the answers all the time, but are committed to finding them out, mind and body poised, teeth gritting as you doggedly pursue the beast, whatever answer or experience that may be?

Is your public persona the real you, like Superman, but perfect and untouchable? Or does your public persona wear a mask, and sometimes bleed? Can only kryptonite hurt you, or stain your mind? Is there only one enemy, some external force that can bring you down? Or, are you only all too aware of your own human weakness, both in mind and body, so that you shield your mind with psychic armor, employ all your resources to protect yourself as you venture like a courageous, frail soldier into the dark dredges of awareness?
If you are Superman, you have the gift of the gods, and truly are an alien visitor, or on an intense ego trip! If, like the rest of us, you are Batman, claim your own power as a vigilante ambassador for truth and justice in the theater of the cosmic, collective mind. We need more people like you.

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Human beings are of course animals, but animals that have evolved in body, mind, spirit and other powers so as to be distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom. The evolution of the human mind, evidenced in self-awareness, speech and language, signs and symbols, the depth of the unconscious mind and the technological heights of the scientific mind, all contribute to expanding the gap between the human person and other animals. In fact, the distinctive aspect is that of personhood itself.

What is a person? We know from experience the difference between a human being with whom we are familiar and a dog, that qualitatively while we may love both, there is a marked difference in the way we relate to each. We may cynically say we would prefer the undivided camaraderie of a dog to a lover, but most of us really desire the complexity of communion that only another human being can bring. The human is a unique combination of body, mind and spirit that is different in quality from that of a canine.
The difference in quality seems to be distinctively centered on the spiritual aspect of the human. The mark of spirituality is personification itself, which is rooted in consciousness, both of others and of one’s self. The Greek word for “person” means mask or face, and its meaning infers the idea that we derive our personhood through the awareness of others and a relationship to others that demands we “interface” with them. This face is our humanness, and it is the chief quality of the human spirit, manifest in the soul and produced through the complexities of the human mind.

Other animals do not share this attribute. They do not put on a “face” in order to commune with each other, develop layers of conscious thought, and plough through the unconscious mind to root out psychopathologies, or develop a scientific mind in the pursuit of progress or deeper understanding of themselves or the world around them. Animals have souls (if a soul is body, mind, but not spirit), but they are not spiritual creatures precisely because they are not personal creatures. Their interaction with us and with each other is governed by instinct and other genetic or innate qualities.

Other animals are nevertheless valuable because as living organisms they have an experience of mind, but one that is unlike the human mind. They have no unconscious mind. They have no scientific mind. But they suffer, they foster various emotions, they are privy to desire. As sentient entities, they have intrinsic value even if they are not spiritual beings. The human spirit – an evolutionary addition – marks our species as one that can summon the idea of God, and as persons that have the opportunity to relate face to face with divinity, contemplate an afterlife, paradise, and eternality; and it is that attribute that may carry us forward into such realities. This is not the case for other animals, which seem to manifest essence absent individual personhood.

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