4. A self-fulfilling life is altogether not selfish

As an expanding town on the southern tip of Dartmoor, Ivybridge has stretched like a bowtie pulled from a village heart outwards to a new patchwork of estates large enough to fill the streets with traffic jams while the pavements remain empty. How to open these self-contained boxes into a community of people? It’s an interesting question.

Travelling up from Ivybridge is the road to Harford, a mossy hamlet with an ancient Dartmoor church and a churchyard of remembered life stories. Along the Harford road beside the Erme valley is the large house of Lukesland with gardens open to the public in Spring and Autumn to enjoy the exotic colours and glory of a tamed full Dartmoor stream guided under bridges into waterfalls.

Lukesland is a quiet focal point of community, opening as a gift of the Howell family. Once a month, for example, they host a ‘Moral Maze’ philosophy breakfast discussion. Bacon baps and hot drinks by the Aga are followed by a discussion around the log burner in the lounge on a theme that the armful of attendees have agreed the month before. I remember one entitled, “Forgiveness or Acceptance: What difference does it make?”

It was a stimulating hour of expressed opinions in an atmosphere of civilised tolerance of diversity with mutual curiosity. I came away enriched and grateful, far more so than any few minutes of Internet browsing on my phone would have been. Among many unexpected turns of thought during the conversation, one take-away has stayed with me to ponder.

One willing participant had expressed the view that all acts of altruism are basically selfish, because they meet a self-centred need. Instantly I had had a heart-felt thought in response. “There is a difference,” my heart said, “between a self-fulfilling compassionate act and a selfish one.”

But what is the difference?

Over the following days a number of seemingly disconnected events started to coalesce in my remembering heart into the start of an answer to that question. There is a difference.

I attend a men’s breakfast fellowship group. There we had been talking about AI psychosis, how its algorithms are foundationally self-affirming so that when people repeatedly ask AI questions about an emotive personal decision they need to make, AI’s answers become more and more extremely self-righteous and extreme in its suggested behavioural responses. “There is no personal challenge in AI from a wider Truth” explained one participant in the group. “There is no reference to ‘the whole’ beyond human language communications that speaks of the need to adjust and change and grow new abilities.”

I have been deeply reading Neil Douglas-Klotz’s Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus where he shows how the Aramaic language that Jesus of Nazareth spoke has its roots in a nomadic cultural way of life, participating in which individuals travelling in groups for survival need to appeal in their hearts to a wider Truth of freedom in wholeness to know how to orientate their next steps in this world of limits and constraints. This is a world of challenges to the individual. Historically people had to break out of self-confinement into relational balancing with others in order to share the same local resources. Some people now with claustrophobia have difficulty leaving their homes to get to the shops. How would I, as a nomad, negotiate with local people to get access to their well to water my flock? Perhaps it isn’t their well? Perhaps the work of people before us in time, who laboured to share a benefit with the whole diverse community by digging a well, opens this potential for my own and other people’s self-fulfilment now for us all, and for those coming after me. This is the scale of an extending community of souls beyond our ticking clock-time boundaries. Getting out of my home, or the safe boundaries of my car, onto the pavement and into the shop is my self-fulfilment in community. The village heart of the town is our modern day equivalent of the well. It is not a selfish act to go to the shops. It is a gift of presence, my uniquely diverse presence into this welcoming community in all time.

I am in another extended conversation with academics from a wide variety of specialisms generating a picture of a healthy human being that brings together science, humanity and spirituality into my place in wholeness on the move. It is, I now actualise as my heart-mind, a nomadic picture of life. My place in wholeness is constantly renewed, as localities change. I have to change and develop each day to grow and adapt and emerge in new ways. My moral compass to find a life-enhancing path moment-by-moment is to open my heart-mind to the wholeness we all share as I breathe in; and as I breathe out to re-open my heart-mind to my presence in this locality as a living source of wholeness in this shared local setting. I am not that wholeness though. I am the channel for that wholeness to reshape this locality in life-enhancing ways. This locality, this well, will build on the work of others before me and endure with my influence to benefit others still to come. This is my time-frame. And this time-framing and timing of action or restraint in the now is the difference between selfishness and self-fulfilment.

Selfishness is self-containment. Self, however, is a local time-frame appearing in the eternity of wholeness in movement. Self-awareness potentially fills my time-frame with the process of reordering my life shared with others. Self-fulfilment brings the wisdom of a wholeness that births life in the cosmos through my self’s time-frame, by inspired timing of my local choices to be present in shared localities, to speak life or restrain while others do.

So, I choose now, after that Moral Maze meeting, to walk the pavements of Ivybridge breathing in the wholeness among which wisdom is to be trusted, and praying out the timing of my communications that they should be life-enhancing for now in eternity. My walk to the shops is not a selfish act of containment to take back what I need. It is a nomadic adventure into the uncertainty of relational growth.

Can I forgive myself for having been so selfish in the past? Can I accept myself as I am in my wholeness, localising moment-by-moment? Let’s find ways…