Selfishness is ‘survival-ness’ – UG
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Selfishness is considered evil and held in contempt by most cultures. Selfishness smacks of moral overtones and is considered synonymous with ‘greed’ in many lexicons of the world.
Selfishness, in this sense, ensures the ‘survival and function’ of every individual cell, and in coordination with the surrounding cells, the survival and function of the entire living organism.
‘Selfishness’, per UG, is nothing but ‘Survival-ness.’
In its benign form, ‘selfishness’ or ‘survival-ness’ is the propensity or tendency of a living cell to care, nourish, protect, survive, and thrive in the natural environment. It is the primitive life force animating the plant, animal, or the human.
Most importantly every living cell is ‘actually and factually’ a phenomenal ‘team player.’ It ‘knows’ that even its own survival is not possible without the survival of all the other adjoining cells, else it is game over!
With its ‘embedded software’ and ‘hardware’, every cell ‘knows’ its part in the grand scheme of things. Like a great soccer team, the individual cell plays its contributory role, as part and parcel of a bigger team, in extraordinary coordination with all other players.
To demonstrate the necessity or significance of this 'benign' form of ‘selfishness’ or ‘survival-ness’, let us consider an airplane flying at 40,000 feet above the sea level.
As we all know, every commercial jet, flying at high altitudes, is artificially pressurized (Remember the pressure bumps on your eardrums during take-offs or touch downs?). That is, all passengers will be supplied with pressurized air inside the aircraft cabin throughout the flight. This supply pressure is equal to the quality (pressure) of air that you might breathe when you are on top of a mountain, roughly 8000 feet high. We call this, the ‘cabin altitude’.
Some bigger, longer-range airplanes offer cabin altitudes of 6000 feet (much easier on your lungs during long-haul flights).
We all know that the air pressure will become lesser and lesser as we go on up and up a mountain. We begin to gasp for breath after a certain point and we cannot survive without an oxygen (pressurized) cylinder above an altitude of 15,000 feet.
Now, imagine if a door bursts open or cracks open (in the news, lately) while flying at 40,000 feet! The cabin will suddenly suffer a pressure loss , also called ‘cabin decompression’ or depressurization. No one can survive the low-pressure air in the environment at 40,000 feet altitude. It is catastrophic to all life forms. Within 8 to 9 seconds, one might lose consciousness and within a few more minutes, one could collapse and die!
Now recall the safety demo given to you before the takeoff about the dangers of cabin decompression, of how the oxygen masks deploy during such times from the overhead bins.
The cabin crew instructions are very succinct and explicit about this danger. And the instruction might even sound ‘selfish’:
“In the event of a sudden cabin decompression, pull the oxygen mask in front of you, secure the mask on yourself FIRST and start breathing normally. AND THEN AND ONLY THEN help your baby or your partner with their oxygen masks.”
Are they encouraging selfishness?
With every passing second, chances of your survival get slimmer and slimmer in a hostile environment like the high altitudes. At 40,000 feet, instead of securing oxygen mask on yourself first, practicing some form of ‘religion’ or ‘selflessness’ will only kill you. Takes only a few seconds for you to become unconscious. You faint and become incapacitated. Without being ‘selfish’ and alive, you will be of no use to anyone – neither to yourself nor to your child nor your partner!
‘Selfishness’ or ‘survival-ness’ remains the primal force at the cellular level. Nature has designed every cell to be ‘selfish.’ At the same time, it has bestowed the intelligence in the cell to remain a ‘team player’, in total harmony and balance with neighboring cells.
On the other hand, a cancer cell is not a normal cell. It is not a team player. It has turned rogue and ‘greedy’, guzzling all nutrients only for itself, dividing and growing alarmingly, invading other tissues and organs with life threatening consequences for all, very typical of human greed!
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Transcript:
Q: Did you say that our bodies are reactors?
UG: The brain, I said.
You see, first of all, you know, the division of that unit (called the ‘human body’), if I may call it, which is not separate from the whole of nature, does not divide itself into brain, into cells, into heart, into all those divisions.
It (localization) is for the (benefit of the) doctor to localize the particular part of the body to understand, to know more and more about it.
Otherwise, you will be surprised that every cell in the body has a memory of its own now (recently discovered by science). So, it (the cell) is interested in its survival. So, it knows that its survival depends on the survival of the cell, next to it. That’s the reason there is a COOPERATION (among the 60 trillion cells in the body).
Our phony culture says that ‘you must love your neighbor as thyself’ and that ‘cooperation is something extraordinary’, ‘we should cooperate with everybody’, that’s all phony-baloney!
But here it (the cell) knows in its own way, and that knowing is only for the survival!
It is SELFISH to its very core.
The unfortunate situation we find ourselves in is ‘creation of some selfless thing (goal) out there (value system)’. So it is that (value system) that is responsible for the misery but not the selfishness ( in operation in the natural scheme) that is very essential for its survival.
This selfishness which is part and parcel of the living unit here, cannot harm (disrupt) anything.
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