Q & A: "Am I just lazy?"
Darrell: For over a year I have been procrastinating sending in some forms that are important for my business. I don't know why -- I don't just do it. Do you think it's because I'm just lazy?
Jane: Being lazy is never the reason why anyone doesn't do anything. People always do what they conceive of as in their self-interest. What causes people to do something that is often thought of as immoral, or lacking in character, is a misguided idea of what is in their self-interest. And that's not a moral issue.
There is a major confusion in relation to morality and self-interest. What I'm talking about is a whole different paradigm way of thinking about things. Thinking about things in terms of morality is being guided by some external idea of what you should or shouldn't do. This means you're not connecting directly to life; you're not connected to direct experience. Without being connected to direct experience, you have no real guidance. You're stuck in repeating what others have been doing, or how they have conceived of things, possibly for generations. This doesn't connect you with truth and reality.
Self-interest, however, does connect you with truth and reality. But you have to evolve your self-interest, moving it toward "enlightened self-interest." If your self-interest is connected to what really matters to you, what benefits your higher self, then it leads you forward and it can only have a positive result.
However, to the degree that your self-interest is still based on desires that are substitutes for what really matters to you, and that are an avoidance of present moment truth, and buffer you against where you actually are -- it's going to lead you in the wrong direction. And that is what people often call lack of morality, but it is simply dysfunctional.
To call it immoral is to imply that there is something bad about what you really desire, which originates from the idea of original sin. The only remedy therefore would be punishment and repressing who you are. But if you view it as simply dysfunctional, then there is a way forward, which is to un-distort your perception of reality, and evolve your connection with your self, moving increasingly more toward who you actually are. To really understand this is to understand that the human soul is inherently good, and that life is meant to work.
© 2011 Jane Ilene Cohen
