What does it mean to be selfless?

If you have ever listened to spiritual gurus and teachers, or have followed spiritualism of any sort, chances are that you must have been advised to be selfless to attain true happiness. And it is this very thing that is the most misinterpreted in this universe. For most laymen like you and me, being selfless means to forget about your wishes and desires. To such people, being selfless means to keep others happy while going through all the hardships and difficulties in life. I do not know how and when such a meaning of ‘selfless’ took birth. All I can say, from my own experience, is that this meaning of selfless is far removed from the actual meaning of selfless which God wanted to communicate to the world.


‘Selfless’ in its true form means to follow your heart irrespective of the situation at hand. But then the question arises- “How can one be selfless while following his heart? Because then, essentially, the self is still there, right?” Actually, wrong!

Being ‘selfless’ means to give in to God’s will. Confused? To understand this, you must first undo all that you have read till now, because a famous author once said- “A bucket full of water will not be able to retain any new drops that may fall in it”. Although God is omnipresent, He cannot or does not intend to be everywhere to guide people around; maybe because he is shy and likes working in the background. And that is why he gave us all a heart so that he can communicate with each one of us.

But the problem is that most of us fail to listen to our heart most of the times and end up giving in to our mind, which is a very logical being indeed. And when we fail to listen to our heart, we fail to listen to God himself, because our heart is the only instrument we have to communicate with Him. In other words, when we stop listening to our hearts, we become selfish. We put our own will before God’s will and that is where the sad part of life begins.

To be selfless really means to listen to our hearts at all times, to follow our dreams, to be what we always wanted to be, to take risks in life, to follow each and every beat of our heart without thinking of the consequences. That is what being ‘selfless’ is all about.

But sadly, today, people think that following their dreams would actually make them selfish and that is the reason why most of them shy away from having any wants and desires. They instead do what others want them to do, or what logic wants them to do because they think that being ‘selfless’ means following the will of their fellow beings rather than doing what they want to do. This is just a small effort on my part to make people understand the true meaning of being ‘selfless’- the word people so often come across through spiritual gurus.

It is time that the spiritual teachers help make them understand the joys of life and more importantly, what being selfless actually signifies.