Did You Take Out Your I’s Today?

Happiness is being truly helpful.

Being truly helpful means focusing your attention and energy on helping other sentient beings.

Focusing on helping others shifts your perspective from “I” to “you” or “them”.

Making this shift means taking out your I's.

Reading the blog post title sounds like a phonetic Oedipus scenario. However, no human needs to remove their eyes to be happy. Metaphorically, seeing the world not with human eyes but limitless mind makes the difference, though. Going within instills a vision, versus living through the narrow prism of human sight. Going within also removes the ego – aka “I” – from the equation. Focusing on others makes you helpful. Being helpful makes you genuinely happy because helping dissolves ego-fear into one-love.

For example, I wrote this post by dwelling on the idea of being truly helpful. One idea instantly entered my mind: write a post for Personal Growth Channel asking readers to shift attention from the ego self to others. Taking out your I's immediately flashed into my mind as the blog post title. I opened the backoffice and began writing for you because my attention feels focused on helping you, not serving me. I feel happy because I am helping you. But I only helped you because you were on my mind.

A few moments ago at the store, I pondered being truly helpful. Thinking about others allowed me to overlook tiny ego grievances, be of service to the cashier and also goaded me to buy some helpful goods for our relatives, as we are currently spending some time at their home. The moment you think of other humans and how to help them is the instant you feel happy, healthy, prospering and helpful. But beware the ego and its obsession with I-itis, dripping with:

• self-service
• selfishness
• greediness
• depression
• inward thinking
• self-obsession
• shame
• guilt
• embarrassment

The ego and its illusory but clever trick of inward thinking goads you to spend most of your life focusing on meeting your singular needs from energies of fear. But focusing only on the self creates fear, depression and hopelessness. Why? We are one. Attempting to cut your self off from one goes against the truth of one-ness. Attempting to deny truth feels scary, depressing, isolating and flat out bad.

Observe any lone wolf. People who focus solely on self for fear of caring for others get sick and die quite sickly only because your body outlives its usefulness and happiness after you decide to shift from serving others to self service, as the sole human pursuit. Death follows; first in the sleeping mind, then the body.

But going within to ferret out self-serving fears shifts an ego focus to serving others. Happiness follows. Peace of mind follows. Service follows. You will never be happy focusing on yourself because joy is in helping people. But you will always be happy as long as you remain truly helpful.

I recall my dad spending hours helping the family any time we had a get-together. My mom followed suit. Both spent hours preparing food, serving dinner and cleaning up afterwards to be of service and as a by-product, each exuded happiness, lightness and a sense of deep joy.

Help others. Take out your “I's”. I am far and away happiest when I help other humans and animals with no expectation of anything in return. Think of how happy you feel caring for pets. Observe the true helpfulness of serving a fellow sentient being who cannot give you $100, a glowing Yelp review or even a two-armed hug in return. Animals are not even self-aware, living in the moment. They cannot conceptualize or understand the concept of reciprocity.

That's happiness!