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What is the relationship between love and understanding? Both are streams from the same source, but whereas love flows through the heart, understanding flows through the mind. Understanding helps us see the truth, and love causes us to act on it.

Understanding assists love by helping us recognize ourselves in others, and helping us see that for all our superficial differences, we are of the same essence. Without understanding, it is all too easy to be judgemental. We see someone acting selfishly, and a barrage of anger and criticism arises within us. Understanding helps us see past their behaviour and to recognize that this seemingly selfish person seeks love and happiness, just the same as we do. Rather than judging that person as “bad”, we view their selfishness as ignorance, and we feel compassion for them. Understanding makes us more accepting, less judgemental, and thereby removes some of the impediments to love.

Love, on the other hand, is the quality that makes us try to understand another person in the first place. It is what makes us willing to reach out and touch them, to put ourselves in their shoes. Love is what stops us from rejecting or ignoring those whom we may otherwise recoil from. Whereas understanding is helpful for love, love is absolutely essential for true understanding. It is the faith in humanity that causes us, when we see someone acting nastily and we do not know why, to have compassion for them anyway. Only with this compassion can we even begin to think about why they act the way they do. Only with this compassion can we come to understand them and to love them completely.

Therefore, when we come to love and understand a person or thing, the first impulse is from the heart. The love comes before the understanding. However, from this point on, they each boost each other. Without understanding, there is a danger that the love will go away. Understanding is what maintains the love and helps it expand to encompass all. Yet without love, the understanding is empty. Love is not merely understanding a person, but feeling compassion for them, wanting to help them, and holding them in our hearts.

What is selfishness? It is generally defined as putting our own needs before the needs of others. It is the opposite of altruism, and agreed by many to be an undesirable trait. The paradox of selfishness is that, although it supposedly means putting ourselves first, selfish people are generally the least happy of us all. It is actually the practise of unselfishness that benefits us the most. So we should really try to be unselfish if we want to become happier…but isn’t that just another form of selfishness?

The paradox arises because selfishness is the wrong issue to focus on. The quality that distinguishes happy and altruistic people from their unhappy and self-centred counterparts is not one of selfishness, but one of awareness. Awareness is the understanding that helping others is actually beneficial both for them and for us. If people realized this truth, then they would never be selfish, for it would be senseless. Thus, selfish people are those who are unaware.

It may seem lenient to describe selfish people as simply “unaware”. We might prefer to vilify them as evil and immoral. However, describing them as “unaware” is not lenient, it’s just the plain truth. Noone knowingly acts in a way that causes harm both to others and to themselves, and so when we see someone doing this, we can assume that they lack understanding. This does not mean that murderers should be allowed to roam free. However, we should not lock them away to punish them for evil, but rather to help them understand the effects of their actions (and also to protect the rest of society).

A nice analogy is to compare humanity to a human body, with each person being an individual cell. Cells in our body want to survive. The best way for them to survive is for them to work together so that the body as a whole survives. Cancerous cells, on the other hand, multiply uncontrollably. This benefits them in the short-term, but the end result is that the body dies, and thus all cells - the cancerous ones included - die. So are the cancerous cells selfish? Probably. But their real problem is not selfishness but a lack of awareness. They fail to understand that their multiplication will destroy the whole body, including themselves. If they developed awareness, everyone would benefit.

Hence, instead of passing moral judgements on selfishness and unselfishness, we should focus on awareness and a lack of awareness. Because it is through developing awareness that we come to understand the true importance of love and compassion. When we have this understanding, questions of selfishness and unselfishness are no longer relevant.