(06-23-2020, 04:29 PM)Navaratna Wrote: I still would like a response to what someone thinks of adopting a person to live in your house for free. I mean if you're going to say that having a job is selfish because you took it from someone, if you're accepting a lower level job to benefit someone else--even though you let someone have the higher rank/business--lets say even with having the lower-paying job you still afford your own place..well hey what if you're not using that place you live in to benefit someone else? if its only for you then :O! Service to self!
If you don't adopt someone even though you could then you're not a completely ideal service-to-others person, right? Those people that you're getting over on, or let have the CEO position of the company/leading ahead of you in business won't generally do it either unless they're in a relationship with the person they invite to live in their home with whether they're male or female.
This is assuming someone lives on their own so that's it's not an infringement on whoever you have to share your property with.
This tells me these things aren't as clear cut as they seem. There are different levels and many different situations determining how self-servicing other other-servicing everyone is.
Here's a response to your hypothetical thought experiment.
I don't think anyone is saying that having a job is selfish because you took it from someone. Taking in a homeless person is definitely a service-to-others polarizing action, but not doing so isn't depolarizing in most instances as you are not directly responsible for that person's situation (though in a sense we are all responsible for our fellow humans, more on that in a second).
There are, however, underlying socio-economic causes for homelessness that are a byproduct of how our society is organized. The fact that some people can amass billions (trillions soon for Mr. Bezos) while others live in abject poverty is a feature, not a bug. CEOs and the like get rich through the exploitation of labor and that requires them to have bargaining power over their employees so they can make them work long hours at low wages to maximize profits. To achieve this requires a reservoir of unemployed and desperate people so that the boss can say "shape up or we'll give your job to someone else. You should be grateful for your job so you can afford to keep food on the table," and so on. In a society that took care of it's own none of this would be an issue, the social group could provide housing to your hypothetical person rather than having the burden be on the individual, it would be a shared burden. Our society is not organized like that, however, and as members of society we all bear some responsibility for that,
Competition is not a bad thing in and of itself (I think in the example of sports, for instance, there is nothing wrong with honing your skills and achieving excellence), but in a game that is rigged so those who take advantage of others rise to the top are certainly on a path of self service. Since sports are organized as a business, they falls victim to this as well, but it's not so much the athletes who are to blame here as the sponsors, owners, governing bodies etc. I mean just look at all the scandals and controversies the International Olympic Committee get up to.
No one is perfectly service-to-others, and luckily no one needs to be. All you have to do is focus your own individual life and the things you can change and try to be as good of a person as you can. I'm not a fan of reducing it to numbers, but Ra states on 51% service-to-others orientation is required.
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference."
And a little side note about free will, I don't think it's possible for anyone incarnated on Earth to infringe on the free will of others. We're all here by soul contract and we're all in it together. I think the talk of infringement in the Ra material pertains more to disincarnate entities, that's why there's a quarantine.