In being selfless, you’re able to see a lot more sometimes than you really want to. Sometimes you just have to be able to tackle that fear, particularly that of the unknown. It’s always easier to just turn away and walk away from it, but if you just open up to it, you’ll really be able to see exactly what your purpose is.

Seeing clearly means that you’re smart enough to know when a project is doomed, or brave enough to persevere when your colleagues are fleeing for the hills. Abandoning your worldview in order to try on someone else’s is the first step in being able to see things as they are.

And the benefits of selflessness go beyond silencing our inner critic. When free from the confines of our normal identity, we are able to look at life, and the often repetitive stories we tell about it, with fresh eyes. Come Monday morning, we may still clamber back into the monkey suits of our everyday roles — parent, spouse, employee, boss, neighbor — but, by then, we know they’re just costumes with zippers.

By the mercy of the Lord, you have been given a guru, so your selflessness is simply a matter of serving your guru with more love and care. Give up all of your individualized desires and live for his pleasure, as he lived and lives for you.

One should be selfish enough to be selfless up to a certain point.

My mentor continued: Selflessness doesn’t mean to give up pursuing adventurous goals, but rather to attach ourselves to transcendental goals. Actual selflessness means we must genuinely access humility and submissiveness. This can be very scary, because we normally identify humility and submissiveness with low self esteem.

if you want to see things clearly, use your self-awareness to intentionally set the past aside and take in a fresh perspective. redirecting your attention preserves your energy. self-awareness is noticing the rhythm of your thoughts feeling when they are clear and when they are out of sync knowing when to take them seriously and when to let them go not every thought is valuable; most are just the sounds of impulsive emotional reactions

Purity of heart is what enables us to see.

Being wisely selfish and being selfless can amount to very much the same thing. There are centuries of anecdotal testimony on this point — and, as we will see, the scientific study of the mind has begun to bear it out. There is now little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds — and lives — are largely shaped by how we use them.

So the key is “enlightened self-interest,” which means in order to have what I want to achieve in the fullness of my life, I must find ways to serve.

...there is power in self-sacrifice.

Here is my secret. It's quite simple:
One sees clearly only with the heart.
Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.

Is it not through her selflessness that she is able to perfect herself?

One owes oneself the privilege of enlightening oneself.