the spirituality paradox

Spirituality often cloaks itself in moral guise as shedding selfishness in favor of embracing the Other whether it be other sentient beings or the world of inanimate phenomena: amor vincit omnia.

The goal of such spirituality is to transcend the self, but the purpose is to improve the self. So, for example, a spiritual cult or movement targets the individual member for itself. It's not a movement to save the cows and chickens, or preserve pristine nature. It's a movement to bring the individual's self to a higher spiritual state. In other words, it's a selfish purpose with a selfless goal. 

From my biased perspective it's not merely contradictory and self-defeating (I mean the doctrine is defeating the doctrine -- a doctrine at cross-purposes to itself), but also self-serving, decadent and essentially degenerate. Yes, you have only one life to live, so there's plenty of incentive to perfect that life for itself -- I'm down with that, for sure -- but there are billions of others and possibly an infinity of other interests to pursue than this one self. Arithmetically, the others should win, were it not for the infinite value of one's own life. 

But here's the difference: attending to things beyond oneself also perfects or augments one's own meagre life. One path to transcendent enlightenment is studying the Other, instead of limiting oneself to navel-gazing. That's a path towards two infinities added together: the broad study of, say, the psychology of the Other will shed equal light on one's own psychology, while the study of, say, thermodynamics or information theory, will take you far beyond oneself. 

Arithmetically, two infinite series are no greater than one infinite series, but you still can see the advantage of an infinite series within yourself and an infinite series of yourself and all the others', the infinitesimal within plus the infinite outside.