I have personal memories of a number of bad things that have happened to me when trying to use bleach. Over the years, I’ve ruined several articles of clothing through ignorance. Experience eventually taught me a thing or two about how to handle this common, yet powerful, chemical cleaning agent.

Ironically, each time I ruined something, I was trying to make it better. But my best efforts were foiled and I ended up making things worse. That’s not only disappointing, its frustrating.

Moving into the spiritual realm, there is a parallel. There are a host of methods and techniques to help us achieve meaning, fulfillment, self-actualization and the like. Some may be quite powerful, but the more powerful they are the more care we need to take in using them.

Just like using bleach, we need to use caution when applying these or we may do more harm than good. The big risk is self-absorption. We all need to pay some attention to getting our needs met. But if we design our lives so that we, as individuals, are the centre of the moral universe, we are setting ourselves up for big trouble in two ways.

First, the more focussed on ourselves we become, the more we monitor our own satisfaction levels and we may end up on a starry-eyed quest the goal of which is "my happiness." Second, and this has more far-reaching ramifications, we are not the centre of the moral universe and acting out of faulty assumptions will always bring us to grief.

For Reflection:

• What do you think is the biggest impediment to our being able to see ourselves in the context of a bigger picture?
• Take some time to try to see reality from some other points of view. What do you learn from seeing what others see?