Our entire nature is the desire to receive pleasure. All of the things we desire, everything we think about, and everything that emerges within us are nothing other than the various degrees of the presence or the absence of pleasure, and nothing more. How, then, are we able to nullify our own self-love, i.e. egoism? Where will we get the energy to do this? If I received pleasure by suppressing my egoism, as a masochist does, then I would suppress it in order to receive pleasure. However, our task is to suppress our egoism in order to achieve union with the Creator, that is, to achieve the property of bestowal. However, my nature was not created such that the property of bestowal is a reward for me.

In reality, only after a great amount of searches, perhaps even after many years, does a person arrive at the state when he finally understands that he does not contain anything that can help him to ascend spiritually. The only place where he is able to acquire the energy to perform an anti-egoistic action against his nature and in order to rise above it into the spiritual world, is only from the people around him. That is, a person should never appeal to himself, but rather only to his environment.