Inspiring the transition from self-comforter to self-server in fiction, part 1

Awakening greater self-interest, energy, and responsibility

May 10, 2025

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The previous post, Transition points in seeking God, ended with three aspects of inspiring readers toward that ultimate goal: develop a greater clarity about a higher purpose of life than the pattern they’re presently living in, proposing or visualizing ideas about what living with that clarity might look like, and helping to awakening the necessary will and courage to carry out the necessary choices in their own lives.

How one might go about expressing these aspects in fiction depends on the readers you’re looking to inspire, which is to say, the predominant behavioral pattern of your intended audience. We’ll thus explore each pattern in turn, starting in this post (and its follow-on part 2) with how one might inspire people in the self-comforter pattern to rise to that of the self-server. (A case of motivational and/or inpletional inspiration, as discussed in The nature of inspiration, part 1.).

First, however, there’s an important question to address.

running man on bridge — Photo by Fabio Comparelli on Unsplash

Does having sense experiences make one a sensualist? Does seeking comfort on occasion make one a self-comforter?

To put it simply, no. Just about everyone runs into overwhelming challenges from time to time and it’s natural to seek solace, even as Jesus demonstrated in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:36–44). Such moments, however, do not establish one in the pattern or default worldview of the self-comforter. Similarly, sense experiences are not inherently “bad” or non-spiritual, nor does having sense experiences make one a sensualist.

Furthermore, “seeking comfort” can mean many different things. For a sensualist, comfort often comes through alcohol, drugs, or sex. For a self-server, perhaps it comes through “retail therapy” or putting in overtime to earn more money. With a self-sacrificer, comfort might be found more in focusing more attention to serving others. And for a self-transcender, comfort is often found in prayer, meditation, or simply offering oneself, as Jesus did, into God’s arms.1

Where sense experiences are concerned, consider, too, that just about everyone, saints included, was conceived the old-fashioned way by their parents.2 Even the Virgin Mary, through preserved from “original sin” according to the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, was yet conceived (according to apocryphal texts) in the usual manner by Saint Anne, her mother, and Saint Joachim (or Imran in Islam), her father. Sex and sainthood, in other words, are not mutually exclusive.

Sensations exist by the simple virtue of having a physical body that’s endowed with sense organs. The desire for comfort, similarly, arises naturally when one experiences pain. The more important question, then, is what those senses and sensations mean to a person’s fundamental or default identity. If your fundamental identity is with sense experiences themselves—the materialistic belief that humans are sensual beings only and anything “spiritual” is a delusion—then those sense experiences must be indulged at every opportunity and protected at all costs. A self-comforter, in fact, is likely to favor the accumulation of sense experiences at the expense of wealth and even personal freedom.

A self-server, on the other hand, is likely to do the opposite: relinquishing some sense experiences in favor of accumulating wealth, possessions, and power. (And a pure self-server will have no qualms about exploiting self-comforters by selling them sense indulgences, including addictive ones.)

If your identity lies in service to a cause, as with a self-sacrificer, then you may be somewhat ambivalent toward any sense experience that doesn’t serve that cause. Self-sacrificers may even find that too many sense experiences obstruct their sense of mission and thus relinquish them in exchange for a greater ability to carry out that work. Self-sacrificers, too, often develop the willingness to endure great pain, especially if by doing so they can spare others from suffering. The inwardly-focused self-sacrificer, indeed, prefers not to indulge the senses but to do battle with and conquer attachment to them.

And if, as a self-transcender, your fundamental identity is union with God—seeing perhaps, as the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is credited as saying, that we are spiritual beings having a human experience—then sensations, even extreme pain, are simply further prods to self-transcendence.

There comes a time, in fact, in the upper heights of the self-transcender pattern, when one more and more withdraws the outward-flowing energy from the senses and merges it inwardly into the upward stream of devotion to God. That’s what’s happening with those saints and yogis who enter states of spiritual ecstasy. Eyewitnesses related, for example, that during one of her visions of the Lady, Bernadette Soubirous once held a candle in her hand that burned so low that its flames were passing through her fingers and licking her hand. Yet she experienced neither pain nor injury. After her ecstasy was over, Dr. Douzous, one of the witnesses, obtained a lit candle. “I immediately put the flame of the candle several times in succession under Bernadette’s left hand,” he reported, “and she drew it away very quickly, saying to me, ‘You are burning me.’”3

What makes a self-comforter or sensualist, then, isn’t merely having sensations but in identifying with them. And the suffering that arises from that identity is what naturally compels them to rise to the level of the self-server.

The next higher purpose for the self-comforter: higher energy

As we’ve defined the pattern in previous posts, self-comforters or sensualists primarily seek to avoid pain and experience sensual pleasure with as little effort as possible. The purpose of life, as they see it, is to feel good and indulge the senses.

To inspire (that is, motivate) them toward a higher experience of life, which is to inspire them directionally toward God, means encouraging them to first take steps toward and then into the self-server pattern, as the diagram below indicates.

Rising into the self-server pattern is the necessary first step even if your eventual goal is to inspire people to the higher levels. The primary reason for this is that seeking God/Satchidananda requires greater and greater energy as well as the ability to focus that energy.

Put another way, it’s easy to indulge the senses without discrimination. Exercising enough self-control to prevent those indulgences from becoming destructive, which is more psychologically healthy, takes more energy and focus. Even more energy is then required to uphold moral conviction, as it also is to commune with the million-amp current, so to speak, of divine consciousness.4 Ultimately, spiritual growth depends on the ability to preserve one’s inner energies and direct them upwards toward the brain.

The next step for a sensualist, then, involves cultivating self-interest and personal responsibility, rather than playing the victim, and cultivating the desire for greater health (physical and psychological), wealth and possessions, self-control, creativity, success, and worldly accomplishments, all of which reflect a higher level of energy and a more lasting sense of fulfillment than ephemeral sense indulgences can offer. Although developing such self-interested desires is normally not seen as “spiritual,” doing so is spiritual progress for self-comforters. Just keep in mind that they’re not the end of the road: those worldly fulfillments, too, are ephemeral. But that’s a matter for the transition to the self-sacrificer; all that matters here for the self-comforter is that they are more lasting than sense indulgences.

The transitory nature of sense fulfillments

When people, at whatever age, set upon the path of the self-comforter, sense indulgences seem at first to satisfy that inner hunger for the conscious bliss of Satchidananda (see Everyone is seeking God but most don’t know it). After all, sense pleasures are, well, quite pleasurable and seem at first to bring a greater sense of inner contentment.

The primary problem with sense satisfactions is that they’re short-lived. Think of eating a bit of chocolate or taking a bite of a cookie. How long does the sensation last? How long does the satisfaction last? How many of us, when eating, start taking another bite before we’ve even finished chewing the previous one?

In the mind of the self-comforter, the solution to the problem is obvious: seek ongoing fulfillment through repeated indulgence. It’s quite logical. If one indulgence brings a fulfillment, then more indulgence must bring more fulfillment, right?

The cruel irony—cruel to the mind of the sensualist, at least, but just a natural consequence—is that the relationship between indulgence and fulfillment is not constant: repeated indulgence desensitizes one such that the fulfillment diminishes with each repetition. In time, it becomes impossible to experience the initial levels of sensation. Economists call this “diminishing marginal utility,” the simple reality that each additional “unit” of consumption just doesn’t have the same satisfaction as the preceding one. Soon, that initial sense of inner contentment gives way to increasing inner tensions.

Another other cruel irony is that although the desire for sensations is limitless, every sensation-producing act yet takes a definite amount of time. There’s only so much joy the physical body can bring. What’s more, many indulgences require time for recovery: whether with alcohol, drugs, or sex, the body can handle only so much before it demands rest. As a result, the ongoing fulfillment that the sensualist craves becomes a receding target. Indulgence demands more and more investment of time and energy but produces less and less satisfaction.

Faced with such brutal calculus, some self-comforters resort to even costlier strategies in an attempt to rebalance the equation. Some turn to dangerous, sensation-enhancing drugs like methamphetamines, for instance; others deliberately employ intense physical pain as a means to intensify pleasure (as in the BDSM subculture, for example). Some also resort to criminal acts to boost their sensual thrill through sheer adrenaline, eventually becoming wholly desensitized even to rape and murder.

Unfortunately for the self-comforter, employing such costly strategies only delays the inevitable. The diminishing returns and the ever-increasing costs of indulgence eventually reach a point of utter exhaustion on all levels: physical, financial, psychological, emotional, and spiritual. The downward spiral can also lead to a loss of one’s freedom: psychological, through mental illness; physical, through incarceration; or of one’s life, through violence, substance abuse, or suicide.

That’s why this pattern of behavior is such a cruel irony: in the very effort to avoid pain and experience pleasure, the pain ultimately annihilates pleasure entirely. But those are the natural consequences of over-indulgence that lead one to consider another path.

Coming up in part 2

In part 2 (next week), we’ll look at an example of the alternate path found in the movie Forrest Gump, then explore how to inspire the upward transition (the growth arc) through fiction.

Until then, your thoughts are always welcome.