From The God of Miracles:

If you want to be blind, be selfish. See everything from your viewpoint and only your viewpoint. Make yourself the god of your own world. In no time your vision will cloud and you’ll find that there are no stars in your part of the cosmos.

There are also no miracles. When we are selfish, we have trouble seeing the spiritual forces that swirl around us.

Each act of selfishness causes a little blot and the blots add up to a patch of blackness.

If you want to check to see if you are selfish, question the motive of everything you desire and examine everything that offends you.

Why were you offended? What part of you did it engage? Did it “hurt your pride,” or challenge your subtle viewpoint of superiority?

Ask the Holy Spirit to reveal your true inner life and if there is too much “self,” purge it. Pray until it is gone. Rise above it.

To rise means to reorient, and the archaic definition of “reorient” is “resurrection.”

When we reorient toward unselfishness, we grow more like Christ.

Step out of your “self” like you would step out of dirty clothes and a new reality will rise around you.

How else do we know if there is “self”? From it come impatience, anger, insult, depression, phobias, grudges, and retributions. Who do you dislike, and why? What engages the negative side of you?

We must know this because the negative will block you, quash the spirit, and is anti-miraculous.

There is no way for a person who is selfish to encounter true miracles – only the miracles of the world, which are eaten, in the end, by the worm, or rust in the mist of dawn (see Jonah 4:7).

The opposite is true when we are selfless and we know we are selfless, when we think of everything from the perspective of others, when we get the greatest joy out of giving, when we easily forgive, and when depriving ourselves doesn’t lead to an emotional crisis. An example is a woman in California whose mission is to bury the little babies that have been abandoned. She does so on a little plot near the town of Calimesa—deceased infants. She was entirely unselfish, serving God in a real need, and it caused a miracle.

There were always the calls informing her of another newborn at the morgue, but in 2004 she got a different call, this one informing her that she had won $27 million in the California lottery—which she immediately announced would go to furthering her work.

Her unselfishness had sparked, had charged, had given energy to a huge miracle.

Those with similar funds hurt themselves if they don’t use it to make miracles for others.

The less self there is, the more there is God, Who wants you in His universe, not your own. Our sun must be His Son.

[resources: The God of Miracles]