With the joy of love, we receive the courage to go into the reality of the world and it's life, there with joy to give all our gift to the service of our neighbor and to the glory of God. This child-like, self imposed oblivion is the opposite of our natural tendency to puff ourselves up. Our answer to this question is bound to be heavily clouded by the modern infatuation with the self. Modernity tried to find reality, even with regard to the self, in the sure answers of science. But the science that seemed so reliable in the area of physical things proved helpless to identify the human heart.
Science is, purportedly, value free, and the human heart is value laden.
Science has concluded that the soul does not exist. But the heart will not be satisfied with such a conclusion. Refusing to turn to the living God for an answer, modern people have turned to an opposite pole from science, to the concept of the autonomous human personality. It is a part of God's judgement on humans that, if we refuse to listen to God's word about ourselves, we will set up two antagonistic poles of thought and roam forever lost between them. This is the predicament of modern thought, in which all of us have grown up and by which we are far more deeply influenced than we think.