Be Nobody (24 page)

No matter whether the lesson is presented positively or negatively, the relationship becomes an ongoing opportunity to learn and grow. And that's the real magic inherent in the practice of guru yoga.

While it's probably easiest to begin with one person you already see as sort of special, someone you love and who loves you, guru yoga has the capability of revolutionizing any relationship. It can be employed with equal benefit with loved ones and difficult people alike. It is the ultimate extension of thinking the best of others, of giving others the benefit of the doubt; of seeing the transformative possibilities inherent in any relationship; and of exploiting to the fullest the fact that if we alter our perception of others we will change our understanding of ourselves.

Action Plan: Working with a Guru

Pick one person in your life to function as your “guru.” As we've said above, it could theoretically be anyone, but it might be best to start with someone close to you who you love—a wife or husband, boyfriend or girlfriend, mother or father, sister or brother, son or daughter, or a very close friend.

The practice is simple to describe, but difficult indeed to stick with. Just decide that from now you'll regard this person as a kind of divine being—an angel who is only trying to help you—and everything, without exception, that this special person says or does is meant to be a teaching for you. What is it you need to learn about yourself from what the “guru” just said or did?

I.
 When asked which of the commandments were most important, Jesus said: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 22:37–39.

II.
 In philosophical terms, we might say that karma isn't a
metaphysical
system but rather an
epistemological
one.

To be too conscious is an illness—a real thoroughgoing illness.

——Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You must lose the self, as Jesus said, to find it.
^I
Or, to put it in the terminology we've used here, you must rise above the “somebody self” in order to gain some kind of access to the joyful unselfconsciousness of
being nobody
.

The empathetic expansion of identity to encompass others in our lives is one of the principal methods provided by our spiritual traditions to overcome the confines of mere individuality. But there is another spiritual technique designed to help us drop the self-consciousness and self-centeredness that are the ultimate sources of our unhappiness.

The method we'll explore in this chapter is designed to help us lose the self in action of all sorts—not only in our relationships with others, but in each and every one of our everyday activities, alone or in company.

We use various colloquialisms to speak of being engrossed in action. When we're “really into it,” or when we're in “the zone” or “the
pocket” or “the groove,” or when we're “going with the flow,” we're describing what it's like to
be nobody
because the “somebody self” has been wholly absorbed in an endeavor.

We all know what it feels like to be really consumed in an activity. When we say a book was a “real page-turner” or a movie was “riveting,” we are referring to this experience. When the concert was “mind-blowing” or the football match kept us on the “edge of our seat,” it's this sensation we're pointing to.

We are attracted to our hobbies, recreational activities, and games because they tend to launch us into this special state of mind. We're captivated by puzzles, and we love challenges at work for their capacity to bring us there. The rush we get while engaged in stimulating activities, especially those with a hint of danger (for me, it's riding my motorcycle), or when we're in the midst of an emergency—these too can evoke this feeling. And, of course, it is this state of self-forgetfulness and ecstasy (derived from the word
exstasis
, “standing outside of the self”) that lies behind the powerful attraction of heightened sexual experiences.

It's the feeling of
not being there
, or, we could also say, of
totally being there
—of dropping the mental narrative and fully integrating with the experience itself. The inner play-by-play commentary on life ceases. Instead of the usual voice-over we superimpose on unfolding events, we are fully engrossed in the activity itself. The mind's monologue is silenced as unmediated awareness takes over.

We're all familiar with this unselfconscious state of consciousness that arises when we fully inhabit the here and now. It's the joy of being fully integrated into life itself. It's the exhilaration and elation we feel when we are deeply engaged in what we're doing. And it's another way we gain access in our everyday lives to the rapture of
being nobody
.

•  •  •

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has observed that we're happiest when we're in this condition of pure awareness. He has famously labeled it “flow,” defining it as the state “in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”
¹

“Really getting into it” is the opposite of being “out of it,” of just spacing out and living life on cruise control. The flow state is characterized by extraordinary concentration on a task one finds captivating. “Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems,” writes Csikszentmihalyi.
²
When we are fully in the moment, completely occupied with the task at hand, we are unable to be simultaneously preoccupied with what comes next or “post-occupied” with what has already happened.

The flow state is the thorough engagement with the present, the utter embrace of reality as it's happening.
It's like this now
—entirely accepted and embodied.

Most importantly for our theme, this state of heightened awareness—full absorption in what one is doing—is also characterized by the loss of a sense of self-consciousness. “Happiness,” notes spiritual teacher Krishnamurti, “is not something that you can seek; it is a result, a by-product,” of self-abandonment:

If you pursue happiness for itself, it will have no meaning. Happiness comes uninvited; and the moment you are conscious that you are happy, you are no longer happy. . . . Being self-consciously happy, or pursuing happiness, is the very ending of happiness.
There is happiness only when the self and its demands are put aside.
³

The “somebody self” disappears when we are truly happy; the inner voice shuts up. In fact, it is precisely the degree to which one loses the self in the activity that defines how deep the flow really goes.
^II
Such “peak experiences,” as Abraham Maslow designated them, are moments of self-transcendence and contentment: “Perception in the peak-experience can be relatively ego-transcending, self-forgetful, egoless, unselfish. It can come closer to being unmotivated, impersonal, desireless, detached, not needing or wishing.”
⁴

These optimal, self-transcending states of mind are the bread and butter of religious mysticism. The “oceanic feeling” occurs when the individual feels herself or himself subsumed within some greater whole: “God,” “ultimate reality,” “the Ground of All Being,” one's “Buddha nature,” or whatever one wishes to call the nameless.

In the Eastern religious traditions, we are given a method designed to bring some version of this exalted state of mind into all our actions. In Taoism and Confucianism, the practice is called
wu wei
, or “effortless action,” and in Buddhism it's spoken of in terms of “awareness” and “mindfulness” in each and every one of our pursuits. In the Hindu tradition the phrase describing this spiritual technique for getting into the zone is particularly apt:
karma yoga
, or “disciplined action.”

These spiritual traditions posit that even in the ordinary activities of our daily lives we can enter the flow state. We don't need to wait for some extraordinary gift of grace to get a taste of the bliss, or sequester ourselves in a cave somewhere in order to bring about a mystical trip. And we don't have to continually and desperately search for exceptionally titillating “peak experiences” before we can get into the groove.

Every experience in life has the potential to be “peak”; every moment and every activity has the latent capacity to be “optimal” if we learn to let go of the “somebody self” and live in a more integrated and less self-conscious way.

There is, however, a difference between being mindlessly absorbed in an activity—passively watching television or a movie or staring at the computer, for example—and what we might call
mindful unselfconsciousness
in our actions. Karma yoga assumes both the disciplined “mindfulness” and the joyful “unselfconsciousness” that comprise “being in the zone” as opposed to just “zoning out.”

There's also a difference between hoping that some activity or another will seem captivating enough to push us into the flow, and the learned ability to put ourselves there. We all know and desire the joy of being completely engaged in what we're doing. But in between such “optimal experiences,” few of us stop to reflect on why and how they happen, and how we could potentially enter into any activity with this same intensity and attention.

Washing the dishes offers the same potential for getting into the zone as motorcycling or rock climbing do. There's nothing in any Himalayan cave that's missing from the office when it comes to getting into the flow. Any action done with mindful unselfconsciousness can take us there.

•  •  •

The unexamined life, it has been said, is not worth living—and that's true enough. It's important to be self-aware, in part because it is through self-awareness that one can come to realize that it is
too much
self-awareness that blocks us from the source of our greatest happiness. For the over-examined life can perpetually defer the actual living of it. “Ask yourself whether you are happy,” wrote
J. S. Mill, echoing the Krishnamurti quotation cited above, “and you cease to be so.”
⁵

Our deepest joy arises only when we cease taking our own temperature and, like the old Nike slogan says,
just do it
. Life does not run best when it's in neutral—stalled out in continual self-analysis—but when it's fully engaged.

Yeah, but I'm already “fully engaged,” and it's totally stressing me out! I've got a million things to do—so many responsibilities! I'm just so busy!

Nowadays most of us do indeed often feel the tension that accompanies having a lot to do. We have homework to complete, exams to pass, diplomas to acquire, and paying jobs to land. There are tasks at the office to accomplish, business problems to solve, and professional promotions to earn. The bills must be paid, forms must be filled out, and taxes must be filed.

The housework needs attention, the kids have to be driven to their soccer game, and there are birthday parties to be organized. There are home repairs that await us, meals to be prepared, and dishes, clothes, cars, and bodies to be washed. And there are, for some of us, book manuscripts to complete in order to meet the publisher's deadline.

Our social lives can also sometimes seem a bit overwhelming, what with all the appointments, meetings, engagements, rendezvous, dinner parties, and lunch dates there are to juggle. We even fill our leisure time with plans, projects, schedules, and itineraries so as to not run the risk of—gasp!—boredom, the characteristically modern abhorrence of not having
enough things to do
.

And the younger you are, the more likely that you're freaking out about all of this. A survey done on behalf of the American Psychological Association found that half of all “millennials” say their angst keeps them awake at night, and 39 percent of them said that their stress levels had increased in the past year.
⁶

We've done a good job of passing on this kind of anxiousness about life's tasks to our kids. When I was a teenager, I looked forward to sleeping in on Saturday morning (and we all know the amazing talent most teenagers have for sleeping in—especially, I guess, if they've been kept awake the night before by stress!). But invariably my dreams were literally shattered as my father woke me at some ungodly hour (like maybe around 10:00
am
) with the “to do list”—the chores I was expected to get through that day.

Idleness, I was told, was the devil's playground, and there would be no such demonic tomfoolery in this house!
Let's get to work, son!

And so most of us have internalized the idea that our self-worth consists at least in part in how busy we keep ourselves, with all the pressures and strains that come from such an attitude. Now more than ever before, we feel it's crucial to keep ourselves constantly occupied—or at least thinking about all the things we have to do—in order to be a real somebody.

Even though such perpetual worry and frenetic activity is wearing us out and down, we nevertheless revel in what has become a
cult of busyness
.

Our communications these days are often just to let each other know how much we've all got going on. Have you ever phoned up a friend and asked them how they're doing, only to sit there on the other end of the line, listening to them talk for fifteen minutes about how busy they are? Maybe you've found yourself doing the same when someone else asks after you. Our catch-up conversations turn into contests to see who's busier.