Be Nobody (28 page)

“Art,” declared philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, “is the proper task of life.”
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And to fully engage in life as art, the artist loses him- or herself in the ongoing process of creation.

Any activity can be made much more enjoyable and rewarding if it's done for its own sake. Any act undertaken calmly and
unbusily
, free from the
compulsion to act
; any chore that's reconceptualized as play; any pursuit that's reconstituted as a kind of
performance art
—in sum, any endeavor we do with
mindful unselfconsciousness
, can get us into the flow.

I wish I could tell you that I knew of some quick and easy tricks for getting into the zone—especially when the activity does not seem that intrinsically magnetizing. It's relatively easy for me to get into the flow when riding my motorcycle or playing in the waves at a beautiful beach. I too would be stoked to learn of some magic that would effortlessly launch me into action when it came to taking out the garbage, mowing the lawn, or doing my taxes.

But karma yoga, as we've mentioned before, is a form of “yoga” or “discipline,” and the main feature of this yoga is not physical. Karma yoga is a method that depends on mindfulness and awareness. The essence of this technique is continuously remembering our simple but always relevant formula:

Om. It's like this now. Ah hum.

The only “trick” to karma yoga is to constantly recall this mantra. “This is what's happening now; this is the task I have to do at present.” There's no point in starting up the “if only” whine again.
It's like this now
, so let's
just do it
!

It is the complete acceptance of whatever the next scene is in the ever-changing drama of life that serves as the precondition for losing oneself in the play. Karma yoga is the discipline of integrating the “somebody self” into what we are doing in the here and now, and thereby assuming the guise of the “nobody self” when acting.

So among the other descriptors that characterize action for its own sake, the most important of them is
egolessness
:

Whether he is seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, eating, walking, sleeping, or breathing, the disciplined one, who knows how things really are, would think, “I'm not doing anything at all.”
³³

It's just the “seeing, hearing, touching, and so forth” that's happening. The “I” that's doing the “seeing, hearing, touching” is subsumed in the activity itself. “I'm not doing anything at all” because the self-consciousness required for awareness of the conceptualized “I” has been lost in complete engagement with what one is actually doing. The separation between the self and the world evaporates, and we become one with the life we are living.

•  •  •

Before concluding this discussion on “losing oneself in action,” it's important to emphasize that the kind of “action for its own sake” we're speaking of here is
not
a morally neutral exercise. There are better and worse ways to be “in the zone.” It's totally conceivable, to take one grisly example, that an ax murderer could really get into the activity of chopping up his victims.

While our secular psychologists have extolled the “flow state” for the pleasant and rewarding feelings that naturally attend it, our spiritual teachers have always emphasized that it matters not only
how
we do what we do, but also
what
we do and
why
we do it.

The discipline of karma yoga assumes that we understand the “karma” part. It presupposes wisdom about how karma really works and the direction such wisdom moves us when determining what we will do with our lives. Most importantly, karma yoga assumes that we are clear about the
why
—the intention or motivation behind any activity. The more aware we are that it is the selfless motivation that creates a happier life, the happier our lives will be—in both the present and the future.

The ancient Stoic philosopher Seneca remarked, “The real compensation of a right action is inherent in having performed it.”
³⁴
Virtue, in other words, is its own reward.

But virtue is virtue only
if
it is its own reward. Virtuous actions pay off only to the extent that we forego the explicit and conscious expectation of future personal benefit and concentrate on doing what needs to be done—to the best of our ability and out of the best of intentions.

There is pleasure to be found in any activity that puts us in the flow. But the rewards of virtuous action done for its own sake are doubled. Selfless action creates the karmic causes for future happiness:
what goes around will come around. But action guided by karma yoga also entails contentment with our present situation and the opportunities it provides for acting wisely and happily in the here and now.

“The one who abandons attachment to the results of action,” it says in the Bhagavad Gita, and “who is always satisfied and independent, does nothing at all, even when he is engaged in action.”
³⁵
Once again, with the loss of the “I,” it's nobody who's doing anything when action is done for its own sake.

When we practice going with the flow, guided by karma yoga, we obtain relief from incessant self-consciousness, the inner chatter of the “somebody self.” We are also at least temporarily liberated from the itchiness of the “if only” syndrome. And we are propelled for the length of our mindful unselfconsciousness into an experience of the Great Itchless State, the place where the “somebody self” stops cogitating and scheming (“I'm not doing anything at all”) and allows the “nobody self” to take over and play.

Action Plan: Who's There When You're in the Flow?

Make a list of the activities you engage in that bring you the most pleasure—gardening, going to the beach, playing with your children, dancing at the club, getting absorbed in a challenging and enjoyable task at work, or whatever yours might be. When you are fully engaged in these happiness-producing activities, are you self-consciously monitoring yourself, or are “you” not really there at all?

Then pay attention to the experience of doing what you truly enjoy next time you have the opportunity to do it. Check to see whether it is precisely the degree to which you can “lose yourself” in the activity that produces the joy and satisfaction you attribute to it.

I.
 “If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it.” Matthew 10:39.

II.
 “In flow, a person is challenged to do her best and must constantly improve her skills. At the time, she doesn't have the opportunity to reflect on what this means in terms of the self—if she did allow herself to become self-conscious, the experience could not have been very deep.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 65–66.

III.
 Compare Csikszentmihalyi's fancier label for this same idea: “The term ‘autotelic' derives from two Greek words,
auto
meaning ‘self' and
telos
meaning ‘goal.' It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward.” Csikszentmihalyi,
Flow
, 67.

IV.
 The earliest example of this argument in Sanskrit literature is found in Badarayana's
Vedantasutras
, 2.1.32–33. The author answers the objection that God can't be the creator of the world since God has no motive or reason to act (
na prayojanavattvat
, 2.13.2) by saying God does so “merely in play” (
lokavattu lilakaivalyam
).

We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real, and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists.

——Thomas Merton

In the futuristic movie
Total Recall
, the protagonist, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, purchases a brain implant designed to endow him temporarily with a completely new persona. The procedure goes haywire and Arnie becomes seriously confused, wandering through the movie trying to remember his former, and real, identity.

At one point, the frustrated, amnesiac Teutonic hero cries out in anguish, “If I'm not me, who da hell am I?!”

This is the million-dollar question for all of us: “Who da hell am I?” And there's one thing that the world's spiritual traditions and modern science and philosophy agree upon when it comes to the self:
We are not who we think we are
. We are all amnesiacs like the Schwarzenegger character, wandering through life, trying to find ourselves.

Julian Baggini has summarized the state-of-the-art findings in psychology, neuroscience, and modern philosophy in
The Ego Trick
, noting first that we're all pretty damned sure that there must be a real “me” in there somewhere: “People almost invariably believe that
there is such an essence, a core of self that holds steady through life,” he writes. “This is sometimes called the ‘pearl' view.” But the pearl inside the oyster is impossible to find: “The problem is that no one seems to be quite sure where to locate this precious gem.”
¹

Despite our certainty that there must be “a core of self,” we've seen that the “Where's Waldo?” search from hell for a unitary, unchanging, independent, Captain Kirk, essential pearl of a self inevitably leaves us empty-handed.

The Buddhist tradition has coined the term “no-self” (
anatman
) to describe this absence of the kind of “me” I think I am. But the recognition of the illusive nature of the personal, individual self is neither the sole discovery of any one religion nor nowadays even of religion itself.

It's become common knowledge that our commonsensical ideas about the self are in no way obviously or self-evidently true.

The self we think we have turns out to be just a kind of imaginary friend—or, perhaps even more often, an imaginary enemy. So we can all join our voices with Arnie's and cry out in unison: “
If I'm not me
”—if I'm not the “me” I think am—then “
who da hell am I?
”

•  •  •

Here's what we've discovered so far:

Each of us is, in fact, a unique individual; we're all equally “special,” worthy of healthy self-respect and deserving of basic human rights. These are the givens when it comes to the question of personal identity—
I am somebody!

Yes, each of us is somebody, and we're all fundamentally equal as somebodies. We're all the same in that we suffer and have problems in life, and we're all equally entitled to and have the capacity for attaining true happiness. And we all, equally, make mistakes—the
worst of them stemming from our ignorance about who da hell the somebody we are really is.

But we delimit ourselves when we overidentify with the temporary and changing roles we play—when we mistake the revolving series of carnival cutouts, which we employ to constitute either our individual or group identities, as being fully and essentially definitive of who we actually are. And we especially suffer when one or another of these cutouts pits us against the cutouts into which other people are sticking their faces. This desperate, if futile, quest to be a
real somebody
quickly devolves into the divisive competitiveness of trying to be
more of a somebody
than somebody else.

Our ongoing culture of narcissism—stretching from the “Me Decade” right through to the present “iEra”—has magnified our attachment to the ego and its insatiable need to be admired and inflated. The elevation of self-centeredness as a culturally acceptable obsession has had obvious consequences, for what goes up must come down. The rampant pandemic of depression (and its less virulent but nevertheless serious twin, low self-esteem) can be directly linked to the excessive self-preoccupation that is both the real cause and the tragic expression of this debilitating disease.

Real self-improvement is founded upon first wising up about the question of “Who da hell am I?” I'm not the “me” I think I am—unified, changeless, independent, and a Master Controller of the present in the present. Who I am—as somebody—is an
idea
of me based on my parts: my body (can't be me without it!) and my mind (I'd really be in trouble without a mind!). “We are
nothing but
our parts,” writes Julian Baggini, “but we are more than just our parts.”
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