Be Nobody (34 page)

Our true nature is accessible in even the most commonplace of activities, like eating and drinking. But we need that
mindful unselfconsciousness
in order to be fully absorbed in what we're doing when we taste the food or beverage. Try it. Use your daily meals and morning coffee or tea as a chance to encounter the “nobody self.”

And the text gives us another method for relaxing into our true nature. Turn on one of your favorite pieces of instrumental music (no distracting lyrics). And then really get into it! Don't focus on individual notes or even the musical phrases, but lose yourself in the melody as a whole. When you're not there listening—that is, when you've been wholly engrossed in the music—there it is again! You've dropped back into your true nature.

One should realize that the consciousness in others' bodies is the same as in one's own. Having abandoned concern for one's own body, one soon becomes all-pervasive.
^VIII

We believe that we are
really
separate from others, not only because we have separate physical bodies but also because we have our own peculiar thoughts (some more peculiar than others!). And other beings have their own separate bodies and, we presume, their own particular thoughts too.

This meditation requires us to concentrate neither on the thinker inside the body nor on the particular thoughts the thinker thinks, but rather on the field of consciousness itself. What is the sphere or arena in which all thinking, in any body, occurs? The focus here is on what makes awareness of anything possible; it is on
pure
consciousness, not self-consciousness or any other consciousness
of something
.

This ability to be conscious—regardless of what specific thoughts are being thought by which individual thinker—is exactly the same in all living beings. Focus on that and the mind becomes “all-pervasive,” and we are drawn into the universal true nature we all share.

I.
 For those interested in reading the full text, my complete translation is online at
http://lamamarut.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/VijnaBhairavaTantraHandout.pdf
.

II.
 VBT, verses 84 (with minor changes from the original) and 120.

III.
 VBT, verse 64.

IV.
 VBT, verses 23, 48, and 92.

V.
 VBT, verse 101.

VI.
 VBT, verses 71 and 119.

VII.
 VBT, verses 72 and 73.

VIII.
 VBT, verse 93.

Preface

1
. Pew Research Center's Religion and Public Life Project, “Religious Landscape Survey, Report 1: Religious Affiliation,”
http://religions.pewforum.org/reports
.

2
. Jason Palmer, “Religion May Become Extinct in Nine Nations, Study Says,”
BBC News
, March 22, 2011,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12811197
.

3
. John McManus, “Two-Thirds of Britons Not Religious, Suggests Survey,”
BBC News
, March 20, 2011,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12799801
.

4
. Dan Merica, “Survey: One in Five Americans Has No Religion,”
CNN Belief Blog
, October 9, 2012,
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/09/survey-one-in-five-americans-is-religiously-unaffiliated/?hpt=hp_c2
.

5
. Ibid.

6
. Kathryn Blaze Carlson, “Organized Religion on the Decline? Growing Number of Canadians ‘Spiritual but Not Religious, ' ”
National Post
, December 21, 2012,
http://life.nationalpost.com/2012/12/21/organized-religion-on-the-decline-growing-number-of-canadians-spiritual-but-not-religious/
.

7
. Dominique Mosbergen, “Dalai Lama Tells His Facebook Friends That ‘Religion Is No Longer Adequate,' ”
Huffington Post Religion
, September 13, 2012,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/13/dalai-lama-facebook-religion-is-no-longer-adequate-science_n_1880805.html
.

8
. His Holiness the Dalai Lama,
Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World
(Toronto: Signal Books, 2011), xii, xiv.

9
. Cited in Acharya Peter Wilberg,
Tantric Wisdom for Today's World: The New Yoga of Awareness
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2009), 112.

10
. Galatians 3:28. All Biblical citations in this book are from the New Revised Standard Version, found online at the Oremus Bible Browser,
http://bible.oremus.org
.

Introduction

1
. Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening,”
New York
magazine, August 23, 1976,
http://nymag.com/news/features/45938/
.

2
. Christopher Lasch,
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). Some of Lasch's observations were foreshadowed not only by Tom Wolfe but also in Peter Marin's “The New Narcissism,”
Harper's
, October 1975. The “world view emerging among us,” wrote Marin, centers “solely on the self” and has “individual survival as its sole good.”

3
. Lasch, ibid., 34.

4
. Ibid., 50. Narcissism is elsewhere described as the “distinctive personality type suited to the requirements of [our] culture,” 238.

5
. The continuing relevance of Lasch's portrait of our society is readily apparent. “The personality of his time, it seems, is even more the personality of ours,” writes Lee Siegel in his
New York Times
essay, “The Book of Self-Love,” February 5, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/books/review/Siegel-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
.

6
. Justin Bieber, of course, became a superstar on the basis of a YouTube video posted by his mom, and later paid it forward by promoting on YouTube what would become, thanks to Bieber's home movie, an international hit song by Carly Rae Jepsen, “Call Me Maybe.” A YouTube-engendered star gives birth, via YouTube, to another instant celebrity.

7
. There were 3.14 billion email accounts worldwide in 2011, according to Royal Pingdom,
http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/01/17/internet-2011-in-numbers/
. An estimated 6 billion mobile phone subscriptions, from which 200,000 text messages are sent every second, according to World Mobile Media,
http://worldmobilemedia.com/sponsor/
. Twitter reaches half a billion accounts in 2012, according to a Semiocast study,
http://semiocast.com/en/publications/2012_7_30_Twitter_reaches_half_a_billion_accounts_140m_in_the_US
.

8
. Emil Protalinski, “Facebook Passes 1.11 Billion Monthly Active Users,”
The Next Web
, May 1, 2013,
http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2013/05/01/facebook-passes-1-11-billion-monthly-active-users-751-million-mobile-users-and-665-million-daily-users/
.

9
. In fact, the addiction to Facebook seems to be having the opposite effect. Check out Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”
The Atlantic
, May 2012,
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930/
. Marche not only links the addiction to Facebook to an increase in feelings of loneliness among some of its users but also cites research that has found “a significant correlation between Facebook use and narcissism.” “In fact, it could be argued that Facebook specifically gratifies the narcissistic individual's need to engage in self-promoting and superficial behavior.” Cf. Geoffrey Mohan's “Facebook Is a Bummer, Study Says,”
Los Angeles Times
, August 14, 2013,
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/aug/14/science/la-sci-sn-facebook-bummer-20130814
.

10
. C. S. Lewis,
Mere Christianity
(New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1952), 6. See also Timothy Keller's observation in
The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness: The Path to True Christian Joy
(Chorley, England: 10Publishing, 2012): “Up until the twentieth century, traditional cultures (and this is still true of most cultures in the world) always believed that too high a view of yourself was the root cause of all the evil in the world. . . . Traditionally, that was the reason given for why people misbehave. But, in our modern western culture, we have developed an utterly opposite cultural consensus. Our belief today—and it is deeply rooted in everything—is that people misbehave for lack of self-esteem and because they have too low a view of themselves.”

11
. Patrice Lescoe, “How Much Have Depression Rates Increased?”
eHow
,
http://www.ehow.com/way_5627919_much-depression-rates-increased_.html#ixzz2Le3SK2UA
.