Be Nobody (5 page)

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Liberation from the anxiety of always feeling that you have to be “somebody” is found only in true selflessness and freedom from the ego's restrictions, where solace is found in relaxing into life rather than trying endlessly to micromanage it for one's own selfish ends. The following pages offer instruction for attaining such liberation from the lower self without having to seclude oneself in a monastery or retire to a cave in the Himalayas. This book is meant to challenge you to incite the biggest revolution of all: the overthrow of the self-centeredness and self-consciousness that are the root causes of our dissatisfaction, and the embrace of our true potential and source of our real happiness.

Happiness is ours for the taking, but it cannot be achieved without doing the hard work of letting go of old habits of thinking and acting and plunging into the new and untried.

I.
 This trait of the “culture of narcissism” has been coupled with, rather than superseded by, a “cult of busyness” that we'll discuss in chapter 7.

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us—don't tell!

They'd banish us—you know!

How dreary to be somebody!

How public like a frog

To tell one's name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

——Emily Dickinson

It is possible to move through the drama of our lives without believing so earnestly in the character that we play. That we take ourselves so seriously, that we are so absurdly important in our own minds, is a problem for us.

——Pema Chödrön

I
t's a funny thing how we adults so rarely stop to ponder the big questions in life: What's the meaning of it all? Is there a God? Why do bad things happen to good people, and vice versa? And just where did I put my car keys?

Young people in their teens and early twenties, as they are entering into adulthood, tend to pose and chew on these queries quite a bit. But apart from professional philosophers and those in the throes of a midlife crisis, we grown-ups get too busy with our families, professions, and ongoing responsibilities to stop and reflect much on these really important puzzles (except maybe for the location of the car keys).

And of all the great mysteries, there's one that surely must count as the most pressing, persistent, and perplexing:

Who am I?

“Know thyself,” said Socrates, succinctly summing up the biggest of all life's challenges. Sounds good . . . and sounds a lot easier than it turns out to be.

Although we spend the preponderance of each day, every day, preoccupied with and enamored of the self, we nevertheless are perpetually confused and uncertain as to who we are so fascinated by. “What we are looking for,” observed Saint Francis, “is what is looking.”
¹
But when we try to catch hold of this elusive self, it seems to evaporate into thin air.

Knowing oneself seems to be an itch we can't quite scratch. And just like any unreachable itch, it's really driving us crazy.

While there are lots of conundrums in life, genuine and deep self-knowledge is perhaps the biggest mystery of all—as well as our biggest obsession. We instinctually feel that we must be
somebody
, but we can't quite put our finger on who that somebody might be. We are aware that we are aware, but we're a bit clueless as to exactly who it is that is aware.

Or, as Alan Watts has cleverly put it in limerick form,

There once was a man who said, though

It seems that I know that I know,

What I'd like to see,

Is the I that knows me,

When I know that I know that I know.
²

Perhaps because locating the true self—here depicted as the self that “knows that I know that I know”—has proven to be so difficult, we gravitate to forged imitations of the real article in the hope that they might suffice. Because self-discovery turns out to be so perplexing, we attempt instead a self-fabrication. We create a character for
ourselves and then elevate it—temporarily, at least—to the status of genuine identity.

Like boardwalk tourists poking our faces in the two-dimensional carnival cutouts depicting the muscle man and bathing beauty, we are forever trying to find some authentic self in the multitudinous, temporary, and ever-changing roles we assume in life. We clutch at straws, claiming to actually
be somebody
to avoid the free fall that we fear is entailed in being nobody.

We find ourselves in relationships with others and then glom on to such guises as our true identity (“
I am
a father/mother/son/daughter/friend/lover/husband/wife,” and so on). Or we identify with our jobs and professions (“
I am
a carpenter/lawyer/doctor/teacher,” and so on). Or we earn degrees, certificates, and titles, and present them as our true identity (“
I am
a licensed mechanic/certified yoga instructor/PhD”).

We have our hobbies and leisure pursuits (“
I am
a surfer/camper/blogger/roller blader/stamp collector”) and our racial, religious, economic, and national personae (“
I am
white/middle class/Christian/American”). We create online avatars or Facebook identities in the hope that a virtual persona will suffice for our self-image. We even, in a true act of desperation, identify ourselves with our past traumas (
“I am
a recovering survivor of alcoholism/drug addiction/childhood abuse/divorce”) or current feelings (“
I am
angry/happy/jealous/depressed”).

We try to find ourselves through these
identifications
, a word that derives from the Latin term “to make the same.” We make a role “the same” as the player of the role, or constitute the experiencer as “the same” as the experience the experiencer experiences.
^I

But who is the “I” that we at different times assert is one or another (or the sum total of all) of these guises? Who's the person
that takes on all these personae? Who is it that's sticking his or her head into each of these two-dimensional cutouts?

“All the world's a stage,” Shakespeare said, “and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.”
³
These various roles are sometimes chosen and sometimes given to us to enact, but when we wholly identify with one player or another in this revolving cast of characters—doing our best to keep up with the necessarily frequent costume changes—we set ourselves up for confusion, dissatisfaction, and frustration. We are confused about which one of the multiple roles truly identifies us; we are dissatisfied by the attempt to make any one of these parts truly fulfill us; and we are frustrated by the limitations inherent in each and every one of these personae.

Bewildering when you actually think about it, right? All these different versions of “me”!

A character played by Lily Tomlin in her one-woman show,
The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
, voices what may be a common sentiment: “All my life, I've always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.”
⁴

Mistaking the authentic self for what are just multiple, transient, and conditional guises—creating at best a fractured and confused sense of identity—we are diverted from the quest to uncover our deeper, changeless nature. We identify with what has been called the “lower self”—the ego, persona, personality, or “self-image”—instead of communing with the real McCoy, what has been variously termed the higher or authentic self, the soul, the spirit, our true nature or being. “We have a hunger for something like authenticity, but are easily satisfied by an ersatz facsimile,” as Miles Orvell puts it.
⁵

The self, it seems, is in an ongoing identity crisis. We're spending our lives in a series of caricatures, impersonating somebody or another, substituting one persona after another for a real person.

When it comes to self-realization, we've been settling for a bunch of wooden nickels. And trying to find our authentic self in such a weak currency has not, and will not, pay off.

If there's one thing we're pretty sure of when it comes to our perception of ourselves, it's that we are unique. We all, each and every one of us, want to think of ourselves as truly individual, as one of a kind. Most of us, and in much the same kind of way, think of ourselves as special—and wish to be
even more special
, for it is in our hoped-for extraordinariness that we believe we will find true fulfillment and happiness.

In an age when depression has reached epidemic proportions in our so-called developed nations, it is important to foster a healthy sense of self-esteem in order to combat the spiraling trend toward self-abasement. We need to find ways to help reverse this trend—for our own good and for the good of others who are also susceptible to this tendency, for the true causes and cures of this modern ailment are not the ones usually on offer in many therapeutic and “self-help” circles.

Now, lest you think I'm telling you that you're
not
special, please know that I'm not saying that at all. You are indeed special, distinct, and one of a kind, and you should honor that. Fostering a good, healthy sense of self-acceptance is an essential basis for a happy life. And this process must begin early. Parents need to instill in their children a sense of self-worth. You've probably seen the meme—a picture of a small child with the caption “God made me, and God doesn't make junk!” Every child deserves to believe that they are not “junk.”

Mr. Rogers—surely one of our modern saints, who positively influenced a whole generation in America—repeatedly told young
viewers of his television show that they were his friends and he liked them just the way they are. The whole salubrious message was encapsulated in a song entitled “You Are Special.”

You're special to me . . .

You are the only one like you.
⁶

This beneficial promotion of self-affirmation, “You are special,” is also crucially important to convey to those who are, for one reason or another, cut off from some or all the ways a person's worth is measured in our society—those without much money, whose profession (or lack thereof) is not afforded much status, or who are otherwise unable to draw upon the usual social props for their sense of self-worth.

When I was a boy, my father occasionally took me on weekend trips from our home in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Chicago—the big, big city for all us Midwesterners. We'd go to the Shedd Aquarium, the Museum of Science and Industry, Maxwell Street Market, and other places of urban wonder. And my dad, being a second-generation Baptist minister, would also bring me on Saturday mornings to a large auditorium for the weekly service conducted by a young and exceptionally dynamic pastor, the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

The organization was called Operation Breadbasket, an offshoot of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, formed to help foster economic development among disadvantaged people like those living on the South Side of Chicago. And the highlight of the weekly service was when the charismatic Reverend Jackson would get behind the pulpit and do his thing, call-and-response style:

Rev. Jackson: Say, I am!

Crowd: I am!

Rev. Jackson: Somebody!

Crowd: Somebody!

Rev. Jackson: I may be poor.

Crowd: I may be poor.

Rev. Jackson: But I am . . .

Crowd: But I am . . . .

Rev. Jackson: Somebody!

Crowd: Somebody!

Rev. Jackson: I may be young.

Crowd: I may be young.

Rev. Jackson: But I am . . .

Crowd: But I am . . .

Rev. Jackson: Somebody!

Crowd: Somebody!

Rev. Jackson: I may be on welfare.

Crowd: I may be on welfare.

Rev. Jackson: But I am . . .

Crowd: But I am . . .

Rev. Jackson: Somebody!

Crowd: Somebody!

And on the chant went, reaching greater and greater pitches of enthusiasm:

I may be small, but I am somebody!

I may make a mistake, but I am somebody!

My clothes are different, my face is different, my hair is different, but I am somebody!