Be Nobody (8 page)

Realizing that suffering is both subjectively experienced and universally encountered—no one is having an easy life here!—is a crucial step toward breaking out of the loneliness of individuality and recognizing what we share with all others. Personal suffering need not simply further and solidify our sense of distinctiveness, but can open us up to a compassionate empathy that enlarges our sense of self.

•  •  •

No one wants to suffer. All of us try to avoid it the best we can. And conversely, we all want to be happy and enjoy life, and this is the second way in which we are all exactly alike.

The desire for happiness (and for avoidance of pain) is fundamental to our nature as living beings. It drives us all day long, and it lies behind all of our life choices. As psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi puts it, “While happiness itself is sought for its own sake,
every other goal—health, beauty, money, or power—is valued only because we expect that it will make us happy.”
¹⁹

Although everything we do throughout the day—throughout our whole lives—is done with the hope that it will bring us more happiness (and less pain), many of us may perceive happiness as something that occurs accidentally, once in a while, through causes unknown and unknowable.

The very etymology of the word
happiness
contains within it the idea that it is, so to speak,
hap
hazard. We feel
hap
less when it comes to obtaining real happiness; we have a sense that, when it seems that things are going right, it's all just a matter of
hap
penstance. It might appear that happiness, like its opposite (a four-letter word for excrement, as one sees on bumper stickers), just
hap
pens.

Happiness doesn't just happen; it is caused, like everything else. And there is a universally affirmed method taught in the spiritual traditions to achieve true and lasting happiness. That method involves less, not more, self-centeredness; it entails relinquishing the individual's insatiable demands and losing oneself in something larger.

While we sometimes think of happiness as a randomly occurring phenomenon, we even more often associate true happiness with the pleasuring of the ego—“making
myself
happy” through trying to find joy in what we label “self-fulfillment,” “self-satisfaction,” or any other of the myriad concepts that have “self” as the first component (“self-respect,” “self-indulgence,” “self-importance,” and so on). Although, as we've seen, it is essential to have self-esteem to be strong enough to move things to the next level, we must transcend egoism if we are to find both our true identity—what unites us with all others—and the real and authentic source of joy.

Compulsively trying to be somebody, we keep ourselves imprisoned by our own egotistical addiction to being more, better, and higher.

True happiness doesn't involve fulfilling the ego's needs for high status, the love and admiration of others, a beautiful body, or a trophy wife or arm-candy husband. True happiness, in other words, will not be an attribute of the lower, smaller, individual self. It is only when we access our higher, universal, true identity that we experience the profound and unshakeable euphoria we all seek.

The purpose of life is to find an alternative to ubiquitous suffering; the whole point is to find the lifeboat and get off the freakin'
Titanic
. And that's another way in which we are all the same: we all have the capability of discovering the lifeboat that's been there all along.

We all, equally, have this capacity for deep-rooted happiness, because we all, equally, have a spirit, universal in nature, at our core. This is the great and fundamental equality, assumed in all the world's spiritual traditions. In Christianity, we are taught that we all—sinner and saint alike—are capable of redemption and salvation. And similarly in Judaism, we are all regarded as equal before God. In Islam, the Qur'an declares that “All peoples are a single nation,”
²⁰
while in the Hindu tradition it is presupposed that we all have the potential to break through the illusion of individuality and realize the true nature we share in common.

And in Buddhism, each and every living being is said to have what is called “Buddha nature,” the inborn potential to realize one's Higher Self.

Everyone has this Buddha nature, and nobody has more of it than anyone else. When it comes to our true identity—our deepest and happiest sense of self—we are not hierarchically ordered individuals with different types and degrees of specialness. Rather, we're perfectly, 100 percent equal and alike.

According to the Buddhist texts, recognizing this capability to achieve our highest destiny—a potential we all have, each and every one of us—is the true remedy for the depression and low self-esteem
that many of us suffer as a result of our identification with a lower, individual self:
²¹

Never be discouraged and think,

“How could someone like me become Awakened?”

The Buddha, who speaks the truth,

Has said these true words about this:

“Even those who were flies, gnats, bees, and worms

Obtained the highest enlightenment, so hard to obtain,

Because of their perseverance.”
²²

Because we are not really just the “somebody”—the particular, discrete, and separate individual—that we believe ourselves to be, we can reach the highest happiness. But it will require effort and perseverance to discover who we really are. It will especially demand a willingness to undergo the kind of de- and re-identification entailed in the ego-ectomy we spoke of earlier.

We must die to be born again. We must be prepared to let go of the caterpillar to which we are so attached if we are to soar free as the butterfly we are truly meant to be.

Our capital “S” Self, our Buddha nature, our soul—whatever name one wishes to give it—is definitely not the individual ego. There is a part of each and every one of us that has never been born and will never die—an eternal, uncreated, and universal Self that is not “somebody” and has never been “anybody,” but is both “nobody” and “everybody.” And it is this part of us, labeled the “wise one” in the following verse from the ancient Indian Upanishads, that is truly extraordinary.

The wise one has never been born and never dies. It has not come from anywhere, nor has it become anyone. It is unborn, unchanging, eternal, and primordial. It is not killed when the body is killed.
²³

Our real specialness lies not in our uniqueness but in what we share with all others. It is who we really are, and it is who we really want to be. It is what makes it possible to overcome our sense of separation and aloneness and feel a part of a larger whole.

We long for it and take our greatest joy when we reconnect with it. According to Hindu scriptures, the little voice inside—the mouthpiece of the ego—quiets down, and the atomistic, unhappy self is enveloped into something much greater: “Conceits such as ‘This is who I am' or ‘I am not this' are destroyed for the practitioner who has become silent, knowing that everything is encompassed within the true Self.”
²⁴

Real self-knowledge requires us to drop the identification with the changing cast of personae that prevent us from knowing the real nature of the face that's peeking from behind those assorted carnival cutouts.

There is, in each one of us, a tension between our identification with a lower, individual self (we all want to be “somebody”) and the yearning for union with the true Self. We are at war with ourselves; we are a house divided; we are existentially schizophrenic.

And what is at stake in this internal struggle is our true happiness, our sense of fulfillment, and the end to the feelings of desperation, inadequacy, and victimization. One of the older Upanishads provides this metaphor:

Two birds, inseparable friends, perch on the same tree. One of them eats a tasty fig while the other looks on without eating. Sitting on that same tree, the lower, deluded self is overwhelmed by
the belief that he is a powerless victim and he despairs. When he sees the other, the beloved Master, and realizes that all greatness is his, then his despair vanishes.
²⁵

It is our own embrace of the personal, smaller, individual self—the bird that always needs another tasty fig to feel like a better somebody—that perpetuates our suffering and discontentment. And it is by knowing our true and universal self—the bird that is always satisfied and never feels the compulsion to be more or better—that we can end it.

And we will know this true self not
as ourselves
but in the blissful relief of
not having to be ourselves
, of finding the peaceful and ever-satisfied “beloved Master” within.

•  •  •

In the following pages of this book, we will survey the different battlegrounds where war is being waged between the “two birds perched on the same tree”—the ego or “somebody self” and the authentic “nobody self.” It is an inner conflict between our anxious striving to
be somebody
and our deepest feelings of contentment or “at-onement” that occur when we get back in touch with the stillness and the feeling of interconnectivity made possible only by
being nobody
.

Action Plan: Generating Compassion for the Suffering of Others

Take five or ten minutes each day to stop and reflect on the problems others are currently facing. Begin by thinking about your relatives and friends and the difficulties they are wrestling with in their lives. Generate what should be a natural sense of compassion for their
suffering and make a plan for something you could do to help relieve at least some of their pain.

Then have a look at the news of the day and reflect on what it must be like to be one of the millions of people who are currently in the midst of a major disaster. Try to overcome the tendency to let such news reports pass through the consciousness without touching the heart. These are people just like you, with the same desire to be happy and avoid pain, and they are currently experiencing a terrible catastrophe.

Resolve not to use current events as just another form of entertainment; rather, use them as a daily opportunity to generate empathy and a sense of connection to the suffering of others.

I.
 Cf. Eckhart Tolle's observation in
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
: “One of the most basic mind structures through which the ego comes into existence is identification. The word ‘identification' is derived from the Latin word
idem
, meaning ‘same,' and
facere
, which means ‘to make.' So when I identify with something, I ‘make it the same.' The same as what? The same as I. I endow it with a sense of self, and so it becomes part of my ‘identity' ” (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 35.

II.
 For these and other such examples—including the groupie who said of every rock star she'd slept with, “He's great, but he's no Mick Jagger,” until she finally did bed Mick Jagger. She then reported, “Great, but no Mick Jagger”—see Wendy Doniger's
The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was: Myths of Self-Imitation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

III.
 The other three “truths” are (1) that suffering is caused (and not by anyone or anything other than ourselves), (2) that there is an alternative to suffering, and (3) that there is a method for attaining the true happiness that is our birthright.

Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.

—Emily Bronte

A healthy sense of self is the necessary foundation for further spiritual progress. We're all unique individuals—everyone truly is a special snowflake—and we should all honor our own singular gifts and achievements.

But when self-affirmation tips over into self-importance and vanity—when that little “somebody self” birdie starts chirping a bit too loudly and arrogantly—it becomes another part of the problem rather than a step on the way to the solution.

Pride is a major weapon in the ego's arsenal; it is closely associated with the compulsion to
be somebody
. Taking overweening pride in some particular and temporary personal characteristic or adventitious circumstance in order to feel superior to other people—to be
more special than others
—is a fool's game. It seizes on something we think makes us truly special (one personal trait among many—beauty, youth, strength, intelligence, talent, or how much money one has, what one owns, or one's professional status or religious
affiliation) and absurdly elevates it above all other possibilities in order to make ourselves
supremely
special.

And if we set too much store by such fleeting and ephemeral phenomena, when they change or we lose them, we become devastated. Instead of taking pride in being somebody oh-so-exceptional, we crash hard, as this inflated sense of the special self is punctured and contracts.

Pride is universally identified in the world's religions as one of the biggest dangers for a spiritual practitioner; it often makes it onto the short list of vices. And what's most relevant at this juncture is that pride is the lifeblood of the “somebody self's” interest in feeling superior to others. As C. S. Lewis notes,

Now what you want to get clear is that Pride is
essentially
competitive—is competitive by its very nature—while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.
¹