Be Nobody (9 page)

Excessively impressed with and attached to our sense of uniqueness and individuality, we distinguish ourselves from those over whom we tower. And with pride inevitably comes its twin sister: envy. We become jealous of and estranged from those who are
even more special
than we are (richer, smarter, better looking, more gifted or accomplished).

Feeling
too special
alienates us from others—from both those we suspect are above us and those we place below us. Our yearning to be somebody not only implicates us in the fear that we'll never be
somebody enough
; it also requires others to be
less of a somebody
than we are. With pride comes not only envy but prejudice.

It is not by further isolating and separating ourselves from others that we will find the genuine happiness we seek. True happiness will not come from feeling better than others any more than it will spring forth from envy and resentment toward those we feel are our betters. True happiness comes only through realizing what connects us to one another—the unity that lies beneath superficial differences.

Taking disproportionate pride in our individuality, we become enmeshed in judgment over those we deem inferior, thus further detaching ourselves from our fellow human beings. And most ironically, this attempt to feel better by ranking ourselves above others backfires and produces the exact opposite effect. For as we shall see in this chapter, it is pride that the spiritual traditions have identified as the main cause of low self-esteem.

What goes up must come down. When we take pride in whatever we latch onto in order to pose as someone superior to others, the result is that we become somebody who thinks of themselves as just a worthless nobody.

One of the many ways we attempt to define and distinguish ourselves—while also paradoxically trying to overcome the isolation and disconnection we abhor—is through identification with a group. We fabricate at least a part of our personal sense of identity by subsuming ourselves within a collectivity.

We describe and designate ourselves, at least to some degree, by hitching our personal wagons to some communal star:

“
I am
an American, Australian, Japanese, German”—identifying ourselves with our native or adopted nation.

“
I am
white, black, Asian, indigenous”—identifying ourselves with one of the (remarkably few, given human diversity and millennia of interbreeding) racial groupings.

“
I am
poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, or (more rarely and immodestly) stinking rich”—identifying ourselves with our economic status.

“
I am
a Democrat, Republican, progressive, democratic socialist, Green Party member”—identifying ourselves with our chosen political party.

We all have a strong desire to belong to something greater, to meld our unique little individual snowflake into a larger snowball.

When it comes to the dynamics behind group affiliation, we once more butt up against the internal civil war between the compulsive drive to
be somebody
and the craving for the release and freedom that comes from
being nobody
.

On the one hand, it seems that our desire to join a community is inspired by an innate drive to transcend the loneliness and isolation of singularity. And as such, it is certainly a positive thing. The impulse to connect with others, to identify with a group, seems to be a variant of the urge we all have to drop the obsession with individualism and lose ourselves in something greater. Our interest in associating our discrete, isolated lower selves with a nation, a race, an economic class, or a political party is, from this point of view, motivated by a kind of secular expression of our spiritual longing to drop being ourselves and
be nobody
through connection to a larger whole.

As we know from personal experience, it is exactly in those times when we discard the burden of self-consciousness and the
striving to be somebody that we feel a sense of relief, spaciousness, and fulfillment. And so it is that we can lose ourselves in a group, gaining a sense of belonging and camaraderie, which is all well and good . . . up to a point.

If we exaggerate the defining importance of any one of these group identities and take pride in our communal sense of self, we're asking for trouble. For each of them is a mere role we play (or have been given to play) in the game of life, and each is quite different from our essential and higher Self. If we focus monomaniacally on any one of these social personalities—elevating it to a supreme position, and then submerging the lower individual self into this collective identity—we have the complete formula for fanaticism and for a new kind of alienation from others.

Individual identification through the collecting and blending of various communal identities can at best only partly, and never essentially, define any of us. For an individual's connections with a set of groups is only a small component of what comprises that person. Each of us is much more (or, you might say, ultimately much less!) than the groups with which we are associated.

We are not wholly defined by being card-carrying members of one club or another, and when it comes to our true nature, our wallets are altogether empty of such nonessential credentials.

Our attempts to forge some kind of special individual identity through our memberships in larger social groupings are all just more carnival cutouts into which we stick our particular faces. In the great internal war that we discussed at the end of the last chapter, it seems as though identification through association is most often aligned with the “be somebody” side of things rather than the “be nobody” faction.

What over-identifying with one or another of our collective guises inevitably entails is not only being included in some group
but also
not
being included in others. Groups are defined negatively as well as positively: If I'm an Australian, it means I'm not a New Zealander; if I'm a Democrat, I'm certainly not a Republican.

For while the ego is immersed in and defined by the group, the group is in turn usually defined by who is excluded. And when we constitute membership in one or another of these collectivities as exclusive, separating out an “us” from a “them,” we obscure or even deny the deep commonalities we share with all other living beings.

We seek to overcome the pangs of loneliness and isolation and gain a sense of community in such group identifications. But if we overestimate them and give them overweening dominance in how we think of ourselves, we re-create the conditions for estrangement from and animosity toward others. Submersion of one's distinct individuality into a group identity can end up being just a repositioning of the will to be somebody.

And too often, being somebody requires that we
not
be somebody else
, and once again we find ourselves alienated from others.

It is especially ironic that religious identities have so often functioned to separate human beings into oppositional factions. As with our association with other groupings, identifying with and taking pride in one or another of the religious traditions—“
I am
a Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim,” or whatever—endows us with a sense both of belonging and of distinctiveness. But insofar as our connection to one or another of the organized and institutionalized religious “isms” is understood to preclude rather than enable our sense of a shared humanity, it has at least the same divisive, if not lethal, potential as national or political identities.

Living in an age when boundaries of all sorts are breaking down, traditional markers of religious identity are increasingly anachronistic. What really matters is not the particular group one adheres to, but rather the universally promoted spiritual message, which is one of tolerance, love, and respect for others, no matter what tribe they are a part of.

There was once a group of young Westerners who were visiting India back in the sixties, in the early days of the Tibetan exodus from Chinese persecution and the establishment of refugee communities in places like Dharamsala. The Dalai Lama at that time was not the famous international figure and Nobel Prize recipient he is today, and according to this anecdote the motley crew of European and American hippies walked right up to His Holiness's house and banged on his door.

And the Dalai Lama, as the story goes, came to the door and said, “Hello. What can I do for you?” and joined the Westerners on the verandah for a bit of a chat.

The discussion, as one might guess, turned to the topic of religion. One of the Westerners was quite adamantly antireligious and got into his host's face about it: “How can you in good conscience act as leader of a world religion? Religion has caused nothing but trouble throughout human history—it's been nothing but a source of violence, dissention, and animosity! How can you justify yourself?”

The Dalai Lama purportedly said this: “Religion is really not about vertically dividing ourselves into separate compartments like Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, Christian, Taoist, and the rest. Rather, it's better to draw the line horizontally. Those who practice religion, regardless of label, are pretty much all alike. And those who don't practice religion, whether formally affiliated or not, are also pretty much alike.”

So what unites all the real practitioners of religion, regardless of which (if any) of the world's faiths they adhere to? Surely the core
message of any authentic spiritual path is the cultivation of a universal love, leading to a sense of unity among all people, irrespective of differences in culture, race, economic standing, political belief . . . or formal religious affiliation (or the lack thereof). Those who are practicing religion (and this includes those who disavow formal association with any particular religion) are practicing being more expansive and inclusive in their love, compassion, empathy, and sense of interconnectedness with others. And those who aren't practicing the true intent of religion are in the business of creating more, not less, divisiveness and ill will among people—often very loudly!

Religion, it has been said, is like a swimming pool. A
ll the noise is coming from the shallow end
.

Back in my academic days, I once had the opportunity to join a group of students who were having lunch with one of the eminent scholars of comparative religion at the time, Wilfred Cantwell Smith. At some point in the conversation, Professor Smith was asked whether he was a Christian. The answer was quite memorable: “I can't really say. You'll have to ask those who know me—my family and friends.”

To be a real Christian (or Buddhist, Hindu, Jew, Taoist, and so on) means that you try to live like one. And surely that must include living a life guided by the universally extolled religious principles of kindness and love (not animosity and hatred) for others, and the cultivation of harmony and fraternity with (and not estrangement from and enmity toward) others.

If we want to claim
to be
a Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Taoist, and so on, we should try to act like one. And this will not involve trying to
be somebody
by means of exclusive religious branding, but rather will necessitate cultivating the willingness to
be nobody
through the practice of humility, universal brother- and sisterhood, and the abandonment of egoistical self-regard—even, or especially, when enveloped in a religious guise.

If we're too obsessed with our religious identity, we can lose sight of our responsibilities to our fellow human beings. We become so “heavenly minded” that we're “no earthly good,” as the Johnny Cash song would have it:

You're shinin' your light, and shine it you should

But you're so heavenly minded you're no earthly good.
²

Overweening pride of all sorts has disastrous consequences. If someone brags about standing, they surely will fall, as the Man in Black so aptly notes in the song. But there's no pride like spiritual pride. Taking undue self-satisfaction in our religious affiliation or, even worse, in our supposedly exceptional spiritual realizations, blinds us to the very thing a genuine path is supposed to lead to—the end of the clinging to the little, egoistic self, and the realization of our true universal nature and interconnection with all others. If we're too heavenly minded and proud, we're no earthly good at all.

It is easy to forget that learning to
be nobody
is both the ultimate goal of any authentic spiritual path and the royal road to true happiness. The very institution that throughout history has been responsible for transmitting this redemptive message has also repeatedly been usurped in order to subvert and invert the good news. Pride in one's religion has too often been used to shun those with beliefs that differ from one's own—to judge and condemn outsiders in order to extol and congratulate the insiders.

It is, of course, not just religious people who are proud and judgmental. This is yet another way in which we are alike—we
all have the tendency to be forever placing ourselves above and judging others. But it's sad to say that, when it comes to being judgmental and feeling superior, so-called religious people often seem to excel.

We do not become better and happier people by elevating ourselves over others or through judging.
Au contraire
. Judging destroys our wisdom, our forbearance, and our love and compassion, and leaves us just feeling smug and isolated.