Recently, I woke up in the middle of the night with a thought on my mind . I wrote it down:
"We start life as nothing, a nobody , yet we spend a lifetime chasing something to become somebody"
I often wonder why we have this drive to be a somebody. We are born a perfect nobody, with very little sense of being an independent self, we are free to be our true happy self. We are very comfortable in our nobodyness. We live in the present with no concept of past or future....free as a bird. Its interesting that most genuine spiritual teachings for thousands of years, encourage us to be as the little child, in order to enter a higher state of being. But, we are led to believe by our culture that we are not good enough, as is. We need to be educated, in order to become somebody. So, we enter somebody school and get trained to be a separate individual with a strong self identity. We are even admired by society and family for our independence, and separate sombodyness. The collective ego encourages us in our drive to become a somebody. But, unfortunately our capacity to love deeply with a unity or oneness with all, diminishes as we grow in this somebodyness. We may be successful from a world perspective, with all our achievements and attachments, but we have become separate from life as a whole. It leaves us with an underlying and often undetected emotion of fear with anxiety. There seems to be a never ending sense of lack with somebodyness.
So, to
the extent you identify with your somebodyness, there is fear.- Ram Dass
Gratitude and happiness comes easy for a nobody, who is content with
what is, having less grandiose ideals to live up to, then that of a somebody. A nobody cares
less about other peoples opinion of them and lives under less pressure to conform to what society considers normal.
We spend most of our lives striving for one thing after another, to become that special somebody. In this state we never get a complete satisfaction with life. We will never be good enough or have all the expectations met. It is a life of mental suffering. There will always be something missing in the fulfillment of our desires. We will need more and more, and we will be in a constant search for something to give us happiness and contentment.
As we mature we begin to realize that this formula for living is very shallow, and we get weary of the constant struggle and the suffering it causes in our lives. This way of life has evolved from an ancient multigenerational type of groupthink, a cultural collaborative insanity, that has been with us for thousands of years. It is like a house built on sand without a solid foundation or like a mini personal empire which is destined to eventual failure, caused by an internal structural dysfunction. When we finally wake up from this illusion, this dream, of the separate self, we begin to realize that to grow in spirit we actually need to become less of a somebody, and more like a contented nobody. When we realize this delusion and begin the long difficult process of diminishing the ego identity, disguised as an independent somebody, we can now have an increased capacity for joy, love, humility, gratitude and peace. We can now lose ourselves in the flow of life, much like the athlete who loses themselves in the action of the sport. When we lose our identity with the false finite self, we realize the way of truth, and we become one with 'Life', as it happens, in the moment, now. The realization of a universal infinite Self, with its Joy, love, peace and bliss are possible when we become the contented selfless nobody with nothing to prove and less need for gain. You are now ready to find the entry point to the gateless gate that leads to the fullness of life. You begin to realize that the greatest deception ever cast on humankind, the false belief of separation, with its guilt and fear was just illusory, and you can just enter in, to what appears in your perception as a whole new world of beauty, love and aliveness. This is the portal, the metaphorical wormhole to an opening, a glimpse of heaven while still in a body, here on earth. Heavens gate has no barrier, the only blockage is the thin veil of fake somebodyness , that was created by the personal ego self. Drop it and you are free.. enter in, through the portal, to liberation from suffering and the only salvation you will ever need.
Ram Dass, American spiritual teacher, former academic and clinical psychologist, and the author of the 1971 book
Be Here Now. sums up what I am trying to express here, very well in this excerpt below :
There’s
a great line from a wonderful teacher who died some years ago named
Kalu Rinpoche, a lovely Tibetan monk. He said, “We live in illusion, the
appearance of things, but there is a reality and we are that reality.
When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being
nothing, you are everything. That’s all there is.”
What happens to most of us, and I say
most
of us, is that when you and I were born, we were born into a
social-psychological world, a world with feelings and thoughts, that was
inhabited by people who were very identified with their separateness.
They were somebody. They were mummy or daddy. They were also this and
this and this and this, and they were all the different identities they
had, and they trained you about those realities, because those are the
realities that were real to them.
Let’s say you started out with
completely undifferentiated awareness, and then in the process of
socialization, you cultivated your cognitive capacities of this versus
that and all your conceptual models that are called your ego and ego
structure, and then you got caught in them. You got lost in them, so you
thought they were real. You got caught in your own creation, because
everything around you supported you becoming somebody. You went into
somebody training when you took birth, and you ended up somebody. I bet
you think you’re real. I really think you think you’ve got a personal
history; you think you’re going somewhere; you think you’ve got problems
and neuroses and hopes and relationships; it all sounds real doesn’t
it? …Boy were you taken for a ride.
Now, it’s not unreal; it’s
just relatively real. The predicament is, you bought into the planes of
reality that are all in time. That’s a problem because there’s at least
another plane where you’re One with it all, and no one is going
anywhere. There’s no time – it’s behind time. So there’s a part of you
that is not in time, even though the rest of you is in time, and you
bought into the part of you that’s in time, so you think time is
passing.
When you get caught in your somebodyness, you as a
separate entity, relative to the game of form, are pretty tiny. There
are galaxies, and you are pretty tiny, you know, and it’s kind of
frightening to have your awareness in something so small when everything
around you is big and so unpredictable, and you can’t control it. So to
the extent you identify with your somebodyness, there is fear. There is
fear of what changes, it turns out, because you can’t control it when
it changes. There’s fascination with it, but there’s fear in it. There’s
fear of death. That colors almost everything everybody does in a subtle
way, all the time. Wanting to leave something behind, wanting to get as
much out of the moment as you can because you are fleeting; feeling
you’re running out of time because there is too much to do.
– Ram Dass
For further reading on this subject here is a good one :
https://www.spiritualawakeningprocess.com/2013/08/be-nobody.html
