Be Nobody (12 page)

I.
 The five aggregates that comprise the basis for our sense of self are the physical body, the ability to discriminate, consciousness, feelings, and mental imprints.

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Exactly.

——Author unknown

Beneath it all, it is only true contentment—the glorious sensation of being utterly free, unencumbered, and relaxed—that we all desire. The goals depicted in many religions reflect this understanding of what we are shooting for:
moksha
or
mukti
(both meaning “liberation”) in Hinduism;
nirvana
(the great “extinguishing” or “sigh of relief” as one becomes free of all troubling thoughts and feelings) in Buddhism; the dropping of the old self and being “born again” into Christ; the release that comes from following God's will and law in Judaism and Islam.

We all want to be free. So what, exactly, are the chains that bind us? What is the nature of the prison that we feel encloses us?

Being free isn't just a matter of doing, saying, or thinking anything that comes into your head. That much should be obvious to anyone who has lived more than a few years in the company of other humans. We've tried that version of “freedom” over and over and over again, to no avail. Whenever some strong impulse arises, unless
thwarted by fear of reprisal (or jail!), we usually just give in to it, consequences be damned! We yell back at those who yell at us, try to hurt those who hurt us, plot our revenge when we feel betrayed . . . just because we “feel like it.”

Until we have thoroughly trained ourselves, we are enslaved by our negative emotions, our mental afflictions. When anger, jealousy, pride, or lust raise their nasty little heads, we are usually rendered helpless in their thrall. Worse yet, we stick our head into the carnival cutouts of these irrational feelings and say, “
I am
angry!
I am
depressed!
I am
jealous!”

Among the large array of mental afflictions that plague and tyrannize us (the Buddha said we have 84,000 of them!), two lie at the root of our unhappiness and imprisonment.

They are desire and ignorance.

“Desire” here really means perpetual dissatisfaction—with what we have, with the life we are leading, and with who we are. It's like when we have an itchy mosquito bite. We scratch the itch, hoping that by doing so it won't itch anymore.

We're slaves to our itches, and that's one very important way in which we are not free. We get a hankering for a new iPhone and the itch begins:
If only I had the new iPhone! You know, the one with that little computer voice named Siri that talks to you? Then I'd be happy
. Or one or another of the myriad versions of the itch:
If only that girl would pay attention to me. If only I had a better job. If only I were rich, famous, popular
.

I
,
I
,
I
and
if only
,
if only
—the repetitive call of incessant yearning and discontent, the “somebody self” always wanting more.

And so we try scratching. We save our money for the iPhone, or try to get the phone number from the beautiful babe or stud-muffin dude, or apply for a different job, or try to be more (more wealthy, more famous, more popular, more attractive) of a somebody.

And every time we scratch, it's in the hope that there won't be any more itches.

We all know what happens next. It's just like those pesky mosquito bites—the more you scratch them, the more irresistibly the itch returns. The relief is at best temporary, and then after a brief respite the desire comes roaring back, more demanding than ever.

And so freedom, we could say, is nothing more than the exalted state of
itchlessness
—being satisfied with everything we have, with “nothing left to lose,” as Janis Joplin says in her famous song, and nothing more to gain.

The liberation we seek with all our scratching consists of simply not being beset with new and improved itches all the time. This is called by another name: “contentment,” and it is what we hope to attain with every attempt to satisfy our desires. We hope that, by fulfilling this particular craving, we won't want anything more. We hope that each scratch will be the last one; that finally, with this one last scrape, we'll be satisfied.

Maybe there's more than just contentment at the end of our spiritual journey. Maybe there's heaven or a Pure Land with all kinds of rainbows in the sky and unicorns bounding about. And maybe we'll all be angels, blissfully flapping around with supernatural abilities and X-Men superpowers. I can't, in all honesty, say with any certainty that there won't be.

But I do know this: If we shoot for contentment—the Great Itchlessness—it won't matter one way or the other. Once we become content, it will be impossible to be discontented with our lives and ourselves—with or without streets paved with gold and divine bodies made of beautiful light. It's win-win when it comes to contentment! If there's more in addition to that, great; and if there's not, well, that will be OK too,
because we'll be content
!

And, of course, all this itching and scratching is in the service of
being somebody
. We believe that status and personal fulfillment will come through scratching, through obtaining something we don't already have or more (or less) of what we already possess.

This would be far more understandable if we were lacking the necessities of life. But for readers of this book, I'll wager, it's not for want of proper food or shelter or clothing, nor for lack of education or opportunities to make a decent living, nor due to the absence of friends and loved ones that we remain discontented with our lives.

We aren't among the three billion people living on two dollars and fifty cents a day or less, nor are we among the 80 percent of the earth's population subsisting on less than ten dollars a day, nor among the one billion fellow human beings dwelling in slums, nor among a similar number who remain illiterate.
¹

What we really desire is the freedom from endless desires, especially when we already have so much. It's liberation from our incessant whining about how we don't have enough or aren't somebody enough. As for the first, when it comes to wealth, consumer goods, leisure time, access to education and information—the nuts and bolts of the good life—there's really no excuse for folks like us. We're just forgetting the basic facts of our lives; we're just spacing out. Say the mantra:

Om, I have enough, ah hum!

Our problems—our itches—are “First World problems,” which hardly deserve the name “problems” at all. Since our “problems,” when it comes to what we own and the material lives we lead, are of such an entirely different order than what others face, we do have a real shot at being content with the material circumstances of our lives.

But when it comes to what is termed “self-fulfillment,” well, that, you might say, is a different kettle of fish.

So now let us turn to the second of our two great mental afflictions: ignorance. As we shall see, there is a fundamental misunderstanding when it comes to who we think we are, and it lies at the heart of our problems.

In the Eastern spiritual traditions, ignorance performs the same quintessential role, when it comes to our unhappiness, that disobedience plays in the West. Readers brought up in Western societies all know the story: In the beginning, everything was jake. Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden and swung in hammocks all day long. When they got hungry, they would leisurely pick fruit from the trees that God had generously provided for them. But there was one tree whose fruit God commanded them not to eat. And we know how the story goes from there: of course, they perversely did the one thing they were told not to do, and the rest is history. Adam and Eve were cursed, and they were thrown out of the Garden to fend for themselves. And so, according to the myth, our tale of woe begins.
^I

In the religious traditions stemming from India, it is ignorance, not insubordination to God's will, that's at the root of our problems. And in these Eastern traditions, there's usually no myth of origins offered to show how ignorance came into our lives.
^II
Ignorance has been with us since time with no beginning, and each of us is simply born with it. It's a standard-issue part of the makeup for us as human beings (not to mention other life-forms).

Because of this ignorance, we make fundamental mistakes about who we are and how to live a good life. We really don't get it when
it comes to what's what. And because we don't get it, we're really in for it!

Ignorance (
avidya
in Sanskrit) is not so much
not knowing
as it is
mis-knowing
. Our minds invert things; we mistakenly think things are one way when actually they are another. In the ancient Yoga Sutra, ignorance is (and this is the norm in South Asian scriptures) said to be the “field” or “breeding ground” in which all the other mental afflictions grow. As long as the “root” of these negative emotions remains uncut, we will continue to suffer through life instead of finding true happiness.
²

The Yoga Sutra's definition of this Mother of All Mental Afflictions is interesting and comprehensive:

Ignorance is the belief that what is impermanent is permanent, what is impure is pure, what will bring suffering will bring happiness, and what is without an essence has an essence.
³

This is, I know, quite a mouthful. But it does, I promise you, have direct bearing on both the real cause of our unhappiness and the disastrously wrong view we have about our individual identity.

So let's look carefully at what is meant by each of these four ways in which ignorance works to turn things upside down in our lives:

1. We believe what is impermanent to be permanent.

Does this ever happen to us, do you think? All the time! We are perpetually thrown for a loop when impermanent things, things we thought wouldn't change, actually do change—or else don't change precisely the way we wanted them to.

Our relationships, our financial situation, our jobs, our possessions, our very bodies and thoughts and feelings—everything in our
lives is transitory and fleeting. When our partners change (“Don't go changing,” sings Billy Joel—but how can any of us not?); when our once-operative computer freezes up; when the boss suddenly alters our job description; when we get depressed, sick, old, or die—what is it but impermanence smacking us upside the head?
Wake up! Did you think this would last forever?

No
, you might protest,
I know that things and people change. But I wanted them to go this way and instead they changed that way!
Well, welcome to reality. We can't govern the specifics of how external things and other people will change any more than we can magically stop change from occurring at all.

We'll return below to the fantasy of the “controlling self,” that ignorant sense that we can, in the moment, micromanage our lives and the events and people in them to suit our own whims. But here's the point:
change is
, and the exact direction of how things change is not within our control. Thinking that changing things won't change, or believing that we can decree the precise direction in which change will occur, sets us up for a big fall when reality makes its presence known.

2. We believe what is impure to be pure.

The classic example of this misunderstanding involves the way we normally think about the human body. We sometimes, in our vanity, admire our own body for its good looks; even more often, we lust after the attractive, “pure” bodies of others.

But beauty, as they say, is only skin-deep, and really it's not even that. Even at skin level, up close and personal, we're all pretty much the same, and it's not that fetching. The epidermis of you, me, Angelina Jolie, and Johnny Depp is equally hairy, pocked, flaky, and mole-, pimple-, and freckle-marked.

And when we go subterranean, deeper than skin-deep, well, it's sort of a horror show, isn't it? One Buddhist text describes this “pure” body we're so enamored of as a bundle of “hair, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, marrow, kidney, heart, liver, membranes, spleen, lungs, stomach, bowels, intestines, excrement, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, serum, saliva, mucus, synovial fluid [whatever that is—we probably don't want to know!], and urine.”
⁴