Be Nobody (2 page)

Even in the United States, a country that is statistically much less disenchanted with institutionalized religion than most of Europe and other parts of the developed world, thirty-three million Americans now claim no formal religious association. According to a recent survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the “nones” (“none of the above,” the religiously nonaffiliated) are the fastest growing group in America—increasing by 25 percent in just the past five years—and they're the only demographic that is expanding in every state. And the numbers are largest among younger people. According to the poll, 30 percent of the “older millennials,” born between 1981 and 1989, are counted among the “nones”; among the “younger millennials”—those born between 1990 and 1994—34 percent are religiously unaffiliated.
⁴

Nonaffiliation with any particular religion does not necessarily mean a disinterest in living a spiritually oriented life. Sixty-eight percent of the “nones” in the United States say they believe in God,
while 37 percent describe themselves as “spiritual” but not “religious.” One in five said that they pray every day.
⁵
In Canada, according to a Forum Research poll, two-thirds of the population claim to be “spiritual” while only one-half say they are “religious.” But a quarter of those who say they adhere to “no religion” still profess a belief in God.
⁶

In addition to the religiously affiliated, the spiritual mongrels who have been shaped by several traditions, and the “nones” who prefer to remain religiously unidentified but spiritually alive, there is another category of those trying to live the good life in today's changed world. We can call them the “undos.”
^I

“Undos” are those of us who are trying to break free from the confines of religious labeling without jettisoning the helpful teachings and methods found in those traditions. Being an “undo” is not quite the same as being a “none.” Divesting oneself of a particular religious designation presumes that you have had one to begin with—that one has been trained in one or another of the world's spiritual traditions. To be an “undo,” a person must first have been a Hindu (or a Buddhist, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Sikh, or whatever). But having steeped him- or herself in this or that tradition, the “undo” chooses to drop the shell of religious identification in order to try just to be a good human being rather than an upstanding, card-carrying member of any one particular faith.

Whatever the label—affiliated, mongrel, none, or “undo”—growing numbers of people are seeking a meaningful existence outside the confines of the traditional religious identities associated with “that old-time religion.” In light of such trends, the Dalai Lama recently declared (on his Twitter stream, no less!) that he is “increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.”
⁷
In his recent book
Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World
, the Dalai
Lama outlines a program for how to live the good life that presumes “religion alone is no longer adequate” for the task:

One reason for this is that many people in the world no longer follow any particular religion. Another reason is that, as the peoples of the world become ever more closely interconnected in an age of globalization and in multicultural societies, ethics based on any one religion would only appeal to some of us; it would not be meaningful for all. . . . What we need today is an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without: a secular ethics.
⁸

Living an ethical life—a life of selflessness rather than unbridled egoism, of integration and interconnection rather than alienation and myopic narcissism—is not just for those who choose to follow one or another of the established religions. It is the key to true happiness for any individual, and the foundation for creating a better world. For “when you have ‘isms,' ” as Lama Surya Das once said to me, “you have schisms.”

Too often, however, the identification with one or another of the institutionalized religions has become just another excuse to rehearse the need to
be somebody
in the ego's never-ending appetite for self-aggrandizement. When, in truth, the founders of the different religions of humankind become founders only retroactively. They weren't teaching “isms,” they were only conveying their understanding of life, of
what is
.

And if there's one thing we know about the great spiritual exemplars of history, it's that they were humble. We don't admire and canonize people who pose as self-important and superior. There is no “Saint Barry the Arrogant” or “Saint Tricia the Pompous.” Our
paragons of the past, as well as the present, are those who seem truly willing to
be nobody
, to be the servants, not the masters, of others.

The point is not to be a Buddhist but to learn how to become a Buddha; not just to identify with the label “Christian” but to live a Christlike life; not simply to join a religion as a way to strengthen one's sense of self but to actually live a good life, a life characterized by egoless concern for others.

“I am not a Hindu, nor a Muslim am I!” declared the fifteenth-century Indian mystic Kabir. “I am this body, a play of five elements; a drama of the spirit, dancing with joy and sorrow.”
⁹
Saint Paul similarly asserted in Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
¹⁰
The Buddha, it is said, “did not teach any religion at all.”
^II
The practice of any spiritual path—whether or not it is designated as such by one or another of the usual trademarks—should lead not toward the elevation of the ego but rather to the self-negation and destruction of vanity that's entailed in
being nobody
.

What? Be nobody? I've spent my whole life trying not to be just a nobody!

Before you throw this book off the nearest bridge, let's be clear about our terms. First off, there is a difference between the egoistic “somebody self” who regards itself as worthless—a nothing, a complete zilch—and
being nobody
. The latter does not refer to our sense of personal, individual identity that can and should be improved—especially if it is insistent on its worthlessness. Somebody who
thinks
they're a nobody is self-consciously defining themselves as such, whereas somebody who has
become
nobody is unselfconsciously absorbed in something much greater.

“Nobody,” as we use the term here, refers to our deepest nature, our “true self,” which is ever-present and in no need of improvement. It is our highest source of joy and strength, the eternal reservoir of peace and contentment to which we repair in order to silence the persistent demands and complaints of the insatiable ego.

Letting go of our preoccupation with being important and significant will not be easy. Laboring at being somebody for so long digs deep ruts of habit, and some ingrained part of us will surely resist the required “ego-ectomy.” But there's a great relief in dropping the ego's restrictive inhibitions and demands for affirmation and magnification. We know this instinctually, and we crave such relief. Our deepest need is to identify not with something small and particular but with that which is greater, universal, and transcendent.

With the rise and vapidity of social networking and “reality” television, the veneration of the ego, celebrity, and instant fame, and the closed-minded arrogance of religious fundamentalism and fanaticism, the questions revolving around the nexus of spirituality and identity have never been more pressing, even as the quest for authenticity and genuine happiness remains perennial.

We all have the capability to be completely self-possessed and truly happy rather than neurotically self-obsessed and continuously discontented. We all have the potential to be the ocean and not just a wave, the clear blue sky and not merely a cloud passing through, the silence and not some particular name or label.

So before you burn this book or toss it in the can—
This is complete rubbish! Nonsense! I really am somebody, and the meaning of life is to be more of a somebody, not less!
—give that “somebody self” a bit of a rest and see if there isn't something to all this. If we lay aside our knee-jerk resistance, we'll soon realize that the happiness and self-satisfaction we all seek cannot be found through perpetually attempting to supersize our insatiable egos.

They say that nobody's perfect.

So why not be nobody?

I.
 My use of the term “undo” is inspired by Swami Satchidananda, who writes the following in his book
Beyond Words
: “People often ask me, ‘What religion are you? You talk about the Bible, Koran, Torah. Are you a Hindu?' I say, ‘I am not a Catholic, a Buddhist, or a Hindu, but an Undo. My religion is Undoism. We have done enough damage. We have to stop doing any more and simply undo the damage we have already done.' ” (Yogaville, CA: Integral Yoga Publications, 1977), 85.

II.
 In chapter 13 of the world's oldest printed book, the
Diamond Cutter Sutra
, the Buddha asks one of his disciples, Subhuti, this provocative question: “What do you think, Subhuti? Has the Buddha taught any religion at all?” We imagine that good old Subhuti might very well have suspected this was some sort of joke, maybe a trick question. (
What the hell, man? Why are you asking me this? What else have you been doing for all these years here in northern India except for teaching us religion? You weren't instructing us in better agricultural methods or how to yodel, now were you?
) Instead, Subhuti gives the right answer: “No, Lord. The Buddha has not taught any religion at all.” In the passage cited here, the word I've rendered as “religion” is
dharma
—admittedly not exact, but probably as close to our concept of “religion” as one gets in the Sanskrit texts. A very similar assertion is found in Nagarjuna's
Root Verses on the Middle Way
: “Peace is the pacification of all perception and all conceptualization. No religion (
dharma
) whatsoever was ever taught by the Buddha.” (24–25).

Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it mean having a low opinion of your own gifts. It means freedom from thinking about yourself at all.

——William Temple

W
e're all desperately trying to be somebody. No one wants to be a loser, a small fry, a big zero, a washout, a nonentity. Nobody, it seems, wants to be just a nobody.

We're all en masse, and in pretty much the same ways, struggling to be unique individuals. This obsessive quest for distinctive identity drives us all equally, for we all believe that happiness and fulfillment will come through distinguishing ourselves, through being “special.” Our contemporary culture of consumerism, materialism, narcissism, and the worship of fame encourages the idea that we will be happy only when we become exceptional.

But maybe we've got it wrong—exactly wrong.

Maybe our deepest and most authentic happiness will be found only when we finally lay down this heavy burden of trying to be a somebody, of perpetual ego-enhancement and compulsive self-consciousness. Perhaps it is precisely in a state of egolessness, in
an utter lack of self-preoccupation, that we will actually become nobody and thereby access something much larger, much more amorphous and less exclusive.

Maybe true fulfillment in life requires an emptying, not a filling.

Selfishness and self-indulgence have always been with us. For thousands of years, the sacred texts of the world's great religious traditions have warned us of the danger of inordinate preoccupation with ourselves, just as they have also provided the most potent tools we have for overcoming it.

But arguably, over the past few decades, at least in the so-called developed nations, we've seen a dramatic rise in—and a cultural validation of—an all-too-human tendency toward self-indulgence. Now more than ever before, we seem to be increasingly preoccupied with “me”—so much so that it seems no exaggeration to describe the whole zeitgeist as an obsession with the self. This excessive self-concern, now pervading virtually every aspect of our lives, is an example—perhaps even the most salient example—of a real “First World problem.”

More than thirty-five years ago, journalist Tom Wolfe dubbed the seventies the “Me Decade.”
¹
The social and political concerns and upheaval of the sixties had given way to a culture of individual self-centeredness. And in 1979—at the tail end of this decade of self-preoccupation—Christopher Lasch published
The Culture of Narcissism
, a scathing critique of “the culture of competitive individualism, which in its decadence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.” Lasch's book remains one of the most accurate portraits of the world we still inhabit.
²

Lasch argues that every age produces a typical personality structure that accords with that particular society's characteristic patterns. “Every society reproduces its culture—its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing experience—in the form of personality.”
³
And the personality definitive of our time and culture, Lasch identified as “narcissistic”: