Does Being Somebody Special Bring Happiness?
So much of life is about being somebody special—creating a persona that others will like so that they (someone, please) will love the beautifully constructed avatar we have meticulously created. Krishnamurti once said, “The ego is a ring of defense around nothing.”
I was thinking about how my sense of self began. When we were babies, we cried out for someone to feed us or change the warm, squishy poop in our diapers. We had real physical survival needs and relied on someone to help us. Then, at some point, we started to observe and mimic the psychological reactions of our caregivers. If we did something ‘bad,’ it was met with a frown, scolding, or smack. If we did something ‘good,’ the response was a smile, kiss, or positive affirmation. This was the beginning of being somebody.
In school, we were rewarded for the right answer and the correct behavior. Broken people and a broken system molded us. We learned to cognitively maneuver toward a desire to get a positive response from our environment and push our real feelings into the shadows of our subconscious. I pushed my feelings into a bottomless well inside myself, and I’m still pulling up the bucket of my heart. Plant medicine has helped me pull up the bucket.
Mostly, I followed the rules and did what my parents and teachers expected of me. I started to rebel when the tension inside became too much to bear. I wanted to test the boundaries and feel what was on the other side of being ‘good.’
I had no idea who I was, but I knew I needed to stop being what others wanted me to be. Understanding that I was being somebody else’s version of myself was the first step toward breaking the chains of my secondhand life. This was my first step toward knowing myself in a long journey that continues to unfold. It’s a rocky ride with twists and turns, two steps forward and one backward.
I traded one avatar for another—surfer, lover, entrepreneur, psychonaut, musician, author, poet, partner, friend—the list goes on. Deep down inside, who am I? When everything is stripped away, what remains? Could I be absolutely nothing, as Krishnamurti suggests?
Being Somebody with Meditation
I frequently sit with the Sam Harris meditation app Waking Up. There is this exercise where he snaps his fingers and asks us to find the person doing the looking—my answer is always, ‘Right here, Sam.’ I know the correct answer is that there is no center to consciousness, and nobody is looking, but I can’t seem to get there. Occasionally, in moments of silence, I glimpse what this calmness and peace feel like. However, I mostly wait to catch Sam’s snap, like an echolocation device, as my thoughts swirl in anticipation.
Somehow, the heart feels like the key to unlock this puzzle. It definitely can’t be through the doorway of the mind. I keep reading about linking the two—heart and mind—but making that connection feels like a superpower. It is elusive and mysterious. I think being nothing has much to do with the heart and love—unconditional love, specifically, another superpower. Jesus got this one right; his entire message is about love at its core.
Is Being Nothing Everything?
They say that being nothing is everything. I’ve heard this my entire life from various sources and teachers. In Buddhism, it is called sunyata, or the voidness that permeates everything. Jesus said in Galatians, “For if a man thinks himself to be something when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself.” Shiva, my latest fascination in the Vedanta lineage, “is the nothingness from which everything has come.”
So here I am, surrendering to my limited access to superpowers and praying for my next glimpse of the divine nothingness that is everything. I continue to explore how to drop into my heart, searching for that key to unlock my superpowers. It seems counterproductive to look for a superpower to nothingness. I have a desire to be unique. I continue to look for conditional and unconditional love as I forage through the jungle of my heart. My soul roars at the possibility of nothingness.
