Be Nobody (19 page)

Regret, on the other hand, is the acknowledgment that giving in to the mental afflictions hurts oneself and others. Regret always entails the resolve to try harder not to do that kind of thing again in the future. While guilt debilitates, regret inspires us to strengthen our willpower to become stronger and better prepared for the next confrontation.

And a third defensive tack: we (once again) de-identify with whatever mental affliction has temporarily defeated us. We don't join enemy forces; we don't surrender to the provisionally victorious affliction and become its prisoner of war.

Even Shantideva, Mr. “Be a Spiritual Warrior,” knows we won't always win the battle with our bad habits. And so we read,

Whenever you fail, your cheeks should burn in humiliation and you should think: “What can I do so that this doesn't happen to me again?”
¹⁵

When you fall off the horse, you dust yourself off and get back up on it for the next ride. This is called “practice.” We renew our
efforts and strengthen our will. And this is the only road, rocky as it may sometimes be, to real self-improvement.

Remember the “reality mantra”:

Om, it's like this now, ah hum.

Given that this mantra is perpetually relevant, we can deploy it also in those times of failure:

It's like this now. So what can I do now to avoid future defeat at the hands of my mental afflictions?

There is a very helpful spiritual maxim—perhaps the most effective of all the tools we can employ in our laborious undertaking of self-improvement:

If you can't do it for yourself, then do it for others.

There's a tremendous power in altruism. I'm reminded here of news stories that tell of a small child pinned under a car. The child's mother, filled with adrenaline due to her panic and desperate wish to rescue her beloved offspring, just lifts up the car by the bumper, snatches the kid out of harm's way, and then drops the two tons of steel back on the ground.

In the next section of this book, we'll learn more about both the power and joy of self-forgetfulness. But even in our quest for self-improvement, thinking about others and not just ourselves is ultimately our greatest resource.

Creating a better “somebody self” involves understanding how karma really works in order to gradually give one's self-image a makeover. And our self-conception begins to change immediately upon making the shift from ignorant self-indulgence to informed self-rehabilitation. We start to think of ourselves as someone trying to be a
better
somebody rather than as someone addicted to becoming
more
of a somebody. We begin turning our attention to others and how we can help rather than hurt them.

We focus on our ethical behavior and wage war against our mental afflictions, our true enemies who both destroy our current happiness and plant the seeds for an unhappy “somebody self” in the future. We hone and deploy the weapons of recognition, understanding, de-identification, and determination in our internal battle with our demons, and we do not get discouraged with the setbacks and failures that will inevitably be part of our path. We remember our mantra—
it's like this now
—and we play the hand we've been dealt with wisdom and skill, remembering that self-improvement is possible and knowing how it will be effectuated.

We try to play our cards smartly, but we should also recognize that the stakes are high. We are in every moment creating the causes for who we will be in the future. For our future happiness, or its opposite, depends on what we do, say, or think in the ongoing present.

But here's the real rub. Here's how high the stakes really are. Your world, and all the people in it, will change when you change.

Change you, change the world.

•  •  •

This, I fully acknowledge, is extremely hard for any of us to believe. It is virtually inconceivable to think that we as individuals have
this kind of power, as it is sort of overwhelming to be laden with this kind of heavy responsibility.

It's one thing to think that we can change and improve ourselves. While most of us assume this is possible, it seems far-fetched indeed that there's any correlation between an inner transformation and a change in the outer world.

But what we make of our lives has repercussions far beyond what we ordinarily believe. What we do, say, and think defines not only who we are but also what kind of world we live in and what sort of people we encounter. If we truly wish to help others and create a better world, helping ourselves turns out to be the best way to do that.

And if we are to come to actually believe this, we'll have to very carefully go through the logic for why this is so, and we'll have to repeatedly rehearse the syllogism.

Ready?

None of us has an objective view of our external world.

When we aren't actually thinking about it, we all feel that we see things, events, and people
as they really are
. But this is an illusion, another trick of the egoistic self. Nobody has a “God's eye” view on reality.

If we're honest with ourselves, we can't help but admit that we are human beings and not digital cameras or recorders. And as humans, we're not like detective Joe Friday in
Dragnet
, who gathers “just the facts, ma'am.” None of us is privy to “just the facts”; we're only privy to what we
think
“the facts” are.

And as psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes, “How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences.”
¹⁶

Since none of us has an objective take on things, each of us necessarily has only a subjective view of the external world.

Because we're not machines but living organisms called “people,” our respective perceptions of the world, events, and other people come from a subjective, and not an objective, perspective.

Put otherwise, all the data received by our senses is strained through our subjective filter. We don't see, hear, feel, taste, or touch the outside world in an unmediated fashion. We
interpret
what we experience in order to experience it.

And the way we interpret things, events, and people is determined by our conditioning, by our karma. There are a multitude of factors that constitute the subjective filter through which all the external data must pass in order to be comprehended. The language we speak and the linguistic categories with which we think, the cultural and historical conditioning and assumptions of our place and time—these form one part of the subjective filter. But additionally there are even more individual factors, such as our personal history, the ideology or belief system we adhere to, our psychological make-up, even how we are feeling on any particular day, and the prejudices and biases that derive from and are shaped by all of these conditions.

The “subjective filter” is really just another name for what we've been calling the “somebody self.” And so it is that we see the world not
as it is
but
as we are
.

If you change your subjective perspective, you change your experience of the external world.

If you accept the above two premises, then here is the first of the necessary logical conclusions: when you change your interpretive lens, you change your perceptions. Change you, and you'll change your viewpoint on external events and other people.

We all have experience of this. One day you wake up on the “right side of the bed” and the world looks pretty good—you're relatively happy with your life and the people in it. But the next day, when you wake up on the “wrong side of the bed,” that same world takes on a different hue.

George Eliot wrote, “Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.”
¹⁷
Our “somebody self” blocks out much of the range of possibility and permits us to see only a fragment of potential reality. But when we alter the “troublesome speck of the self,” we gain a different perspective on the world around us.

So self-improvement improves not only your sense of who you are, but it also cleans the filter through which you process what's outside of you. When you feel better about yourself, the world and other people seem more approachable and less problematic.

As we've seen, the individual self is nothing other than the sum total of our karma. When we change our karma, we change our sense of self, and thereby also change the subjective filter through which we apprehend the world.

OK so far?

If you have followed me through these first three steps of the reasoning, then here comes the real kicker.

If you change your subjective perspective, you change the world.

Wait a minute! What happened? That couldn't be. I've been tricked!

No, you've just followed the logic of the syllogism. Since none of us has an objective view of the external world, and since all of us only
experience the world from our subjective perspective, if we change our subjective perspective, we change our perspective on the world.

And the world seen from the subjective perspective is
the only knowable world there ever has been, is, or will be for any of us
. So we might as well just call it “the world.”

Change you, change the world.

Get it? No? Review the steps. We all need to work through it over and over again. Because if we have even an inkling of how self-improvement goes hand in hand with the amelioration of the world we live in, it will supercharge our efforts to better ourselves.

The stakes are high when it comes to self-improvement. And so, once again, when the going gets tough—when the Big Smackdown with the mental afflictions seems too daunting—remember the maxim:

If you can't do it for yourself, do it for others.

Action Plan: The Daily Rage in the Cage

Single out your worst negative emotion, your number-one mental affliction. (If you need some help, ask someone who knows you well; they'll tell you!) Begin your own daily Rage in the Cage with the affliction, employing the techniques we've discussed in this chapter—recognition, understanding, de-identification, and determination. Don't be discouraged when the negative emotion wins the Smackdown. Review the defensive strategies above, and get back into the ring for the next round!

And remember, your indulgence of the mental affliction is not making the lives of those around you more pleasant. Take strength in your consideration for their well-being.
If you can't do it for yourself, do it for other
s.

I.
 I believe this mantra—at least the “it's like this now” part—originates with Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, although he may have gotten it from someone else too.

Whatever suffering there is in the world comes from the selfish desire for happiness.

Whatever happiness there is in the world comes from the desire for the happiness of others.

——Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life

Any task is easier if it's done selflessly rather than egotistically, and that very much includes the big life project of improving the “somebody self”—and thereby improving the world we live in.

The means to real self-improvement is, paradoxical as it might seem to the controlling, Captain Kirk self, a function of self-forgetting. We are happiest when we leave off assessing and evaluating our own relative happiness and become absorbed in something or someone other than ourselves.

In this section, we will examine two interrelated techniques for discovering more of the joy and fulfillment that
being nobody
can bring to our lives. Both methods involve losing the “somebody self”—either by fully engaging in unselfconscious action (that's in the next chapter) or, as we'll see here, by freeing the ego from its endless itching through empathetically thinking about someone else and their wants and needs.

It is not through incessant self-consciousness but rather through dissolving ourselves in something or someone other than ourselves that we access the greatest source of transformational power we have available. It is when we can
drop the demands of the “somebody self” and be available for others
that we create the karma for improving our self-conception and the quality of life we lead.

Karmic regulation, far from being just another method for ego-enhancement, is the only effective method of self-help. And at the very heart and soul of self-improvement through karmic management is t
he ability to put others and their interests first
. Contrary to our usual unenlightened beliefs,
the best thing we can do for ourselves
is to consider how we can help others.