On Becoming Nobody

The PATH | Potential, Surrender, and Forgetting Yourself

Welcome to The PATH (Monday Meditation) — A weekly reflection with three timeless insights for daily life. This week’s reflection searches for ancient lessons for modern living On Becoming Nobody.

Self-portrait. The night wanderer by Edvard Munch (1923)

1. Potential

What is your potential? It may sound obvious or an unimportant to ask. In my experience, we tend to place limits on what is possible. "Believe it or not," observed the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, "this can be your reality, to be loved unconditionally, and to begin to become that love."

Regarding the realization of potential, Ram Dass advised,

"Don’t treat yourself so gingerly; you can let go of stuff. Sometimes it takes three breaths instead of two to do it, but you can do it. Be a little tougher, and don’t cling to stuff. People go around carrying everybody’s stuff all of the time. I just pick it up and put it down. Pick it up and put it down. That doesn’t mean I’m not compassionate, it doesn’t mean I don’t love people. But holding onto people’s suffering is not compassionate… for them or for you."

Believing in ourselves is a highly individualized endeavor. Just as no one can walk the path for us, no one can force us to believe in our own possibilities. "I can do nothing for you but work on myself...you can do nothing for me but work on yourself," stressed Ram Dass.

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2. Surrender

The idea of the path (the title of our Monday meditations) is that we are embarking on a journey to nowhere and one that will never be complete. At first, that might sound uninspiring or a little strange. Put in the context of projects with no end it makes sense: a virtuous person, a good parent, or a loving friend. These types of goals have no completion dates — they are an infinite path.

Ram Dass put it this way,

"Early in the journey, you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is here, and you will arrive now... so you stop asking."

The whole point is simply walking the path and not worrying about the outcome. As Krishna explains to Arjuna in the classic spiritual text, The Bhagavad Gita. The translator Stephen Mitchell writes, "You have a right to your actions, but never to your actions’ fruits. Act for the action’s sake."

According to Mitchell,

"Any genuine path will, with sincere practice, result in a gradual, deepening surrender of selfishness into the ultimate reality that the Gita calls the Self. Just as our primordial craving leads to all the manifold forms of our misery, letting go of our ideas about reality and our desires for particular results leads to freedom."

The notion of surrender also applies to our desires and aversions of how we think things ought to be. Ram Dass suggested that as long as we have specific desires of how things ought to be, we cannot see things as they actually are. In the classic, Polishing the Mirror, Ram Dass wrote,

When somebody provokes your anger, the only reason you get angry is because you’re holding on to how you think something is supposed to be. You’re denying how it is. Then you see it’s the expectations of your own mind that are creating your own hell. When you get frustrated because something isn’t the way you thought it would be, examine the way you thought, not just the thing that frustrates you. You’ll see that a lot of your emotional suffering is created by your models of how you think the universe should be and your inability to allow it to be as it is.

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3. Forgetting Yourself

"The game is not about becoming somebody," said Ram Dass, "it's about becoming nobody." Similarly, a thousand years before Ram Dass, the philosopher and Zen Master Dogen wrote,

To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things. To be enlightened by all things is to drop off our own body and mind, and to drop off the bodies and minds of others. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.

According to Ram Dass (and many others), we must live with the paradox that opposite things can simultaneously be true. However, the project is not about becoming somebody. It does not mean we are not individual “persons” with separate and unique social security numbers, for example.

In the documentary, Becoming Nobody, Ram Dass explains that we all affect the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter because we're so deeply interconnected with one another. Working on our consciousness is the most important thing we are doing at any moment, and being "love" is the supreme creative act.

To quote Ram Dass, "This path of love doesn’t go anywhere. It just brings you more here, into the present moment, into the reality of who you already are."

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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.

Until next time, be wise and be well,