We continue to discuss our identities with today’s post, and as we move into the meat of Act 2, I want you to focus on how you see yourself in today’s western civilization, and contemplate on how you can use that information to calm your thoughts and embrace your life regardless of where you’re at on the spectrum of societal standing.
Understanding what we are is a very important step to take because if we don’t know what we are then we can’t know how to dismantle our ego and remove it from our bodies and our thoughts. Our bodies are the same material as everything else, it all comes from stardust, and it will all go back into stardust at some point, but for now, that material has a form, and you associate your identify with that form.
This is alright, because our society was formed in this manner, but again, knowing is the difference, and knowing is how you evoke power over anxiety. This idea holds true regardless of where you’re at on society’s ladder; whether you’re a janitor at a elementary school, a CEO running a fortune 100 company, or somewhere in between. All of those people, including you and me, are made up from the same temporary cosmic material.
Oftentimes, people let their positions of power or achievement go to their heads. We see it time and time again when someone ascends to these platforms of ‘significance‘ (deemed significant by society, not actually significant), they sometimes let their ego get the better of them. People can change, they grow power hungry or wield their fortune to display their egotistical thoughts everywhere. As an example, some rich and powerful person puts their name onto buildings and cements statutes of themselves. Why do they do this? Because they fear death, not the physical death so much, but the death of their ego, the death of their self.
Do you see why it is so powerful to destroy your ego? Because once you do so, you will be free from this anxiety-driven desire to sustain it. If you’ve already removed it from your mind and your body, then you’ve won! You’ll be free to live as you see fit and not worry about what other people think. So today, we’re going to dive deeper into this identity situation after someone achieves something of great magnitude in their life. How can we keep our egos in check after we’ve become successful? How can we maintain enlightenment when society tries to assign value to our legacy? We will discuss this now.
The Drive Sustains Us
Humans across time have an innate drive to improve their lives; this is normal and fundamental to our way of living in the West. We seek constant improvement, and it’s ingrained in us at a young age to try and do better. “You’ll do better next time,” “Get up and try again,” “When they knock you down, you keep getting up,” these are all sayings we’ve heard to continue the fight, to keep pressing in order to reach our goals.
Having and achieving goals is great, as long as they’re established for the right reasons. Wanting a safer and more comfortable home for your family is generally agreed upon to be a great goal to have, but what about the steps you take to achieve it? Assuming it wouldn’t be acceptable for you to steal or manipulate people for money, you likely try to find a way via a career path. I, like many of you, am on this path myself, always trying to improve my living conditions to give my family a better place to live on this earth. That’s all well and good from our Zennado perspective, but understand that every house you own, every apartment you rent, and each space you take up – it’s all temporary. Even the grandest and most beautiful homes will eventually decay and rot, so enjoy them while you’re in them, and be grateful for what they are in those moments.
Don’t spend your time envious of someone else who has a bigger house than you, or has more properties than you; instead, focus your time on enjoying what you already have. The drive to obtain bigger and better things should be a background item in your mind; it shouldn’t be at the forefront of your thoughts, consuming you and preventing you from enjoying the present. The drive should be a subconscious energy moving you toward something, but not away from something else.
Improving, bettering ourselves, and getting faster and stronger are all great objectives. Performing well and getting good results at your job is fantastic, and you should strive to be good at what you do. Seek pleasure in understanding your role and why it’s needed, and find ways to improve what you do and how you do it. It is in that focus that you can find enjoyment in the day-to-day items. Mastery of your craft, improvement of processes, and navigating change are all important to your career and your life’s improvement.
Achievements Follow
Some time later, and after much toiling and dedication, you may find yourself achieving your goals. This is fantastic, and you should celebrate your hard-earned victory. However, you should not associate your new position, promotion, or windfall with your “self.” Do not attribute it to your ego, or your ego will find ways to manipulate you into believing that it was responsible for your victory, instead of recognizing the simple joy of having honed your craft.
We must separate our enjoyment of our roles from the roles themselves, and from the ego.
A woodworker should not say that they are a “successful woodworker.” Instead, they should say they enjoy building furniture and coffee tables, and let the work speak for itself. They should speak of how much they love refining their trade; but they shouldn’t celebrate being a “renowned woodworker.”
Achievements have nothing to do with who you are. They are irrelevant to you as a human, and they do not define you. Humble yourself when you’re successful. Remember that you enjoyed the path that led you to the peak of your achievement, and don’t forget the difficulty that it took you to get there.
Post-Achievement Ego
I’ve personally seen celebrities and successful people rise up and achieve great things, but later those achievements go on to define them as a person. They have attached their success to their identity and ego. I’m sure you can find examples of this too, and probably very easily, because our society likes to prop up people who are successful and force this identity onto them. It’s not easy to brush this off, but I highly recommend that you do not allow your achievements to become your identity.
An example doesn’t even need to be a big name that we all know; I’m sure someone at your place of work has had achievements go to their head. Maybe they got a big promotion and suddenly their personality changed; maybe they changed how they talked to you or how they presented themselves around you. This is what I mean when I say achievements challenge people’s identity. When they are unsuccessful at decoupling success from their ego, they allow themselves to be changed, to be manipulated by the ego. Their personality shifts to include that promotion, that success, and that achievement. Their persona literally morphs into something new and altered because they could not identify their ego and see through it.
You are not your ego. You are not your job title, the house you live in, or the car you drive. You are a human with feelings, emotions, likes, and dislikes, and you should not allow your achievement to dictate how you feel about yourself.
The Quiet Victory
If you can reach the top of the mountain and still realize that you are the same person you were at the base, you have achieved something far greater than a promotion or a windfall. You have achieved clarity. The world will try to name you, rank you, and label you based on what you have done, but you must remain the observer. Enjoy the view from the peak, celebrate the work it took to get there, but do not let the mountain become who you are. True power is being able to lose everything you’ve achieved and realize that you haven’t lost yourself.
A Moment of Reflection
Before you close this tab and return to the “performance” of your daily life, ask yourself this:
If every title, achievement, and possession was stripped away from me tonight, what is the “Nothing” that remains? When you can look at that “Nothing” and feel peace instead of fear, you have mastered the art of being.