Be Nobody by Lama Marut

one other than your own conscience and consciousness) has a sort of sick sense of humor. He notices when we’re constantly preoccupied with ourselves— What about me? Whatabout me? —and says, “OK. You want to focus on yourself all the time? Try this !” We get depressed, unable to get out of our own heads and stop the repetitive, broken record of how bad we feel.
    And then, performing another trick from its vast repertoire, the “somebody self” identifies with this “depressed person” it has fabricated. We are so desperate to be somebody that we’re willing to stick our heads into even this kind of carnival cutout: If I can’t be a good enough anybody else, at least I can be somebody as a nobody . The ego tries to solve the problem of low self-esteem by assuming the role of “somebody with low self-esteem.”
    And tragically, this designation of the self as “a depressed self”—now more self-centered than ever and taking perverse pride in its self-defining misery—re-creates the very cause that brought about this dismal state of affairs in the first place.
    Depression is a downward cycle, in more ways than one.
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    The culture of narcissism that encourages rampant self-obsession and self-congratulatory pride has had unfavorable ramifications when it comes to the pursuit of true happiness. The precipitous rise in depression and the steep plunge in self-esteem can be directly correlated to living in a society where the unconstrained preoccupation with the self has taken on pathological dimensions.
    While we’ve drawn the karmic correlations between, on one hand, egotism and pride, and on the other hand the calamitous fall into the bleakness of depressed self-absorption, you don’t really even have to accept karma to perceive the relationship between the two. Selfishness doesn’t make us feel better about ourselves, which we know if we check in on our own experience. And in fact it makes us feel much worse, depressingly so.
    The karmic causes of depression—anger; idle speech, either in the form of self-righteous gossiping about others or making promises that aren’t kept; and the pride, arrogance, and judgmental mindset that cause us to place ourselves above others—these are all expressions of a more fundamental root problem: self-centeredness. And correspondingly, the real causes of happiness (and the cures for depression) will all orbit around the same foundational source: selflessness and altruistic concern for our fellow human beings.
    In the next chapter, we’ll see that the usual forms of self-absorption are in fact based on a grand illusion. While in our culture of narcissism we invest so much time and effort in appeasing the needs of a divinized, egoistic self, the status of that deity is insecure—and for very good reason. The “somebody self,” one might say, is in a perpetual identity crisis because it suspects (while at the same time it denies) that it isn’t really real.
    When we actually go looking for the self we feel so intuitively is there—it makes such constant demands, after all!—a sneaking suspicion starts to grow that there’s really nobody home. For the self we are so obsessed with and take such pride in has only an apparitional existence, and our obsession turns out to be no more than chasing a shadow.
    This is not, however, the nihilistic tragedy we might fear. When we give up looking for the somebody who’s not really there—when we come up empty-handed in our futile search for some unchanging and all-controlling entity amidst our many and variegated personae and appearances—we begin to realize that the nobody we’re left with isn’t just a big nothing.
    Wising up about the real nature of the “somebody self” makes it possible for us to become a happier somebody. It’s through accessing the infinite