Make Nothing of Yourself To Become Everything You Want

Your whole life is most likely spent trying to make something of yourself, that is what we are taught from youth. Make something of yourself! It is all about Self-improvement.

So we spend our life doing everything we can looking at whatever we can find to make something of ourselves and find inner peace and happiness. Yet often when one makes something of themselves, doctor, lawyer, they are rather unhappy about it. For the last 20 years I have known my accountant, he has been saying how much he hates his profession . But he is very much something, sometimes referred to as one of the best accountants in all of Canada.

So off we go from our innocent youth to make something of ourselves. And on we go to difficult searches and confusion through late teens and twenties. Then we have our profession and are eventually disillusioned and lost, searching for what can make us happy.

Let me be clear here, this lesson is only for those who want more than this material world can give them. More than money, house, toys etc. Something immaterial. Many people turn away from the world in search of this hidden something that they cannot define but know cannot be found in the world, yet continually they do not find it.

Here is the key, what is not to be found in the material world can be gained through the material world. If you make something of yourself, you have made yourself into some thing. If you are a thing, then you are not you, because YOU are not a thing.

But if you seek to find what will satisfy that inner hunger, and you have studied and self reflected enough to know that you are more than this body, and more than the world can contain, then you know you are not a thing, and to make a thing out of you would be to defeat your search, to place the eagle in a cage. A lawyer, doctor, engineer, these are all things. When you meet someone, they promptly tell you what they are. If you want to be you, and you know that you are not limited to this world, then you must make “no thing” of yourself, because that is what you really are.

But the only way to do this is to be in the world and active so that you can find what you are not by consciously practicing being awake at each moment you are doing what you do. Know that you are doing something, making your body do these things, but you are not this, not that.

Making nothing of yourself means to eliminate all the preconceived qualifying concepts about you, and with that dissolves those same subjective views of others. Yet we must still deal with the image of what we and they are. Make nothing of yourself and be free, but deal with the forms of you and others so you do not die to soon. A truck driver may only think he is a truck driver, but the truck does not know that it is not really a truck.

If you do nothing in the world, just live in a cave, then you cannot make nothing of yourself because there is nothing to look at. You can only work with the material you have. So if you want to see that you are not this and not that, then you have to be this and that so you can prove to yourself by examination and effort that you are not that.

First of all you have to be desirous to make nothing of yourself which goes against programming, and that is difficult, but if you are not happy with what you are, then you may want to try being nothing rather than another attempt at another something. Be content that you are no thing, that you will never find something that you can be, that is not possible for anyone who has entered the path of self seeking. The pain of many comes from denying reality.

The reality we deny is that we are no thing, we are not contained and not limited, yet we try so hard to be contained, qualified, quantified and so on. How can you expect to be happy if you do this?

Resolve to yourself that you will not be any specific thing, that all you can do is what is in front of you and nothing more. And this is only what you do until you change. Find a profession or job, let your body be occupied and see it doing what it does while paying attention, be awake and know that it is not you.

Since I was young, I had not less than 3 jobs at the same time, different jobs that I did part time, and I usually changed each one every year. So this means that by the time I was 25, I had been about 40 different ‘people’ if you qualify a person by their type of work.

How many jobs have you had? How many different people have you been so far in your life? Think about this and you will find that you can give up finding who you are if you seek to find that in a profession or other classification. When you give up chasing your tail then you can rest. When you are rested you will have plenty of energy to move forward.

I just had the image of a maze with all its turns. But I see that we are never turning, we always go straight ahead, just in different directions.