Become What You Are (eBook)

Chapter1: The Paradox of Self-Denial Whileliving, be a dead man, thoroughly dead, Then,whatever you do, just as you will, will be right. ABuddhist poem, written in China several centuries ago, tries to find words foran intuition which is common to almost every culture in the world. Whentranslated into the familiar language of the Christian tradition, it is so wellknown as to be almost a platitude: 'He that loseth his soul shall findit.' But what always preserves this thought from banality—,from the meretiresomeness of those precepts which everyone knows he ought to observe butdoesn't—,is that this is a saying which no one canobserve.For so long as there is something which I can do about it, I am not yet dead, Ihave not yet completely lost my life. Yet this is not the simple absurdity of acommand impossible to obey. It is a real communication, a description ofsomething which happens to people—,like the rain, or the touch of the wind. Itis simply the expression of the universal discovery that a man does not reallybegin to be alive until he has lost himself, until he has released the anxiousgrasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation andposition. It is the irreducible truth in the monkish idea of 'holypoverty,' of the way of life to which there are no strings attached, inwhich—,because all is lost—,there is nothing to lose, in which there is theexhilaration of a kind of freedom which is poetically likened to the birds andthe wind, or to clouds drifting in the boundless sky. It is the life whichSaint Paul described as 'poor but making many rich, as having nothing butpossessing all things.' Whatan unrealistic nostalgia we have for it! Marie Antoinette playing shepherdessin the gardens of Versailles. . . presidents of great corporations retreatingto lonely fishing shacks in the High Sierra. . . the insurance clerk walkingalone on the interminable ocean sands, wondering if he would have the courageto be a beachcomber . . . or the moral idealist, reproaching himself because hedoes not have quite the strength to abandon a comfortable salary and plungeinto the slums, like Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day, or the great exemplars SaintFrancis and Saint Vincent de Paul. But most of us know that we will not, andprobably cannot do it—,that we shall continue to cling to our habitual ways oflife with all the helplessness of addicts to a destroying passion. Ifthis begins to sound like a sermon, I do not mean it that way, for I said atthe beginning that the words about finding one's life through losing it werenot really a precept that could simply be practiced and obeyed. This is whatmakes all the talk about the necessity of selflessness or the task oftranscending the ego so fantastically misunderstood. Treated as a precept, itmakes for every kind of moral and spiritual phoniness. Always have a largepinch of salt handy when you meet the fellow who talks about trying to renouncehimself, to overcome his ego. I am reminded of the apocryphal conversationbetween Confucius and Lao-tzu, when the former had been prating of universallove without the element of self. 'Whatstuff!' cried Lao-tzu. 'Does not universal love contradict itself? Isnot your elimination of self a positive manifestation of self? Sir, if youwould cause the world not to lose its source of nourishment: there is theuniverse, its regularity is unceasing, there are the sun and moon, theirbrightness is unceasing, there are the stars, their groupings never change,there are the birds and beasts, they flock together without...