Free Be Nobody by Lama Marut

ways we attempt to define and distinguish ourselves—while also paradoxically trying to overcome the isolation and disconnection we abhor—is through identification with a group. We fabricate at least a part of our personal sense of identity by subsuming ourselves within a collectivity.
    We describe and designate ourselves, at least to some degree, by hitching our personal wagons to some communal star:
    â€œ I am an American, Australian, Japanese, German”—identifying ourselves with our native or adopted nation.
    â€œ I am white, black, Asian, indigenous”—identifying ourselves with one of the (remarkably few, given human diversity and millennia of interbreeding) racial groupings.
    â€œ I am poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, or (more rarely and immodestly) stinking rich”—identifying ourselves with our economic status.
    â€œ I am a Democrat, Republican, progressive, democratic socialist, Green Party member”—identifying ourselves with our chosen political party.
    We all have a strong desire to belong to something greater, to meld our unique little individual snowflake into a larger snowball.
    When it comes to the dynamics behind group affiliation, we once more butt up against the internal civil war between the compulsive drive to be somebody and the craving for the release and freedom that comes from being nobody .
    On the one hand, it seems that our desire to join a community is inspired by an innate drive to transcend the loneliness and isolation of singularity. And as such, it is certainly a positive thing. The impulse to connect with others, to identify with a group, seems to be a variant of the urge we all have to drop the obsession with individualism and lose ourselves in something greater. Our interest in associating our discrete, isolated lower selves with a nation, a race, an economic class, or a political party is, from this point of view, motivated by a kind of secular expression of our spiritual longing to drop being ourselves and be nobody through connection to a larger whole.
    As we know from personal experience, it is exactly in those times when we discard the burden of self-consciousness and thestriving to be somebody that we feel a sense of relief, spaciousness, and fulfillment. And so it is that we can lose ourselves in a group, gaining a sense of belonging and camaraderie, which is all well and good . . . up to a point.
    If we exaggerate the defining importance of any one of these group identities and take pride in our communal sense of self, we’re asking for trouble. For each of them is a mere role we play (or have been given to play) in the game of life, and each is quite different from our essential and higher Self. If we focus monomaniacally on any one of these social personalities—elevating it to a supreme position, and then submerging the lower individual self into this collective identity—we have the complete formula for fanaticism and for a new kind of alienation from others.
    Individual identification through the collecting and blending of various communal identities can at best only partly, and never essentially, define any of us. For an individual’s connections with a set of groups is only a small component of what comprises that person. Each of us is much more (or, you might say, ultimately much less!) than the groups with which we are associated.
    We are not wholly defined by being card-carrying members of one club or another, and when it comes to our true nature, our wallets are altogether empty of such nonessential credentials.
    Our attempts to forge some kind of special individual identity through our memberships in larger social groupings are all just more carnival cutouts into which we stick our particular faces. In the great internal war that we discussed at the end of the last chapter, it seems as though identification through association is most often aligned with the “be