When you understand that there is no such thing as personal greatness, rather, the greatness of Life working in, as and through you, the same Life that does the same thing in each and every one of its forms, that’s when you liberate yourself from the social order that demands conformity, competition and proof of worth.
Image by Lucy Lopez
The opposite for courage is not cowardice. It is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow – Jim Hightower
What is conformity? It is the forced adherence to a behaviour or idea that is expected of you regardless of whether it is Life-honouring. In other words, when that behaviour or thinking does not align with what you know and feel in that place within yourself of non-judging stillness and attentiveness, and you accede to it, you are conforming. You are dishonouring the natural impulse of Life to express itself in its infinite ways since conforming limits what can be expressed.
Competition involves trying to outdo another in order to save or strengthen your own position. But Life is impartial in its expression in all its life-forms and its expressions are infinite. Life is therefore naturally and inexhaustibly creative. Competition is not needed to nurture creativity.
I could be wrong, but of all the species on this planet, it seems to me that humans are the only ones who are obsessed with self-worth. It is an obsession that is created by, and that nourishes an underlying, incurable and sustained pang of unworthiness. And of course, it is an obsession easily exploited by the consciousness of separation.
If we did not see ourselves as separated, vulnerable individuals stranded on, or engulfed by, (depending on how you’re feeling in any given moment), a heaving ocean of other individuals, each desperately preoccupied with the need to survive in an environment of limited resources, we would have no reason to compete or conform. And when conformity and competition no longer drive us, we would be even less burdened by the need for self-worth.
It’s important to understand that it’s our need to prove our worth that drives us into conformity and competition. You can dress our habits of conformity and competition in the elaborate costumes of ‘maintaining social order’, ‘generating the economy’, ‘inspiring innovation and creativity’, and many people do, but neither conformity nor competition can harness the greatness of Life in an entirely peaceful and effortlessly productive way. If you believe you need a common ‘enemy’ in order to form a coalition of collaborative individuals to compete with and defeat the ‘enemy’, you are simply feeding the beast of self-unworthiness.
If we took the time to pay attention to our inner world, and to allow ourselves to fall into that place, that state of consciousness where the wholeness, the enough-ness and the spontaneous and unfathomable grandeur of our natural self is revealed to us, we would be less inclined to conform or compete. Instead, we would be so inspired by our natural greatness, the greatness of Life bubbling and flowing within us, we would seek to allow it to express itself naturally, effortlessly, spontaneously, remarkably. We would learn to step out of its way. And we would most certainly not let anyone else get in its way.
There’s a theory that says that life is based on a competition and the struggle and the fight for survival, and it’s interesting because when you look at the fractal character of evolution, it’s totally different. It’s based on cooperation among the elements in the geometry and not competition – Bruce Lipton
This is not the arrogance of Ego, its self-centredness and its self-obsession. Those are the things we see (and even if we don’t see, we surely feel them) when we and others are driven like slaves by the need to prove our self-worth. Rather, it is the greatness of Life, using its form – you, me – to express its infinite potential.
It is not a greatness that is defined by scale of reach or number or influence or any of those social markers that we have been trained to fearfully worship. No, this is the greatness that we observe, for instance, in a child as it takes its first tentative steps or speaks its first words or rests blissfully in its cradle.
It is the greatness of the synchronized chirping of crickets and the bold flutter of the wings of a seagull. It is the greatness of the radiant blueness of the sky and the amorphic gathering of clouds and the heart-bursting singing of an aria and the intricate weave of a story and the elegant coding of a program that allows people to communicate in real time via text messages across vast distances.
It is the greatness of a meal prepared with the care and attention that only Life makes possible. It is the greatness of attempting something you’ve never attempted before. It is the greatness of the mighty ocean caressing the sand and cliff again and again and again. It is the greatness of one caring human being listening to another. It is the greatness of recovering from an illness or an addiction.
It is the greatness of seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, tasting, thinking, walking, talking…
In all of these, it’s not you as actor or observer that is great. It is Life. It is always Life, without which you and I would not exist. To attribute any of what we do or observe to the individual self, whether plant, animal, element or person, would be delusional. And we all suffer from such delusion – that the self can be independently worth anything at all and that we must find or acquire self-worth should we lack it.
Ego is the part of us that believes: I am what I have, I am what I do. I am what others think of me. All this is just an illusion. The problem? If you are what you do, then who are you when you don’t do it any longer? If you are what you have—then when you no longer have it, you no longer have any value!
The truth is that we are all spiritual beings. And when you see yourself as a piece of God, then you see yourself as connected to everything and everyone – Wayne Dyer
Yet, when we attribute all of it to Life, to what some may call God, Universe, Consciousness, the Field, we can finally cure ourselves of the delusion of our unworthiness and the empty craving for self-worth. We can see that we are Life’s forms and that Life is spontaneously expressing itself through us in a naturally Life-honouring way, that is, until we dishonour this natural way by conforming and competing.
Reflection
Are you allowing Life to express its greatness through you? In what ways are you preventing this? What behaviours and their underlying beliefs are you holding on to that cause you to feel that you need to prove your worth? What social systems and practices demand that you prove your worth? How do your family, friends, work colleagues do this? Do you demand or expect others to prove their worth? How? Can you imagine a world where you and everyone else are unconditionally accepted and respected simply because you/they exist as forms of Life? Are you more or less likely to express Life’s infinite potential if you were less concerned with conforming and competing or proving that you are worthy?
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