The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [31]
A person fears death not for itself but for a deeper reason, which is the need to defend an imaginary self. Identifying with an imaginary self is the fourth klesha, and it’s something we all do. Even on a superficial level, people erect an image based on income and status. When Francis of Assisi, the son of a wealthy silk merchant, stripped off his rich garments and renounced his father’s money, he was throwing away not just his worldly possessions but also his identity—the way people knew who he was. In his mind, God could not be approached through a false self-image.
Self-image is closely connected to self-esteem, and we know the high cost a person pays when self-esteem is lost. Children who sit in the back row in grade school and avoid the teacher’s eye usually don’t grow up to discuss foreign policy or medieval art because, early on, their self-image incorporated a sense of inadequacy. Conversely, studies have shown that if a teacher is told that a particular student is exceptionally bright, that student will perform much better in class even if the selection was random: Low IQ kids can achieve beyond high IQ kids with enough approval from their teachers. The image set in the teacher’s mind is enough to turn a poor performer into a sterling one.
Identifying with a false image of who you are causes a great deal of suffering in other ways. Life never stops demanding more and more. The demands on our time, patience, ability, and emotions can become so overwhelming that admitting your inadequacy seems like the honest thing to do. Yet in a person’s false self-image is buried the ugly history of everything that has gone wrong. “I won’t,” “I can’t,” and “I give up” all flow from the fourth klesha.
The third klesha says that even with a healthy self-image we recoil from things that threaten our egos. These threats exist everywhere. I am afraid of being poor, of losing my spouse, of breaking the law. I am afraid to shame myself before anyone whose respect I want to keep. For some people, the thought of their children turning out badly is a deep threat to their own sense of self. “We don’t do that in this family” is usually code for “Your behavior threatens who I am.” But people don’t recognize that they are speaking in code. Once I have identified with my self-image, the fear that it might break down is instinctive. The need to protect myself from what I fear is part of who I am.
The second klesha says that a person suffers because of clinging, which means clinging to anything at all. Holding on to something is a way of showing that you are afraid it will be taken from you. People feel violated when a purse snatcher runs away with a purse, for example, or if they come home to find that the house has been broken into. These violations don’t matter because of what has been taken; purses and household goods can be replaced. Yet the sense of personal injury often persists for months and years. If the right trigger is pulled, having a purse snatched can make you lose entirely your sense of personal safety. Someone has stripped you of the illusion that you were untouchable. (America’s national paroxysm after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center continues to play out this drama of “us” versus “them” on a mass scale. The sense of American invulnerability was exposed as an illusion. Yet at bottom this wasn’t a nation’s problem. It was an individual problem felt on a huge scale.)
There are many twists and turns to suffering. The trail leads from fear of death to a false sense of self and the need to cling. In the end, however, unreality alone is the cause of all suffering.