Don’t take yourself so seriously

Hello friends!

These days ago I was talking to a good friend and he commented that he had heard this phrase: “Don’t take yourself so seriously”. I thought it was brilliant and at the time I told him I would write a text here on the site about this phrase. Of course, this phrase has several meanings, perhaps even to provoke offense. However, what I want to talk to you about is the positive side of this thought.

About three years ago, I started to practice meditation. Vipassana meditation is practiced all over the world, because it is simple and because it has very quick results and, if done consistently, we realize that they are also lasting. If you are interested, I can explain in another article how it works and how we can do it. Here, I would like to say how I understand the “Don’t take yourself too seriously”.

From a young age I was intrigued by self-awareness. For when we think: “I think about myself” or “I think this about myself” or “I say this to myself”, we are in a way presupposing two selves: a me who thinks the me, that is, a me who observes the other me. Meditating also means me-dictating, dictating to myself…

When we meditate, breathing for 1 hour or more, we disconnect from attachment to our sensations, feelings and thoughts. It is a process of letting come and letting go. If a thought, say of hate or hurt, arises, it arises and then disappears. If we are aware and observing “our own self”, we can increase and grow that thought-feeling of hate or hurt or we can choose to let it appear and disappear, in a matter of seconds.

With that, we started to not take ourselves so seriously. The meaning here is that we are managing to understand the difference between consciousness and the ego, the I.

Consciousness is what observes, the self corresponds to all thoughts, values, emotions, attachments, fears that – like waves – come and go….

It’s like the Zen story of Me and the Wagon:

An Emperor, knowing that a great Zen sage was at the gates of his palace, went to him to ask an important question:

– Master, where is the I?”

The master then asked him:

– Please bring me that wagon over there.

The cart was brought. The sage asked:

– What is it?

“A wagon, of course,” replied the Emperor.

The master asked him to remove the horses that pulled the wagon. Then he said:

– Are the horses the cart?”

– No.

The master asked that the wheels be removed.

– Are the wheels the wagon?

– No, master.

The master asked them to remove the seats.

– Are the seats the wagon?

– No, they are not the wagon.

Finally he pointed to the shaft and said:

– Is the cart the axle?”

– No, master, they are not.”

Then the sage concluded:

– Like the wagon, the Self cannot be defined by its parts. The I is not here, not there. The I is nowhere to be found. He does not exist. And not existing, he exists.”

Having said that, he began to back away from the surprised monarch.

When he was already far away, he turned and asked him:

– Where I am?

Therefore, the self appears and disappears in its parts, in different thoughts, emotions, sensations, values ​​and behaviors. That’s why we also go through so many stages in life. Phases in which we identify with a value, such as a football team or a political party, phases in which we love a certain someone and phases in which we don’t even remember that this same someone exists… and millions and millions of phases in a single life.

Serious plans and life

In other older texts I have already mentioned John Lennon’s phrase: “Life is what happens while you are making plans”. My dear friend, who told me the phrase that gave the title to this text, interpreted it in this way. We take our plans very seriously and suffer a lot if the plans we had don’t work out or don’t happen exactly as we’d like.

This goes for insignificant plans, like wanting to go to a pizzeria and getting sulky because it’s closed, to big, life-changing plans like going to college, finding a job, moving to another city, getting married, having kids, etc.

What happens, in psychological terms, is explained by the concept of a very famous anthropologist at the beginning of the 20th century, Levy-Bruhl. The concept is “participation mystique”, mystical participation. Roughly, Mystical participation is the non-differentiation between subject and object, the psychic confusion between the two. It is easy to see the mystical participation in primitive (or first) peoples, when they are afraid to take a photograph for fear of losing their soul. That is, they link the soul to the image of the body. For us, such a thought is ridiculous and laughable.

However, we also still have a lot of mystical participation with the objects to which we connect. For example, if a child makes a serious mistake, the mother may come to feel as if she made the mistake herself. In this case, the mother confuses the child (who is someone outside of her and an other) with herself.

This also happens when we have a plan, that is, an idea and it does not materialize at the desired time. The idea is just an idea, a thought in our inner world. Naively, we want this internal image to have a necessary correspondence with the external image, the events in our environment.

Therefore, it is healthy not to take – the plans – so seriously… not taking everything so seriously we can live longer and better. Living longer because we are really living (not dreaming a plan) and living better because relationships with little projection, with little mystical participation, are freer and more complete.

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