http://keenawareness.blogspot.com/2014/08/seeing-oneself-as-nothing-that-we-are.html?m=1Yes. As Ramana Maharshi said, "Your duty is to be, not to be this or that."
This is an opportunity to drop corrective hints to friends and neighbors. To refute the idea that success, money, wealth = happiness. This idea is refuted everyday, but it is also reinforced everyday through the goob tube and at the office. We are all conning each other. We try to project our ideas of who we want to be, and we alienate each other from who we really are. This causes the widespread sadness in our culture. Nobody is real. Everyone is hiding from each other, and everyone knows it. It's a big open secret. So it is pathological.
Tonight, discussing Robin Williams, I was trying to explain some of these things to my dad. I was trying to explain that people are more than just "what they do". I mentioned how everytime you run into someone in the store they want to know "what you're doing these days", etc. Because our culture defines people by "what they do". Dad said, "isn't it true that people are what they do?" I said, "of course not, you know that. Isn't there more to you than just your job? Isn't there more to the cashier at Wal-Mart than just scanning groceries?" Of course, people are not just "what they do". But you wouldn't know it by the way people talk to each other and always size each other up. Everyone is always trying to compare how their life is going with the next person as if life were some sort of contest or game. It's totally ridiculous. And everyone deep down is unsatisfied so after we get done sizing each other up we go home and pop our SSRI's and watch silly ass television shows and gorge ourselves on Wal-Mart food to drown out the pain of a life lived on the fucking surface. What kind of sadomasochistic prank are we playing on each other?
