Forrest

The need to feel special is a great burden for many people in modern life. Putting that burden down is one of the easiest wins for living a happier life for anyone currently holding it. The need to feel special not only puts undue pressure on ourselves, but it also prevents us from fully noticing all the specialness already around us. When we are fixated on locating specialness within ourselves, it is harder to notice it in all the things that are not ourselves. If we want to feel more valuable, more beautiful, more unique, more powerful than everyone and everything else, then the mind can naturally develop a bias towards downplaying the value / beauty / uniqueness / power of other people and other things. This is a very depleting bias to develop as it deprives us of fully experiencing all the value / beauty / uniqueness / power surrounding us. By contrast, when we decenter our need to feel special, this cognitive bias naturally weakens and the filter that was blocking out all the beauty, power, value and uniqueness in our world naturally falls away. When we are looking for specialness just in ourselves, specialness can become scarce. When we are looking for it everywhere, it becomes very abundant. And the more we can see the unique beauty that all things hold, it is actually even easier to recognize our own unique beauty. But this time it is not a beauty premised on comparison to others. There is a beautiful quote by the Zen master Dogen - founder of the Japanese Soto Zen lineage - that goes: “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away." It is in forgetting ourselves that all distinctions between self-other, beautiful-ugly, special-mundane fall away. And, paradoxically, in that falling away, beauty and uniqueness are everywhere. Because nothing is special, everything is special.

What we call “the mind” is often just a small suburb of the body’s distributed intelligence. To unplug it from the body is like uprooting a plant from its soil. Yet that’s largely what we’re doing when we engage with the various virtual worlds the modern world offers us with social media, video games, porn etc.. And it’s a habit that modern society regularly installs in us in various other insidious ways. So much of our society’s journey back to sanity consists simply in making a journey back to living in our bodies.