THE ART OF PEACEFUL LIVING

THE ART OF PEACEFUL LIVING

Part 1

By Ozodi Osuji

If what you are looking for is peace, let me share with you how I finally found it; it had eluded me for most of my life. I did it by combining insights from Secular Psychology, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and my own experience living on planet earth. Let me begin by summarizing what Buddhists believe and do. (See suggestions for further reading.)
Buddhism, of all religions, is less superstitious; it is almost like an exercise in rational thinking. Gautama Buddha said that he discovered that being human is to suffer. He said that we suffer because we have desires, and that to overcome our suffering, we have to give up our desires, especially the desire to have a powerful self-image.
Give up your desires and approach living with a detached attitude. To live in this world, we obviously need many things, but we must recognize that we can also live without them; therefore, we must have a sense of non-attachment to the things of this world. It is when you desire something so intensely that you become frustrated if you do not get it or get it and it later vanishes. If you have a sense of detachment, you work toward goals; if you get them, fine; if not, that, too, is fine.
This world is ephemeral and transitory; things are here today and gone tomorrow, so why sweat the things of this world? Take it easy. But where Buddhism was particularly most helpful for me was in meditation.

BUDDHIST MEDITATION

In Buddhist meditation, you sit down and close your eyes. You tell yourself that you are not the self that you know of. The self you know about is your ego, a separated self. You are not the ego separated self. Identifying with the ego is identifying with a false self. You tell yourself that you really do not know who you are, but that it certainly is not the ego. You make an effort to deny the reality of your ego and then say to yourself that you do not know who you are and ask to know who you are.
You do not tell yourself who you are because if you already know who you are, you will not be meditating. You make your mind quiet, and sit there calmly, not saying anything, or if your mind says something, you reject it as not the truth. The idea is to extinguish your normal sense of self and have no self that you know of (this is called anatta), and simply be silent, for hours if necessary.
Some people while thus sitting say that they escaped from our world and experience unity with all existence, a different world; it is difficult to describe that world; nevertheless, they say that it is like a field of light; that light is everywhere, and they felt that that light has infinite units, all of them connected and are one and that in that light they felt like they are a part of it and yet all of it; in anthropomorphic terms, they say that there is one self that has infinite parts and each of us is a part of that one self; they felt that they have finally returned home from a journey to a distant country; they felt that in that home they are eternal, permanent and changeless and they felt perfect peace. They call this experience Nirvana; Zen calls it Satori, and Hinduism calls it Samadhi (Christian mysticism calls it the mystical union of the son with his father as oneself; such Christian mystics as Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, and Saint John of the Cross said that they had that experience of oneness with God).
Buddha is said to have experienced Nirvana and knew that he is one with everything, and in that awareness, awakened to the truth of our interconnected oneness. He was enlightened and illuminated to our true self and became all-knowing because that field of light is also a field of total intelligence, intelligence from which our universe and many other universes emanate.
That field of light is not outside us; it is inside each of us and everything. You do not look for it outside you, but by going inside you.
Buddha had his nirvana experience and thereafter lived his life peacefully, aware of who he is, a part of a light that has no beginning and no end, a self that is eternal and peaceful. Thus, he lived calmly; he parked his mind in a place of peace most of the time, and nothing taking place in our world disturbed his peace.
The other Asian religions, such as Hinduism and Taoism, also teach the same message and practice meditation. Hinduism teaches that there is one God called Brahman and that he has a part called Atman; Brahman and Atman are oneself.
Atman is equivalent to the Christian notion of the Son of God, who is one with God; they are in each other, where one ends and the other begins is nowhere; there is no gap between them; they are holographic because the whole is in the part, and the part is in the whole.
Atman cast Maya, a kind of magical spell, on his mind and went to sleep, and in his sleep, he forgets his union with his father; in the dream, he sees himself as separated from God.
He invents a universe of space, time, and matter and walks around in it as a separated self. His new identity is now a separated self, which in Sanskrit is called Ahankara; Ahankara, or ego, forgets that he is one with God but thinks that he is separated from God.
The objective of Hinduism is to enable the individual human being to remember that he is not his ego, ahankara, and that his true identity is Atman, a part of God.
In Hindu meditation, you repeat one of the Upanishads, Neti, Neti, nothing I know from my Ahankara, ego self is the truth, I want to know the truth, but I do not consciously know the truth, so I must keep quiet. Thus, the Hindu meditator silences his mind of all ego thinking and keeps quiet.
Some Hindus claim to have broken free from the grip of the ego called Moksha, and experienced Samadhi, meaning that they suddenly realized their true identity as Atman, a part of Brahman, God.
Atman and Brahman share oneself; where one ends, and the other begins, is nowhere; they are the same. This unity of Brahman and Atman, in Christian categories, is called the unity of the Father and his Son, God and Christ. (See Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism.)
It is impossible to understand the nature of oneness with our ego minds; our ego minds are separated and are designed to understand the world of separate selves and multiplicity of things and cannot understand a world where infinite selves are oneself.
The unified world is not the world of language because in it there is only oneself with infinite selves, and they do not need language or speech to communicate with one another; they know what each other is thinking because each other’s thoughts are their thoughts.
The world of unity is beyond our ego understanding and cannot be explained; all that can be said about it is that one is now in perfect peace and knows that at that level, we are eternal and happy.
Every once in a while, a Hindu claims to have experienced Samadhi. Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi were claimants of enlightenment status, that is, that they had realized their real self, Atman, who is one with Brahman. In effect, while still on earth, they know that they are part of God. (See Swami Bhashkrananda, The Essential Hinduism. He was my Swami.)
Zen and Tao meditators also claim to sometimes experience oneness, and that experience is beyond our understanding. (See Tao Te Ching by Laozi.)
God-enlightened people are calm, peaceful, and happy. Since they have experienced the reality of perfect knowledge, they tend to be knowledgeable, and people take their issues to them, and somehow, they give them appropriate answers.
I am not a Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, or Zen. I will therefore avoid speculating on what these people experienced; what I know for sure is that these religions helped me to meditate and feel peaceful. However, I have a background in Christianity and psychology, so I factored those two into my lifestyle, and they, too, helped me to experience inner peace.

WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY TEACHES THAT EACH OF US HAS A SELF-CONCEPT AND SELF-IMAGE.

Western psychology teaches that upon birth on Earth, the human child appears to have no preexisting self and must construct a self for himself.
(Asian religions say that we have a preexisting self but choose to forget it and learn a new self, a false ego separated self, whereas our real self is unified with God and all selves; we came here to experience the separated self-housed in a body.)
Most people do not recall their early selves or events from their first three years. I personally remember a few incidents when I was four and five years old, but I have a clearer understanding of things from about age six, my first year at school.
Western psychology holds that humans are born without a preexisting self, tabula rasa, and develop their sense of self through learning, through trial and error.
The pertinent point is that we do not remember events during our first three years; during that time, we are learning about our world and place in it. We are also learning a human language; one needs language to articulate what one has learned. Therefore, since one does not have language early in life, one cannot articulate what one has no words for, but by age four, children have learned to speak and can more or less express their feelings in words.
Western developmental psychology/child psychology says that something in the human child, which it has not understood, takes how he experiences his body and his society to construct a self-concept and self-image (Alfred Adler, 1921; George Kelly, 1958).
The consensus of Western psychology is that the child’s inherited biological constitution and early social experience (in the family) are building blocks he uses to conceptualize his self-concept and self-image.
By age five, most children’s self-concept and self-image are in place, and henceforth they approach the world from their self-concept and self-image.
The self-image is a kind of looking glass with which one looks at the world and seldom sees the world as it is, but as the glass one uses in looking at it colors it. Very few people see other people and things as they are, but as their self-image, the lenses with which they look at the world, color what they see.
What is objective perception? I do not know; even at its best, scientists still look through lenses. Every scientist looks at the world with existing scientific paradigms, and when paradigms change, they look at their world differently. Thomas Kuhn (1962) made the point that we do not see anything as it is, but as our prior learning and accepted notion of truth, and methodological approaches to phenomena dispose us to see them.
How do you know that the physical universe of matter, space, and time you see, that the stars, galaxies, planets, human beings in bodies, animals, and plants are really there? They are actually not there!
What is there, according to quantum mechanics, is light energy. Energy seems to have transformed itself into matter (per Albert Einstein’s famous equation, E=MC2) and, as matter into human bodies, animals, trees, planets, stars, but at the root, what still exists in matter are particles of light. With the right microscope, you will see light particles where you see your body, animals, trees, and the table I am typing on. It is an illusion to see our bodies, plants, planets, stars, and other solids in our world.
For our present purposes, the human child develops a self-image and tries to live according to his self-image and responds to everything in his world from his self-image. We interpret what we see with our self-concepts and self-images; the tools we employ in interpreting phenomena shape our interpretations.
Most people have normal self-images and interpret the world they see in similar ways, but some people, for some reason, have false, grandiose self-images and routinely misinterpret their world, project their distorted views onto the world they see, and behave accordingly.
In childhood, I desired to be important, powerful, and superior to other people. I did everything to meet the requirements of my self-image. I wanted other people to acknowledge my self-image; if they did, I felt good and got along with them, but if, for some reason, they did not see me as I wanted to be seen, important, I tended to feel offended and angry at them.
It is my grandiose self-image that made me feel angry at those I believed belittled me; what they did to me that made me feel angry, other people did not see as belittling and did not feel angry. Therefore, it is my problematic self-image that made me angry, not necessarily what other people did.
The same goes for our fears, anxiety, anger, sadness, personality disorders, depression, paranoia, delusions, mania, and schizophrenia.

CHRISTIAN INFLUENCE ON THE SELF CONCEPT AND PERCEPTION, AND ONE’S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE WORLD

As a Christian, I accept that there is God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. I ask the three to guide me and help me not get into temptation and make mistakes. By my own power, I can do nothing, but with the power of God, I can do what human beings can do. This tendency to ask non-apparent mythological forces to guide one affects one’s thinking and behavior; one uses the parameters of Christianity to interpret the world one sees and biases the interpretation with Christian prejudices or assumed truth.
What is the truth? Pontus Pilate asks. The truth is that none of us knows what the truth is; we do not know whether God exists or not, but religious folks have faith in an unseen God, and that faith affects their relationship with other people and their perception of phenomena in general.

GIVING UP THE SELF IMAGE IN MEDITATION TO ATTAIN INNER PEACE

In meditation, I tell myself that I am not my self-concept and self-image; I affirm that the self-image and self-concept are false constructs of who I am, but not who I truly am. I then let go of my self-concept and self-image and tell it that I do not want it.
When I let go of my self-concept and self-image, what remains in me is silence. The self-image and the self-image are mere puffs of smoke that we identify with, but not who we are. Who we are, we do not know.
When I consciously, in meditation, give up my identification with my self-concept and self-image that I made for myself in childhood, what is left in me is nothing; where I used to see my self-image is now emptiness, void, and silence.
I feel like I am nothing. That is correct, when the self-concept and self-image are given up, one knows oneself as nothing. I am nothing.
But make sure that you understand what nothingness is. Nothing means not this or that self or thing, not any particular self or thing.
If one is nothing, one is everything! When you give up your self-concept and self-image and feel as if you are nothing, you also feel that you can construct a different self for yourself.
The self-concept and self-image have to be desired and defended to seem real to one; without desire and defense, they disappear.
When the self-concept and self-image disappear from one’s awareness, one feels that one is a unit of life, a unit of light, and a unit of love.
Love is the union of all selves and things as one, so one is a unit of all selves and things.
The unit of life in you, while living on earth, has a memory of its experiences. Upon the death of your body and ego, its memory remains. If it remains captivated by the earth, it will appear again in a new form and develop a different sense of self and identity.
That unit of life may choose not to manifest on earth but live in the immediate world all people see upon their physical death, a world that still looks like our earth, but everything in it is not made of matter but pure light energy; people, animals, trees, planets, stars, etc., are in light forms. This world is beautiful to look at, but it is still a fantasy, an illusion, a dream, a make-believe world, a fiction, a lovely fiction.
Some people stay in that semi-insane world for a while. Others return to our world or try to awaken from all fantasies, from the dream of separation from our real self. They give up the desire to have separate selves and experience what Buddha experienced: themselves as formless units of life.
Life is formless spiritual light that is everywhere, having no beginning and no end; it is a field of light, and that light is perfect intelligence and creates forms, including our current universe and infinite other universes.
Enlightened folks like Buddha and Jesus Christ stay in the formless light world and, from there, occasionally descend to the world of light forms, but seldom return to our world of matter, space, and time. Who wants to live in a dense body again? Certainly not me. This time around, in body and on earth, is my last trip to this foolishness we call our lives on earth.

In this paper, I am not really doing metaphysics. I am interested in the here and now world and how to obtain peace in it. If peace is what you desire, then learn to gradually accept that you are not your ego and body, not your self-concept and self-image, and stop identifying with those. Try not to think, talk, or do anything from your ego, self-concept, or self-image. Instead of doing anything based on self-image, do nothing, just keep quiet. However, if you are certain of what serves the public good, then do it.
I no longer identify with my hitherto grandiose self-image and try not to respond to events around me from that insane self-concept and self-image. Regardless of what other people do, I do not respond to them from my ego; I just keep quiet unless I am convinced that my proposed action cares and loves them as well as me.
I know that I’m not my ego; therefore, I do not have to respond to whatever other people did that used to irritate my ego. I no longer defend my ego; I seldom defend against even physical attacks because I know that I am not my body; if you destroy my body, I am still alive in spirit; you cannot destroy my spirit, hence you have really done nothing to me, and I have no reason to be angry at you.
I now live in peace and formed an organization called Society for Peaceful Living, through which I teach people to live in peace. I train people on how to live in peace, and when they have been trained, they train other people. We teach people how not to live from their identification with their separate self-images and self-concepts, how to be quiet instead of responding from their false self.
If you must talk or do anything, do it from your inner self, a self that knows that it is a part of all human beings and things and therefore loves all people and if they do wrong to you, instead of fighting them, it knows that they did so from their identification with their egos; and you try to help them to learn to speak and act from the loving part of them.
We do not ask you to tolerate abuse but to correct it with love, our true selves. You know that you are doing things rightly when you and those around you live peacefully.
Peaceful living does not mean escaping from our world, but living in our world, and not allowing it to make you a monster and disturb your peace. In Buddhist terms, you are in the world but not a part of it.
At the Society for Peaceful Living, we learn how to live peacefully while going about our usual daily lives. We do not escape from this world but deal with it as it is but do so peacefully.

THE BELIEF THAT ONE IS A VICTIM DISTURBS ONE’S INNER PEACE

One of the issues that disturbs our inner peace is the perception that unfair things happened to us, and we blame those who seem to have caused them. One sees a demonstrably sad thing happening to one’s ego and body, and one sees the person who did it, and one blames that person. Since all of us have eyes and can see, we see that the accusation is empirical and thus conclude that it is true and sympathize with the blamer; we do the same thing.
This practice sees some people as victims and others as victimizers. The world says amen to this perception. If his perception is true, then the world is unfair, and if the world is unfair, it is utter foolishness to believe in a God.
If there is a God, he must be a God of justice. So, how do we reconcile God with a world where injustice prevails everywhere?
It depends on how we define justice and injustice. Whenever something my ego considers unfair happens to me, and I am tempted to be angry, I pause and ask myself whether there is any chance I wanted to experience what just happened. If the Universe is just, I tell myself that only what I, at a deeper level, want to experience, and that that experience is good for me in some way, happen to me.
A deeper part of me schedules what happened to me. I made what happened to me happen to me. I am not a victim of accidental occurrences in my life, but an active participant in my life. I choose what happens to me. I chose it because I want to learn from it.
As the world sees these things, I am smart. In terms of measurable intelligence and educational level, I fell into the top two percent of the population. But I am not successful by most people’s standards. I was tempted to see myself as a victim and blame other people for my situation. Since I am a black person, I was tempted to blame it on racism. I considered that as a probable reason why I seem to be a failure. Thereafter, I sat back and considered whether what seemed like failure was really so.
Ultimately, I learned that failing is the best thing that could have happened to me. You see, I had a grandiose ego that felt superior to most human beings. I expected other people to see me as superior to them. In fact, I wanted people to treat me as their king, and if they did not do so, I felt angry at them. What does this apparent narcissism mean?
It means that I identified with a false, grandiose ego self. I expected the world to collaborate with me and reinforce that grandiose self. If it did, I would stay grandiose and thus be false to my real self. But by seeming to fail, I realized that what my ego perceived as the world closing doors of opportunities to me is designed by something in me, my real self, for my growth.
An unconscious part of me wanted me to fail in the existing world so that I could redirect the trajectory of my life. In failing, I stood back and considered the nature of the ego and what constitutes success.
Ultimately, I learned that I am not the ego ideal that I was striving to become. In fact, trying to become the ego ideal is a literal attack on my real self. The ego ideal then had to fail for me to pause and try to understand who my real self is.
It would be awful to live all my life without understanding my real self.
Failing in the ego’s world offered me the opportunity to find who my real self is; failing is good for me. In failing, I permitted myself to study the religions of this world; hitherto, I had dismissed them as unscientific and cavalierly disregarded them.
I studied Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen, Christianity, Islam, African religions, and so on. All of them tell me that I have a different self than the one I am conscious of. The only way that I had to remember my real self was for my ideal self, my self-concept, self-image, to fail in the ego’s world, and for me to drop out of that world.
I dropped out of the ego-based world. I tried to find out who I am and live it. I did, and the result is that I no longer feel bothered when something happens to my ideal self. In fact, I thank whatever made my ideal self-fail.
For example, whereas I used to be angry at white racists, now I am no longer angry at them. Consider white American racists. Are they, in your opinion, adult human beings? They are developmentally at the level of children under age nine. They have underdeveloped minds; they are robots constructed by the universe to do evil and seem successful, but the evidence of history is that they will be consigned to the dustbin and forgotten.
Humanity, regardless of what it seems, always remembers those who teach people to love one another, not those who ask them to hate one another.
I learned to be grateful to whatever makes my ego seem like a failure and use it to do course correction, try to figure out my real self, and try to live from that real self. I am now grateful to the person I would have seen as my victimizer because he or she helps me make corrections to my identity. In fact, that person is, from a spiritual perspective, my savior, for he or she enabled me to find out my true identity and live from it.
Living from the ego false self is literally to be in hell, to be prone to fear, anger, depression, paranoia, delusion, and other mental and emotional upsets.
Living from your real self enables you to have emotional equanimity, to live calmly, and nothing disturbs your peace and happiness.

GROUPS HAVE LESSONS TO LEARN

What applies to the individual also applies to groups. All of us invented the world we see. Whatever world we find ourselves in, we collectively made it; we are not victims of it. The world is our collective and individual handiwork, our idol, and we are proud of it.
Consider the rise of Donald Trump and white Christian Nationalists. In the USA, white racists tell themselves that their fathers came from Europe, bought African slaves, and used their individual and slave labor to cut down the virgin forests of America and develop it. They consider the natives who were already living in America as not quite human beings and do not feel bad about appropriating their land from them. Now that they believe that they have developed the land, other people, especially black and brown people, want to come live in it and enjoy a land they did not work to develop.
They want to keep these perceived interlopers who want to reap where they did not sow, out of their land. Thus, they deliberately elected Donald Trump (77 million of them voted for him, remember) to round up brown people and eventually black people and bundle them out of the land. They fund ICE and arm them to the teeth to roam around the jungle as lions and grab undocumented foreigners and send them to the perceived shithole countries they came from.
They cheer each time ICE maltreats brown and black people, even when they kill them. This seems unfair to black and brown people. But is it really?
Central and South America, Latin America in general, and Africa are composed of people. Why are they not developing their own land?
Why are the Latinos and Africans as corrupt as they are? They made a holy mess of their countries and ran to relatively well-organized USA, Canada, and Western Europe to sleep on beds they did not make.
We sleep on beds we made; if we make our beds with thorns, we must sleep on them until we remake them with feathers.
I am not interested in talking about colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, and regaling us with what Europe did to underdeveloped Africa. I was regaled by that tale when I was a college student. I am no longer a college student; I am an adult who examines reality with clear eyes.
The fact is that if Africa and Latin America are well governed, their people would not be drowning in the Mediterranean Sea to get to Europe or trying to cross the US-Mexico border and be chased like rats by ICE, apprehended, and placed in concentration camps, before being unceremoniously deported to their countries of origin.
What is happening to black and brown people, from the ego’s perspective, is humiliating; yes, white folks are humiliating them, but the lesson to be learned is for them to stay wherever they are and try to govern it well and stop making a royal mess of governance and fleeing to the white man’s land to go live in well governed lands.
If Africans govern Africa right, in one hundred years, most white folks will be trying to go to Africa to live there, but as long as Africa is, according to Trump, a shithole, white folks do not want to live in it.
They only go to Africa to extract its natural resources, and since those were deposited by nature, not Africans, they do not consider what they are doing as stealing them. Undeveloped land, John Locke told us, does not belong to those merely living on it; property is yours if you have developed it.
If I wanted to, I could take this discussion to the philosophical level. I said that the land of North America belongs to white folks. Who said so? It is white folks who said so! Certainly, God did not say so! They possess that land because they exercised force; it is military power and technology that enable people to have the land they are living on. By that token, if the Chinese or other people become powerful, there is no reason why they should not use force to appropriate the land that white Americans currently call their own.
Alternatively, we all accept collective ownership of all the lands on planet Earth and allow individuals to live wherever they want to live.
I am not sentimental and know that people have different power levels, so what is likely to occur in our world is the more powerful taking what nature gave to all of us. Enough political idealism already.

BLAMING OTHER PEOPLE FOR YOUR SITUATION GIVES YOU TEMPORARY PSEUDO SALVE BUT NOT A LASTING ONE

Blaming Europeans and white folks for the shithole that is Africa may make Africans feel psychologically happy, give them what I call ego happiness, but it does not change anything for them.
For people to change, they must undertake to do the right thing for their people and ultimately for all humanity.
Instead of blaming the colonizer for not developing your country, you develop it. Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, China, and India are developing their countries and will soon attain economic equality with their former colonial masters. Merely blaming their former colonial masters will not help Africans improve their lives.

HEALING YOUR ANXIETY AND OTHER MENTAL AND PERSONALITY DISORDERS REQUIRES JETTISONING YOUR SELF-IMAGE

All mental disorders, including anxiety, personality disorders, depression, mania, delusional disorder, and schizophrenia, have biological underpinnings. Listen, I worked in the mental health field for over two decades and saw mental disorders up close and from every possible angle. All of them have biological roots. Therefore, they have to be addressed with medical technology. That being said, there is a psychological aspect to them that can be addressed psychologically.
Consider me. I had anxiety issues. I inherited a mitochondrial disorder, Cytochrome c oxidase deficiency, and other biological issues such as spondylolysis and mitral valve prolapse. The sum of these disorders was that my childhood was traumatizing. Every little physical event was a threat to my survival, so I developed inordinate fear. I had anticipatory anxiety about things harming my fragile body. I was an anxious child. Clinically speaking, I had an anxiety disorder secondary to medical disorders. So, you would say that my anxiety disorder was not caused by me.
But I examined the nature of anxiety disorder itself. Although it has biological roots, it is also caused by one’s thoughts. In childhood, the medically compromised child tries to adapt to his impersonal environment and finds it difficult to do so. He feels inferior. He recognizes that he needs power to make it in our impersonal world. Thus, as Alfred Adler correctly observed, the somatically inferior feeling child compensates by desiring to be psychologically superior and powerful.
In Karen Horney’s terms, the weak feeling child rejects his body and tries to become a mentally constructed ideal self. He now approaches everything with fear of failing, of not becoming his ideal self. He uses the standards of the imaginary ideal self to judge himself and all people, and finds himself and people not perfect, and since he wants to seem perfect, he feels anxious from not seeming perfect.
He is now what Adler and Horney called the neurotic child. He lives with anxiety from fear of not attaining his desired grandiose self-concept and self-image. His parents may take him to medical doctors, and they give him anti-anxiety medications, the anxiolytics, and those calm his over-aroused body down. But most anxiolytics are like alcohol; they are addictive, so folks on them develop tolerance for them, both physiological and psychological addiction, and keep needing higher doses of them to reduce their anxiety. They live to seek medications to calm their bodies.
Now, if they tell themselves that they are not their bodies and ego ideal selves, not their wished-for ideal self-concept and ideal self-self-image, and believe it and stop trying to become the ideal self, stop trying to be a grandiose self, and simply accept that they do not know who they are (do you know who you are?), if they give up the desire for the ideal self, ideal self-image, and are not bothered by success and failure, they will heal their anxiety disorder.
Simply allow yourself to be. Other people may not accept you if you are just being. But other people are normal neurotics or even psychotic (have bizarre delusions and hallucinations), so ignore them and simply relax and be nothing.
You do not have to be important; you don’t have to be powerful. Accept that you are like trees, animals, part of nature, and do not have to have any mentally invented status to accept yourself.
There is this woman; she has an anxiety disorder secondary to her biological issues. In childhood, she invented an ideal self and wanted to become it; she developed a tremendous fear of not attaining that ideal self. She took herself out of the competitive world lest she try but fall.
No longer in society and competing, she simply told herself that she is her wished grandiose self. But objectively, she is a failure in society, so she feels depressed. She masks her depression by eating too much food and has gotten fat. Her delusional claims of being the most important person in the world, God, while other people are not God, is her attempt to seem important.
All she needs to do is give up the desire for ego importance and accept her real self and live with it. She is dishonoring her true self by seeking to become a false grandiose self; she is dishonoring her body by eating too much food and ballooning out.
She honors herself by accepting her unknown real self and stops being ashamed of it. Since on the IQ scales she scores at the gifted range, she could go back to school and study what she really likes, genetics (as it is her knowledge of genetics is probably more than some folks with a PhD on that subject have).

ANGER IS LARGELY PREDICATED ON SEEKING A GRANDIOSE IDEAL SELF

When I was younger and pursued an ideal, powerful self, if you did not recognize my importance, I would be angry at you. I had rigid boundaries. If you invaded my boundary and insulted me, I would feel angry. I sometimes asked staff to leave my office due to their manner of speaking to me (I was the executive director of some agencies).
Once, a young person berated me for hours on end, and I asked him to leave my office. He did not. I got up from my seat and tried to shove him out of my office, and he hit me with his fist. I immediately called the police, and he was arrested and jailed.
So, I thought, is having someone arrested and jailed making me feel powerful and superior to him? Is that real power, or is it cowardice? It is cowardice, so I did my best to release him from jail and suggested that he seek counseling (I myself tried to understand why I tried to use force to shove him out of my office; weak people resort to physical violence, strong people rely on verbal persuasion to solve problems).

WORTH IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

Worth is a social construct. In the USA, white folks are the dominant figures in the land and construct worth as belonging to white folks, especially to upper-class white folks. They do not consider black people to have worth.
What then should black people do? Allow other people to define them as worthless? Of course, they should not accept other people’s definition of them; other people are not their creator, not God; they have to define themselves and give themselves worth; worth is a social construct; a group of people can decide to see themselves as having worth. The individual can also give himself worth even if all of society sees him as worthless.
Many young black folks who have understood the game of racism withdraw respect from white folks and see them as totally lacking in worth; they have no respect for them. I know many black folks under thirty who it would take years of convincing for them to believe that a white person is a human being and has worth.
The relevant point here is that worth is a social construct and is a game that can be played by members of all races.
Of course, the correct behavior is to see all human beings, black and white, man and woman, adult and child, as having total worth and treat them with respect and dignity.