Our whole life is aimed at self-accomplishment. What is the nature of this obsession?
We live with the idea, the hypothesis that there is a true nature for myself and life's meaning is to find it. To find it, we work jobs, search for vocation, attempt to better ourselves, and our life is an endless search of effort in order to realize the self.
We are miserable when we don't succeed as if a life full of success and accomplishment is only waiting to be discovered... If only we worked hard enough. In our minds, there is no self-accomplishment without effort. Effort is the force that will sculpt the statue in the perfect shape that is an accomplished self.
Everything in our life becomes a protection of the self, an effort to aggrandize the self, protect it, embellish it. And all of it is ideas on ideas, and we live in this world of ideas. We do not know reality. We do not know truth. The self is the center of recognition. The self is a tower within. And this tower isolates.
Everything is experienced from this tower within. This is isolation. This tower is built on experience, memory, ideas, opinions. The more we live, the higher the tower, and more isolated we become. Life is lived from the heights of the tower. What does not concern the tower is ignored. The tower must be solid, that means the self must be certain. Everything is made for solidity of the tower. Every brick on this tower is added for certainty. And in the process, life becomes dull and empty, because only what concerns the tower matters. Yet, life is immensely vast and greater than the small foundation of the tower.
One can see his own tower within. And as one sees it, one sees emergence the possibility of a life without it. One can contemplate from within what life is without this tower. One sees life itself.
How subtle life is, how vast, how beautiful, and how free life is when we are on foot within life itself, and not from the top of the tower. When one climbs down from his tower, one surrenders. And one feels the burden dissipating in the immensity of life and the journey that unfolds at every moment. This tower is seen from every angle at every moment. This tower is conformity. This tower is self-preservation. This tower is self-continuance. This tower is self-prevarication. There is nothing but a tower, a certain tower. And everything you ever cared about is about this tower.
Fear comes when the tower shakes. Ambition is building a higher tower. Thoughts are whispers of the tower in the wind. The mind is a force that can serve the tower, but not only.
The tower needs profits, security, and advancement. Otherwise, the tower doubt if it does not grow. When you desire, the tower plans its next level. When you are in pain, the tower doesn't get its next level. And when you have pleasure, the tower earns. Whether in pain or pleasure, the root of the tower grows deeper. For the tower is a center. The center of our lives.
You can have the highest tower within, but do you have anything if you don't have peace?