What is Greatness?
I think that we’re greater than we think, more powerful than we know, more unlimited than we could ever dream…Be greater than the conditions in your environment… be greater than the emotional habits and addictions of the body. All of the adversity in our life is to initiate us into greatness.
- Dr. Joe Dispenza
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Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst.
— C.S. Lewis
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Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you, your perceptions need you. Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it. Go home and be there for all these things.
— Thich Nhat Hahn
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We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.
— Alan Watts
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Before a child talks, they sing. Before they write, they draw. As soon as they stand, they dance. Art is essential to human expression.
— Phylicia Rashad
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My father preached greatness all his life, and strove to achieve some measure of it himself, but there’s something in that philosophy that bothers me. For one thing the word ‘greatness’ isn’t defined in that quote, so you’re left to imagine your own version of greatness.
In pursuing greatness you’re in the position of striving for something you’re not, something grander and more impressive than you know yourself to be. You may become embarrassed by your decidedly un-noble attributes and try to hide from them, which set up a conflict, a lie.
As a successful captain of industry, for example, your greatness is proven by your mastery over money and success, two things that in my mind, at least, are not proof of greatness. That kind of greatness doesn’t confer wisdom, it just shows you can manipulate and dominate challenges put before you by your society. But confusing strategic wiliness with genuine depth of soul is strangely common in our culture.
We do have creative powers in us, but they are more likely to be accessed through play rather than calculation. Creativity without playful enjoyment of the process is unthinkable because it’s what brings inspiration and insight and beauty to the fore.
It’s work to create something beautiful, but it’s still a soul satisfying endeavor. It’s a pleasurable work. Overcoming rivals and opposition might be fun for some folks, but for me it looks boring because it doesn’t look fun or beautiful or insightful. It’s just a sweaty wrestling match. No thanks, I’ll be over here peering into Reality itself and maybe learning something about God and having a revelation. I’ll leave greatness to more ambitious souls.
I admit I don’t really understand the search for greatness. The search for truth, for realness, for insight and wisdom, now that’s interesting, but to approach that world you proceed with your simple delight in truth. We like to bring competition into everything we do but that’s just ego stuff that gets in the way of real creativity, which is a form of love in the end.
The ego likes ‘winning,’ whatever that is, but the soul is more interested in living deeply enough to understand and experience why we exist. The soul needs beauty. I’m not sure it needs winning at all. In the beginning of our lives, before we were absorbed into the wider culture, we already knew why we are here and what we should be doing, and it has to do with joy, with play and creativity. We all start out as artists of some kind, before the social expectations get hold of us.
Great people obviously exist, but I doubt they are trying to be great. They’re probably just following their true talents and passions and having a great time doing it.
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Volume four of my series Meditations on Living is now published on Amazon. If you read it, please leave a review.
Here’s one:
Insightful and eloquent musings on the human condition
A regular contributor on Medium, David Price’s articles caught my attention a couple of years ago. Combined with stunning artwork — some of which is his own — and often wonderful quotes from celebrated sources, his daily submissions became a fixture with my morning coffee. He combines an almost poetic prose with razor-sharp insights into the state of humanity and the world we’ve created. Time and again I’ve been thoroughly impressed by his views of the state of things, both the good and the bad, views that will often follow me around all day. This book is a collection of a number of his articles, and I highly recommend it.
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It will look like this:
