Rosseau wrote the following in Emile. "Any man whether he's
a king, or a noble, or a millionaire, is born naked and poor, and
when he dies, he must die naked and poor." This is certainly the
absolute truth. However we aren't naked during the entire time
from birth until death. We all wear some kind of clothes during
our lifetime. There are people who wear splendid and gorgeous
clothes like a queen's and people who must spend their whole
life wearing poor, tattered rags. Some people wear army uniforms;
others, prison clothes; and others, monk's robes.
Actually, these clothes aren't limited only to those made of
cloth, but of course, there are the clothes of class, status, fame,
and wealth. They're the clothes of nobles, company presidents,
congressmen, and millionaires. I say these are clothes because
there will always be a time when a man is stripped naked of things
like class, status, fame, and wealth. There are also clothes called
'beautiful woman' and 'genius.' No matter how beautiful a
woman is, there will finally come the time when she must change
clothes and wear the garb of an old woman. And the genius must
in the end change into the clothes called 'senility.' Likewise, there
are the clothes 'superiority complex,' 'inferiority complex,' 'happiness,' and 'unhappiness,' and further the ones called 'so-and-so
ism,' 'so-and-so race,' and 'so-and-so people.' Also people change
from one system of thought or ism to the next, and when it's
time to die, doesn't a man even take off his old clothes of racial
distinction and die as a completely naked 'I'?
Even though these are just clothes that we wear in the interval
between naked birth and naked death, almost all people are taken
in by only these clothes. They think that the entire problem of
living is out of all these clothes, which nice ones will they wear?
And isn't it true that they never once ask the questions: "What
is the self which is the reality of life?" "What is the naked self?"
In other words, what I previously described as a relationship
which is determined from the outside and balanced against other
people and things is the same as the 'clothes' I'm talking about
now. At any rate, while we are now certainly living out our 'I,'
we are not in fact living out the reality of the true self. We are
only concerned with the 'clothes' during the interval when we
are alive, or the self which is determined from the outside and
balanced against others. It seems we assume that this is all there
is in life.
As long as this is so, it is not at all strange that people should
find an emptiness in their lives. Whether they suffer from an inferiority
complex (Figure 2.) or burn with the spirit of competition
(Figure 3) or have a superiority complex (Figure 4)
it's only natural that they all feel the same hollowness in their
lives. "To rely on others is to be uneasy." A man can find no true
peace of mind until he lives out the reality of the life of the self,
until "The abode of the self is only the self."
