There was a time when I measured myself by potential. I carried a quiet belief that something in me exceeded the common measure — that given the right conditions, some latent capacity would declare itself and matter in a way the world would recognize. That belief organized a great deal of my interior life. It was not vanity exactly. It felt more like a promissory note I held on myself, waiting for the circumstances that would make it good.
Those circumstances did not arrive. And in the slow dissolving of that expectation, something happened that I did not anticipate. I did not find defeat. I did not find emptiness. I found, instead, a ground I had been standing on the entire time without knowing it — something steady and unhurried and alive beneath the story I had been telling about myself.
What I discovered was not that I am ordinary in the diminished sense of the word. I discovered that the ordinary itself had been misread. That what I had dismissed as the common lot of unremarkable human life was in fact threaded through with something I can only call Source — not as a reward for exceptional souls but as the very substance of all souls, without condition or distinction.
This is not a story about learning to settle. It is a story about learning to see. And what I saw, when the myth of specialness finally quieted, astonished me.
Introduction
We live inside stories about ourselves. This is not a flaw in human consciousness — it is one of its most characteristic features. From our earliest years we begin assembling a narrative: who we are, what we are capable of, what destiny, talent, or inner fire might set us apart from the common current of human life. These stories serve us. They give shape to ambition, fuel to effort, meaning to suffering. The belief that one is somehow more — more gifted, more destined, more awake — can carry a person through decades of striving.
But the story is not the self. And for many, perhaps for most who walk a sincere interior path, there comes a moment when the story simply stops being believed. Not through a dramatic unmasking, but through a quieter erosion. The opportunities that did not come. The abilities that proved themselves average. The slow recognition that what one imagined about oneself did not correspond to what one actually is.
What do we do in that moment? The spiritual traditions of the world offer a surprising answer. They suggest that this dissolution — this falling away of self-mythology — is not a loss at all. It is, in fact, an arrival. The beginning of something more real than anything the constructed self could have offered.
What Is the Self We Mourn?
When the belief in one’s special capacity begins to fade, what exactly is it that grieves? The Vedantic tradition has a precise name for the self that constructs and defends these narratives: ahamkara — literally, the I-maker. It is the faculty of consciousness that draws a boundary around a particular stream of experience and says: this is me, this is mine, this is what I am. Ahamkara is not pathological. It is necessary. Without some functional sense of self, no thought could be completed, no love sustained, no action taken.
But ahamkara tends toward elaboration. It does not content itself with the bare fact of existing. It reaches for identity, for distinction, for significance. And so the I-maker builds a myth: I am someone who possesses unusual potential. I am someone toward whom life owes a particular unfolding. I am someone whose inner depth surpasses what appears on the surface.
Jung called this the persona — the face we present to the world and, more dangerously, to ourselves. The inflation of the persona, the unconscious identification with an idealized self-image, is not vanity in the ordinary sense. It is the soul’s way of asserting its own worth before it has learned that worth requires no assertion. The myth of specialness is, at its root, a misdirected cry for the sacred. We reach for greatness because we sense, dimly, that we were made for something beyond the merely mechanical. We are not wrong in that sensing. We are only wrong about the address.
What the Mystics Understood About Falling
Every serious mystical tradition contains, at its heart, a theology of dissolution. The Sufi path names it fana — the annihilation of the ego-self in the fire of the Divine. But fana is not the end of the Sufi journey. It is followed by baqa: subsistence, return, the self reconstituted not around its own mythology but around something that does not require defense. What dies in fana is not the person. It is the person’s insistence on being exceptional. What survives in baqa is something quieter, more durable, and — the Sufis insist — more genuinely itself.
The Christian kenosis holds a parallel wisdom. The word means self-emptying, drawn from the Philippian hymn in which the Divine itself is described as having poured itself out, taken on the form of a servant, entered the ordinary without remainder. Kenosis is not humiliation in the modern sense — it is not the crushing of the self but the liberation of the self from its own inflation. Teresa of Ávila, writing from the interior castle of her prayer, described the progressive dissolution of self-importance as the soul’s movement toward its truest room. The soul does not shrink. It expands into a space that self-mythology had previously made too small.
In the Zen tradition, the teaching is perhaps most blunt: ordinary mind is the Way. Not the extraordinary mind, not the mind that has achieved or perceived or transcended. The mind that wakes, eats, works, and sleeps — that mind, fully inhabited, is the very thing the seeker has been looking for. The tenth ox-herding picture does not show a saint ablaze with supernatural fire. It shows an ordinary person returning to the village, carrying nothing, hands empty, face open.
The Ordinary as the Face of Oneness
What does it mean to say that the ordinary is sacred? Not that it can become sacred through the right quality of attention, not that it points toward something sacred beyond itself — but that it is, in its plainest and most unremarkable form, already a direct expression of the Oneness that underlies all things?
The traditions that have pressed deepest into the nature of reality keep returning to this. Advaita Vedanta does not teach that Brahman — the undivided ground of all existence — is located in the elevated, the rare, the spiritually accomplished. It teaches that Brahman is the only thing that exists, wearing every form without exception. The face of the stranger passing in the street. The texture of an ordinary afternoon. The unremarkable fact of being alive on an unremarkable day. These are not lesser expressions of the Oneness. They are the Oneness, undecorated.
This is what Ramakrishna could not unfeel. His tears at a blade of grass were not sentiment. They were recognition — the shock of perceiving, without the usual filters of hierarchy and preference, that this ordinary thing was made of the same substance as everything he called Divine. Not similar to it. Not a symbol of it. The thing itself.
The Sufi poets circled this endlessly. When Rumi wrote of the reed’s cry, he was not describing an exceptional soul’s longing. He was describing the universal condition — every soul, average and extraordinary alike, separated from Source and aching toward return. The cry is common. The longing is common. And it is precisely the commonness of it that makes it the truest language Source has for speaking to itself through human form.
What this means — and it is worth sitting with the full weight of it — is that the ordinary life, fully lived, is not a compromise with the sacred. It is the sacred at its most honest. The Divine does not require exceptional vessels. It requires only open ones. And the opening, when it comes, does not reveal something rare. It reveals what was always and already everywhere — in the unremarkable morning, in the average face, in the common breath of a human being simply present to their own existence.
To recognize this is not to settle. It is to stop turning away from what was offered all along.
The Sacredness Hidden in the Common
To call something ordinary is, in the modern imagination, to diminish it. Ordinary means unremarkable, interchangeable, easily replaced. But this is a poverty of perception, not a fact about the world. The contemplative traditions read the ordinary very differently. They see in it not the absence of the sacred but its most faithful dwelling.
Ramakrishna, the great Bengali mystic of the nineteenth century, wept at the sight of a blade of grass. Not as a performance of piety but because he could not, in that moment, distinguish the grass from the Divine. Every particular thing, in its very particularity, carried for him the full weight of the sacred. There was nothing that was merely ordinary in his perception — and yet he lived, in most outward respects, a remarkably simple life. His greatness, if we must use the word, lay precisely in his inability to find anything that was not great.
Rumi, writing from within the Sufi ache for the Beloved, returned again and again to the image of the reed cut from the reed bed — not an exceptional reed, not a reed of unusual capacity, but simply a reed, separated from its source and crying. The cry is not the cry of the special. It is the cry of the human. And it is exactly that cry, common to every soul that breathes, which the Beloved hears and answers.
There is a democracy in this. The soul that has relinquished its claims to exceptionalism does not find itself impoverished. It finds itself, for perhaps the first time, in genuine company — with every human being who has ever lived an unremarked life with full sincerity. Which is to say: nearly everyone who has ever lived.
What Remains When the Story Falls Away
When the narrative of special potential dissolves, something remains. This is the part that the dissolution makes visible. In Vedantic terms, what was always present beneath the ahamkara is Atman — not a personal soul elevated above others but the universal consciousness individuated, temporarily, in this particular form. The falling of the ego-story is not the falling of the self. It is the falling of the self’s mistaken address.
Jung spoke of individuation not as the achievement of greatness but as the becoming-whole of the person. Wholeness includes the shadow, the wound, the limitation, the ordinariness. The individuated person is not someone who has transcended the human condition. They are someone who has, at last, consented to it. That consent — full, unresisted, without the consolation of a private myth of specialness — is among the most difficult and the most liberating acts available to a human being.
What remains, when the story falls away, is the bare fact of being. And the bare fact of being, when seen clearly, turns out to be astonishing. Not because it is rare. Because it is not. Because every living soul shares it equally, regardless of talent, achievement, recognition, or the particular story that has organized their life. The ground beneath every human story is the same ground. And that ground is sacred.
Epilogue
The beliefs we carry about our own potential are not lies exactly — they are early translations of a real intuition. The soul does sense something extraordinary in itself. It is not wrong. It is only reaching for that extraordinariness in the wrong direction — outward, toward achievement and distinction, rather than inward, toward the simple and inexhaustible fact of its own existence.
When those beliefs dissolve, when the opportunities do not come and the abilities prove themselves average and the private myth of specialness quietly loses its power, something is given that could not have been given any other way. The ordinary is returned to us. Not as consolation. As revelation.
To be a human being — limited, unremarkable, carried forward by breath and love and the small faithful acts of a day — is not the lesser version of some greater life that never arrived. It is the life. And it has always been enough. It has always, in the deepest sense, been more than enough.
The common soul is not common at all. It only looks that way from the outside. From the inside, from the place where the I-maker has finally rested and the breath continues and the morning comes again without requirement — from that place, it is the whole of everything.
Sources and References
Swami Vivekananda — The Complete Works, particularly the lectures on Jnana Yoga and the nature of the Atman Sri Ramakrishna — The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, as recorded by Mahendranath Gupta (M.) Jalal ad-Din Rumi — The Masnavi, translated by Jawid Mojaddedi; The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks C.G. Jung — The Collected Works, Vol. 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology; Vol. 9i: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious Teresa of Ávila — The Interior Castle, translated by Mirabai Starr Thomas Merton — New Seeds of Contemplation Philippians 2:7 (kenosis passage) — New Revised Standard Version Zen Ox-Herding Pictures — commentary by Yamada Koun Roshi Al-Hallaj and Sufi teachings on fana and baqa — as discussed in Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam
Numinous Waves 