It may seem to many that giving up oneself represents a kind of cruelty on the part of fate that makes our existence a sort of bad joke. This attitude is especially true in present-day Western culture in which the self is held sacred. Yet, it is in giving up of self that human beings can find the lasting, solid joy of life.
The process of giving up the self is a gradual process which we get into by a series of fits and starts. One form of temporary giving up the self is the so called 'bracketing' (Peck, 2006) which is an absolute requirement for growth of the human spirit. Bracketing is the act of balancing the need for new knowledge by temporarily giving up one's self for the assimilation of new material. As Sam Keen describes in his book "To a Dancing God" one should go beyond the egocentric perception of the immediate experience. Mature awareness requires one to digest the prejudices that are part of the personal history. Awareness of what presents itself involves a double movement of silencing the familiar and welcoming the strange.
Each time we approach a strange person or event we tend to let our present needs, past experiences and expectations for the future determine what we will see. In Keen's words "In order to appreciate the uniqueness of any datum we should be aware of our preconceived ideas and emotional distortions to bracket them long enough to welcome strangeness and novelty into our perceptual world". This discipline or bracketing or silencing requires sohisticated self-knowledge and courageous honesty (Keen, 1996). Yet, without this discipline each present moment is only the repetition of something already seen or experienced. In order for genuine novelty to emerge we must undergo a decentralization of the ego (Keen, 1996).
As Peck (2006) claims, for all that is given up more is gained. Self-discipline is a self-enlarging process and to develop a better idea we must let die our old concepts and understandings. This lifetime is a series of simultaneous deaths and births. The further we travel on the journey of life the more births one will experience and the more joy and the more pain.
Once suffering is accepted it ceases to be a suffering. The ongoing practice of discipline leads to mastery and one evolves spiritually to a level of consciousness at which the pain of living is diminished. By virtue of this discipline, one becomes more competent at serving the world.
