I have lost count of the people I have met who doubt their worth. They doubt it while succeeding. They doubt it while the mark they leave on others is there for them to see. Then they try to beat the doubt with whatever they can gather: fame, money, certificates, titles. They accumulate, believing this is how worth is raised, deserving increased, standing lifted. And they keep running.
I do not think the running cures the doubt. A person gathers things whose nature is to be lost, and asks them for reassurance.
I have no verdict to hand you ready made. I have what I have seen in my work with people, and there have been many. I have what the dictionaries gave me when I went back to them. And I have what I keep returning to in the Book of my Lord. I want to separate three words we blur every day: deserving, worth, and standing. Then I want to read a chapter of the Qur'an that is three verses long, and see where these words fall in it. What follows is an Islamic reading. I write it for anyone who has felt that race.
Three words we blur
I went back to the dictionary before writing, because the confusion that wears people down is a confusion of words before it is a confusion of feelings.
To deserve comes from a Latin verb that meant to serve well. Deserving is a verdict: something has become due to someone because of what they did. We say it both ways in daily speech. He deserves the promotion. He deserves the punishment.
Worth, in its oldest English sense, is what a thing is equal to in value: what it would take to stand in its place. When a mother tells her son "you are precious to me," she is saying that nothing stands in his place. He is worth himself.
Esteem is from the Latin for appraising a thing, putting a price on it. The same root gave us estimate. Standing is the English word for what that appraisal leaves you with: what others measure in you.
Three words. Worth is what your existence stands on. Standing is what people measure of you. Deserving is a verdict passed for you or against you on the basis of one of the two. The seeker of fame and money raises his standing among people in order to convince himself that he has worth. It does not happen.
What the commentators said, and what I read
﴿وَالْعَصْرِ إِنَّ الْإِنسَانَ لَفِي خُسْرٍ إِلَّا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا وَعَمِلُوا الصَّالِحَاتِ وَتَوَاصَوْا بِالْحَقِّ وَتَوَاصَوْا بِالصَّبْرِ﴾
"By time. The human being is surely in loss. Except those who believe, and do righteous deeds, and counsel one another with truth, and counsel one another with patience." (Qur'an 103:1-3)
God swears by time, then declares that the human being, every human being, is in loss. Then He makes an exception.
Ibn Kathir reports the saying of al-Shafi'i: if people reflected on this chapter, it would suffice them. I read what the commentators said about the loss. Al-Tabari makes it diminishment and ruin. Ibn Kathir makes it loss and ruin for all but the excepted. Al-Razi goes to an image I love: a person's capital is his lifetime, and every hour that passes is a withdrawal from the capital. He relates from one of the early Muslims: I learned the meaning of this chapter from an ice seller who was calling out, have mercy on a man whose capital is melting.
I stop at this image and read it slowly. What melts? And what, if anything in a human being, does not melt?
I found in myself, and in the people I have worked with, that what melts is the whole material side of a person. I call it the outer being. And what grows, in those who are excepted, is the side a person stands on from within: what he believes and builds himself upon. I call it the inner being. This is my contemplative reading. I place it after the commentators, not in their place.
The outer being: the side that melts
The outer being, as I mean it, is everything in you and yours that is matter. Your body. Your health. Your money and your possessions. Your certificates, titles and position. Everything you have acquired.
Even your relationships. These are the heaviest item on the list. Our relationships are built on behaviour, and what is built on behaviour changes when the behaviour changes. My relationship with my son as a child is over. It did not end badly. It ended because he grew up. What is between us today is another relationship, with another man. I lost one relationship and was given another, and one day I will lose this one too.
Others saw this long before us. The Prophet ﷺ said: "The feet of a servant will not move on the Day of Resurrection until he is asked about his lifetime and how he used it up, his knowledge and what he did with it, his wealth, where he earned it and where he spent it, and his body and how he wore it out." A sound tradition, recorded by al-Tirmidhi, who graded it good and sound; al-Albani graded it sound. Look at the verbs. Used up. Wore out. Spent. Verbs of melting. Three of the four questions are about the melting things, lifetime and body and wealth, and the question each time is the same: on what?
The teachers of the Sufi path had a word for the work on this side: emptying. I take it here in one of its meanings, loosening your attachment to what is made to leave. Not hating it. Not throwing it away. Holding it with a hand you know will be opened.
The inner being: the side that grows
The inner being is what you hold true, and the self you build on it.
Because I work in this inner side every day, I need to draw you its map as I see it in Somatic Thinking. Your mental awareness, your mind for short, is a container. It holds your self, and other things this article has no room for. Your self is your answer to the question "who am I": your thoughts, your convictions, your points of view, your identity, everything that runs in your head about yourself, the world and the people around you. It has three components in constant interaction.
The persona weaves your beliefs about how people see you and how you see them. The ego weaves your beliefs about how you see yourself, regardless of people. I do not mean the ego of everyday speech, the arrogant one. I mean the part of you that holds what you believe you are. The two sets of beliefs are compared with each other all the time, sometimes with your awareness and sometimes without it. People tell you: well done. And you feel you did not do well. Just a feeling. You do not know why you cannot take their appreciation. Most often there is a belief in the ego, one you are not aware of, that you are not doing well. The two beliefs fight, with or without your awareness, and you live in a state of dissatisfaction.
And the reverse. People tell you well done, and you did do well, and you consciously hold an inner belief that you gave it all you had. The two beliefs agree, and you live in a state of contentment and quiet joy. This state is the third component. I call it the tranquil self.
For us it is a temporary state. It resembles, I think, what God named in His Book: "O tranquil self, return to your Lord, well pleased and pleasing." (Qur'an 89:27-28) The difference, as I understand it, is that the one in the verse remains after death, because the triggers of this world are gone. Ours we enter only when the two beliefs agree, and we lose it the moment we engage with life's situations again. This is a likeness I draw, and I offer it to you as no more than that.
Identity lives inside the self. It is part of the inner being, not the whole of it.
Now look at the one who accumulates fame, money and titles. What he gathered is real, and it counts for him. But everything he gathers feeds the persona, because it changes what people see. Some of it feeds the ego, because it changes what he sees in the mirror. And the tranquil self does not come by feeding. It comes when the two beliefs agree, and in him they do not.
The hunger is in one place. The food is thrown in another.
The worth of a stone
Consider a stone on a road. It has worth. Its worth is that it was created, and that it has a place in this universe put there by the One who created it. The stone did not build its worth. And what is true of a stone is truer of a human being: "We have honoured the children of Adam." (Qur'an 17:70) The honouring comes first. Before your work, your certificate and your position, and before anyone's opinion of you.
So worth, as I see it, lives in the inner being, before anything the persona and the ego weave. What you add in knowledge and character grows it. It was there before the adding.
This is why losing a role can feel like losing yourself. When your whole identity is that you are "the manager" or "the doctor" or "the mother," the moment the role goes you feel you are lost. Your worth was not lost. What was lost is the assumption that it lived in the role.
Deserving: three doors
I said deserving is a verdict. The question that separates things is: who is the judge? In my work I have seen three doors this verdict comes through, and they get mixed up.
At the first door, God judged when He created. Nothing was earned there. Every being, by the fact of its creation, has what God granted it: the stone its place, and you your breath.
At the second door, others judge. "This is someone who deserves appreciation." "You deserve respect." This belongs to standing. It comes from outside and changes as people change.
At the third door, you judge yourself: do I deserve what I receive? This door wears people down more than the two before it.
I have found people who feel they do not deserve even the breath they draw. And I have seen more of another kind: people on whom blessings arrive, who live in a quiet conviction that they do not deserve them. They are given and feel ashamed. They are thanked and look for the mistake. They are promoted and wait for the day they will be found out. This is the state people today call impostor syndrome. I see it at the third door: people say he deserves it, and in his ego there is a belief he is not aware of that he does not, so the two beliefs fight and the tranquil self does not come. And a belief that was woven can be woven again.
The same door has a danger on the other side: the one whose standing rose among people and who came to think that his standing makes them owe him something. That is arrogance, and the persona weaves it.
Standing and measure
Your standing among people belongs to the outer being. It rises with a position and falls when the position goes, and it shifts as the people watching you shift. Whoever seeks peace from his standing seeks it in a market that never settles.
There is another word beside it. "Surely We created everything by measure." (Qur'an 54:49) The verse is usually read as God's decree over all things. I also hear in it the measure you were created in, the scale you were weighed on before anyone weighed you. In Arabic the word for standing and the word for measure are written with the same three letters, and only a vowel mark tells them apart. I read in that meeting: you have a standing that changes with people's eyes, and you have a measure that came before their eyes. This is my reading of the words. I offer it to you as such.
What grows
Back to the chapter. The exception has four parts: those who believe, do righteous deeds, counsel one another with truth, and counsel one another with patience. I read them as steps, each standing on the one before. The order matters. Then I look at where each step falls between the outer being and the inner being.
Belief is in the inner being, in the deepest of what you hold true. And for me it is work that never stops. I told you that the persona and the ego weave your beliefs all the time. Belief, as I live it, is to review that weaving and sift it: what do I truly believe? And what slipped into my beliefs without my choosing it? This continuous review is, for me, the core of educating the self, in a sense of the word I will come back to.
Then righteous action. After you have laboured in the review, you polish it with action, and your behaviour comes into agreement with what you believe. Sometimes you will need to adjust the behaviour. At other times you will need to adjust what you believe. This polishing between the two is what I call human development, or education, in a single word. And it is the place where the outer being meets the inner being: you spend your lifetime, your body and your money, all of them melting, on something that stays. "Wealth and children are the adornment of the life of this world. But the lasting righteous deeds are better with your Lord in reward, and better in hope." (Qur'an 18:46) I read it this way: wealth and children belong to the outer being, and the verse calls them adornment. The lasting deeds carry their meaning in their name.
Had the matter stopped there, a person would live occupied with himself alone. So comes counselling one another with truth. The truth we counsel with, as I read it, is what we discovered from the results of our attempt to act on what we believe. What was revealed to you in the trying is what you counsel your family, your community and all people with. This is what remained to me of my relationship with my son as a child after it melted: what we counselled each other with inside it did not melt. He carried it with him into the man he became. The relationship belongs to the outer being. The truth that passes through it belongs to the inner being. Two Companions of the Prophet ﷺ, when they met, would not part until one had recited this chapter to the other. Recorded by al-Tabarani; al-Albani graded it sound. They counselled one another with the very chapter that commands counselling.
The chapter has one more step. When you counsel someone with a truth you have lived, you expect him to follow it. And expectations can kill you. That is not how the human self works: you may counsel with truth, and no one follows. Here patience becomes due, as a trait in you and as a counsel you carry to people. From the door of this verse I read the step of patience: "God does not change what is in a people until they change what is in themselves." (Qur'an 13:11) Change begins inside a person, and no one can make it for him. What is in your hands is to counsel, and to be patient. This is my contemplative reading, not an exegesis.
I later found my reading, in another form, in Ibn al-Qayyim's Miftah Dar al-Sa'ada, the Key to the Abode of Happiness. He writes that the ranks are four, and by completing them a person reaches the utmost of his perfection: knowing the truth, acting on it, teaching it to those who do not know it, and bearing patiently the learning, the acting and the teaching. Then he says: God mentioned the four ranks in this chapter.
This is also how I hear the word education. The Latin behind it, educare, meant to bring up and rear a child, in body and in mind, and the Romans used it of plants and animals too. The Arabic word for the same work has a root that means to grow, to increase. In both tongues, the one who educates you is the one who makes you grow from within.
The greater loss
One question remains. If the outer being melts for everyone, what does the one who is not excepted lose?
"Say: the losers are those who lose themselves and their families on the Day of Resurrection. Indeed, that is the manifest loss." (Qur'an 39:15)
They lost themselves. The greater loss is there, in the inner being. Al-Razi came before me when he described the loss as the ruin of one's self and one's lifetime. And I read: whoever gathered what melts and neglected a self that could have grown, gathered two losses.
Kun
Everything I have named in this article grows from one root. The two Arabic words behind the outer being and the inner being both come from the verb to be, the verb of existence itself. English keeps a trace of this: the word being sits in both. "His command, when He wills a thing, is only to say to it: Be, and it is." (Qur'an 36:82)
Years ago I named my work after that word. Kun: be. To be before you own.
The key: what melts from you, you will be asked about. What grows in you stays yours. And the melting is spent on what stays.
If you find yourself counting what you have gathered, certificates or balances or titles, ask: which of the two have I been feeding?
For those who want to see the outer being and the inner being in the movement and stillness of the Prophet ﷺ, I have gathered it in a separate paper: «The Harmony of the Outer and Inner Being in the Prophetic Movement».
