Anxiety: A Form of Vanity?

It's common to think of the words vain and ambition together. Vain ambition is often the culprit behind the downfall of people who accomplish amazing things- only to eventually "fall from grace" or to sacrifice their standards in order to maintain their status or their reputation as someone famous or well regarded by many. The annals of history are full of such examples and the plot of many a great tragedy is based on the eventual pitfalls of unbridled and vain ambition.

But what about another "a" word that is even  more common than ambition:  anxiety.   Could it be that anxiety might also be a form of vanity?  To understand this better- let's first establish a working definition for vanity. 

VANITY:  Believing  that what I want is all that really matters- often to the exclusion of what others want or what God wants.     

When we are vain we place our self-will above all else.  What we want is more important to us than what God wants or worse yet, we believe that what we want is what God wants and use that belief to justify acts that are dishonest or even evil.  Some of the worst evil that has ever been done has been done by people who have convinced themselves that their self-will is God's will and anyone who stands in the way of that must be intimidated or even eliminated.  

Another way to look at this is self-will (small s) vs. Self-will (capital s) where the self is the ego and the Self is the Spirit.  This is how traditional Hindu scripture describes the structure of life, the interplay between the self and the Self.   We can also understand vanity by looking at it's opposite:  humility.  When we are humble we recognize that we don't know.  We are open, we are teachable.  When we are vain, we think we know, we are closed minded an un-teachable.

There is a great verse from the Lao Tzu's Tao te Ching  that teaches this concept:

" When they think that they know the answers,

People are difficult to guide.

When they know that they don’t know,

People can find their own way"

The Bible too is full of cautions against vanity.  The story of Moses and Pharaoh is one of the great stories that illustrates the difference between vanity and humility.  Jesus Christ taught his entire ministry about the importance of humility and sealed his teachings with his own example when he cried in agony before the Father in Gethsemane just before being betrayed by Judas: 

"Oh my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt."   (Matt 26:39) 

So it's easy to see how vanity applies to ambition- but let's come back to that other state of mind we all know:  anxiety.  Can anxiety be another form of vanity?  I had never really considered this to be the case until I read the following passage from  the Bhagavad Gita:

"Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action are miserable

For they are constantly anxious about the results of what they do.

When consciousness is unified, however, all vain anxiety is left behind

There is no cause for worry, whether things go well or ill." 

There is so much meaning packed in those few words.   But for purposes of this article, I want to draw two key points from this passage.  First is that one of life's great lessons to learn is doing good for goodness' sake- without expectation of external "fruits" or rewards- like praise, attention, or even the satisfaction of knowing who you helped and how they were helped.   The second is the understanding of anxiety as a form of vanity.   That was a revelation to me when I first read this.  Wanting things to turn out the way we want them to and feeling anxious that they aren't or don't seem to be heading that direction is actually a form of vanity!  Wow!  Sit with that for a while, let it sink in.  Here's what I have begun to understand as I've pondered this principle: 

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