Brave New Kitty

I am not a big fan of reality television. Whether it’s people thrown into a difficult situation so we can see their ruthlessness blossom or fade (a la Survivor and Big Brother), being coached by obnoxiously charismatic experts to perform unpleasant tasks in order to win a prize (Biggest Loser type shows), or people who engage in humiliating acts and/or competitions, also to win a prize (such as The Bachelor), I find most of these shows embarrassingly awful. I can give several reasons, the main one probably being that reality shows aren’t real. Everything about them is staged (and usually badly). Maybe it’s just entertainment, and nothing to get too worked up about. Yet the popularity of these reality shows, with their bad acting, low-quality production, painfully predictable plots, and palpable insincerity, has truly puzzled me. What is the appeal, I’ve often wondered.

I used to think it was the fifteen minutes of fame thing. (Andy Warhol’s prediction that fame would somehow become ubiquitous was eerily perceptive.) The desire for fame is something I have never understood. The thought of being known, evaluated, and judged (or even admired, which in many ways must be a heavier burden) by millions of people makes me cringe; I see it as something a person would have to tolerate as a side effect of being really, really good at something; never an end in itself. But I know that attitude puts me in the minority, and that fame is a powerful allure for many people. Reality television offers the opportunity for fame, however ephemeral, like no other venue. It doesn’t require beauty, wealth, or even talent, only the willingness to follow some simple directions, endure some unpleasant circumstances (but never dangerous ones, no matter how much viewers are encouraged to think otherwise), and embrace public humiliation with cheerful abandon. If you are willing to do any of these things and have a strong drive for recognition, then you can be on a reality television show.

But the desire for fame only explains part of the equation. What about the audience? People who watch, week after week, to see who gets eliminated and who advances, and what dreadful acts they must perform to reach that point of judgment? A few years back, a friend of mine remarked that public humiliation had become the new American pasttime, right up there with gambling and living beyond our means. I think she was absolutely right, that Americans do seem obsessed with watching other people do humiliating things, so much so that this humiliation has become the basis for many a TV show. It doesn’t have to be staged reality, either; America’s Funniest Home Videos, for example, also captures this mean-spirited sentiment, as does Cops, as do many popular sitcoms and game shows of the last decade. Then there are the reality shows featuring celebrity has-beens in all sorts of undignified situations. People simply love to watch other people engage in embarrassing, degrading, value-compromising acts. We delight in it. We can’t seem to get enough of it!

We are voyeuristic by nature, always wondering what somebody else’s fate means for our own, always comparing ourselves to see if we measure up, maybe secretly relieved when we don’t actually have to find out. Reality TV offers a lot of opportunity to imbibe in these impulses. But I’m not sure this is anything new. I mean, what could be more voyeuristic, or humiliating, than a public hanging, or pitting Christians against lions for an audience’s viewing pleasure?

Voyeurism–the sense of titillation we get from seeing other people in bad situations (and not in the sexually deviant sense here)–has always been a popular human activity, I think for good reason. There is a side of the human psyche that must somehow come to terms with all the awful aspects of conscious awareness, all the existential anxiety and suffering for which there is really no solution. A part of us has always sought outlets for this, mostly at a level beneath our awareness. Watching other people in moments of weakness makes us feel a little stronger, maybe a little less alone with our fears. It’s not that we benefit from the suffering and humiliations of others, exactly, but psychologically, we sort of do. The impulse to distract ourselves from the unpleasant parts of life is normal–as is the impulse to stand at the edge of the abyss and stare into it. Voyeurism offers people an opportunity to do both, but in a benign, non-threatening way. And reality television does this really well.

But besides feeling relief, or compassion, or just less alone with your humanity, I think reality TV provides an even more important psychological function, and that is a sense of certainty. Lack of ambiguity is, more than anything else, the real appeal of reality television.

In real life, there are no black and white situations, just infinite shades of gray. While we have free will and the capacity to improve our lives to the best of our ability, any event or circumstance can come along at any moment and swipe away all our hard work and accomplishments. Luck and fate make certain that we are never really in control of our own lives, no matter how much we want to think we are. We can do everything right and suffer; we can do everything wrong and come out ahead. The only concrete fact of life is a morbid one: everything else is pretty much up for grabs, unknown and unpredictable. And all of us, on some level, know this.

None of this is the case in reality television. You may not know what the contest is going to be this week, and you may not know who wins and who gets eliminated, but you know beyond doubt that there will be a contest, that somebody will win, and that somebody else will lose. Regardless of the particular premise, reality TV is set in a finite universe that is fully, completely controllable, with no surprises and no real drama. It is formulaic and predictable in a way we all sometimes wish, secretly and in vain, that our lives could be; I think most of us would even prefer losing to not knowing the outcome.

In watching these shows, there is always a sense of that could be me, and unlike watching actors and movie stars, it really could be you. And if it were, you would be living in a world of certainty, where what was coming next could only be one of a few options, and you would know exactly what they were. It is a fantasy we all have at one time or another, a way we deal with all the unknowns and ultimate lack of control in real life. These shows not only distract us from our problems, like all entertainment, but they blur the lines between fact and fiction and tantalize us with the possibility of living in a controllable universe. This is a powerful allure, even if we don’t know it while we’re watching; maybe especially if we don’t know it.

I’m probably making too much of this. After all, it’s just television, right? But I don’t think a steady diet of insincerity and fiction-masquerading-as-fact is good for the soul. These shows are embarrassingly predictable. The participants are all caricatures of common stereotypes: the hot 20-something girl or guy; the man approaching middle age who’s looking for adventure; the middle-aged businessman who wants a shot at something bigger; the mother of three who’s doing something exciting for the first time in her life; etc., etc. What passes for character development is maudlin statements like, “I’m doing this for my dead father, who loved me very much.” What passes for conflict is envy and contrived competition. There is no underlying meaning to any of it. It is all very superficial, very safe, and ultimately, very uninteresting. Yes, it’s just television, but it’s bad television. It encourages us to live on the surface because we believe that’s how other people are doing it; thus, it encourages superficiality as a viable value.

Shudder.

I think it’s the difference between art and titillation. While good art–a great novel, movie, painting, etc.–will distract you from your problems, it will also make you see things in a new light; it expands your awareness somehow. You step away from it with a new perspective. Titillation, on the other hand, has the same power to distract (maybe even more power), but it is an empty shell. It arouses our baser desires and demands nothing more: no message, no meaning, no attempt to stir the soul. Just cheap thrills for the senses, false promises of security, a lack of ambiguity that doesn’t exist. It’s kind of like Las Vegas (gambling being the ultimate example of titillation): It’s okay to go there once in awhile, but living there would be mind-numbingly, soul-sappingly awful.

Much like the Las Vegas Strip, reality television entertains by titillation. If we know this going in, and have some sense of self-awareness about why the shows appeal to us (and each of us must draw our own conclusions about this), then they are mostly harmless. But if we lack such awareness, we are at risk of believing that superficiality–and thus, lack of ambiguity–is a value worth striving for, which moves us yet another step further away from seeking and knowing our own messy, complex, wonderful inner values.

Q: What makes one ripe? What is the ripening factor?
M: Earnestness, of course…After all, the realized [enlightened] man is the most earnest man. Whatever he does, he does it completely, without limitations and reservations. Integrity will take you to reality.
–from “I Am That, Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

There’s a great book about spirituality called I Am That. Nisargadatta Maharaj was as close to the cliche of a spiritual guru living on a secluded mountaintop as anyone could get in modern times. People the world over visited him in India to ask questions about the spiritual path. Maharaj didn’t exactly write I Am That, but somebody was wise enough to record his answers to the people who sought him out, and this book is the result. It’s a terrific book, and one I recommend highly to anyone seeking spiritual understanding.

The reason I mention the book, though, is that in it, Maharaj talks a lot about the quality of earnestness. Over and over, he tells people that if they’re earnest, they’ll find what they’re seeking; that earnestness isn’t merely something required, it is all that’s required. I had never thought much about earnestness before I read this book. In the years since, though, I’ve realized that earnestness not only embodies much of what we are striving to be, but also how we will achieve it. And when trying to define admirable traits in a person–or more importantly, perhaps, lack thereof–earnestness is an idea that covers a lot of ground. If earnestness can bring spiritual understanding and enlightenment, imagine what it can do for other areas of a person’s life.

At dictionary.com, earnestness is defined as serious in intention, purpose, or effort; showing depth and sincerity of feeling. I would add that earnestness means a person is more concerned with doing right than with being right. Earnest people aren’t perfect. They get moody, lose their tempers, and hurt their loved ones like all human beings do. But earnest people will admit their wrongdoing, apologize sincerely, and work toward mutual understanding and benefit. Not because it is in their best interest to do so (although it is), but because they care about doing what’s right. Earnest people care about things like honesty, kindness, willingness, open-mindedness, and perseverance. They are sort of walking definitions of virtue (another underused word these days).

Earnest people are easy to communicate with. They almost always say what’s on their minds, straightforwardly and openly, without hidden agendas. They tell you what they’re thinking and feeling, or are clear that they’re not ready to for their own reasons. In general, you know where you stand with an earnest person. This is why, in personal relationships, and in particular with a significant other, you must strive to pick the most earnest people you can. There are few things in life that cause more misery than when you can’t trust that the people closest to you are earnest; that they say what they mean, mean what they say, and are straightforward with you about their thoughts and feelings.

This brings me to my central point, which is that often, very earnest people don’t pick earnest companions. This isn’t the case for all earnest people, but it is true for many. The reasons for this lie, not surprisingly, in a person’s childhood conditioning. Many earnest people got that way by trying to please an emotionally distant parent; in an effort to gain approval, they developed an overarching desire to be good and perseverance at doing so. But earnestness developed this way has potential for problems in adulthood.

One problem is that an invalidating environment can cause children to doubt their instincts and feelings. Rather than be encouraged to be confident in their own sense of right and wrong, as well as their ability to make these judgments accurately (something we all need to do well in order to get along in the world), they are taught that their feelings aren’t important and that their perceptions are silly, wrong, or bad. So they learn to deny, ignore, and otherwise disown their capacity to make emotional sense of the world–especially when it comes to assessing how their parents treat them. In adulthood, this lack of capacity to trust themselves transfers mostly to choices about significant others because that is the relationship that most closely resembles the parent/child bond. And because these impulses–both to seek approval and to deny their own capacity to judge another person’s treatment of them–are so deeply rooted and “necessary” to their worldview as children, it can take years of hard work in adulthood to get past them.

To complicate matters, there are subconscious forces at work as well. The more personal power one disowns to survive an invalidating environment–and having confidence in your perceptions and instincts is personal power of the highest magnitude–the greater the shadow impulse will be to reconnect with it. A common way people do this is to seek out that power in a significant other (this is often the true, unacknowledged meaning of absurd statements like “you complete me”). Such seeking is hampered by lack of self-awareness, though, and thus lack of understanding about what personal power really is. This is one way that very kind, earnest people end up with very unkind, un-earnest ones. Nowhere is the adage that “opposites attract” more applicable than when aspects of personal power become relegated to the shadow, and a person unknowingly sets about to reconnect with them: the impulse is right, but the execution is wrong, wrong, wrong, and often results in being attracted to dominating, controlling, bullying, or otherwise emotionally distant partners. One of the saddest outcomes of these relationships is that earnest people can spend years trying to make such a relationship work and blaming themselves that it isn’t, all the while making little headway with the more relevant issue of their disowned power.

Another way to view the connecting of earnest people with un-earnest ones is that by choosing emotionally distant partners, people re-create their childhood struggle to gain approval from an emotionally distant parent. I think both things can be going on at the same time, and both mean a world of unhappiness for the earnest person who is trying to come to terms with childhood issues.

Earnestness is important. It will keep you moving in an ever positive direction–maybe all the way to enlightenment. So be proud of your earnestness, and feel good about it. But also be on the alert for issues around your earnestness that might need to be addressed, particularly if you have a history of picking “opposites” that don’t make you happy. The better you understand your own earnestness, its sources and its shadow aspects, the better able you’ll be to spot it in other people–and if you’re lucky, be attracted to it.

• Making bad choices in the first place due to disowned (shadow) impulses to fix things with my parents;
• Believing, or wanting to believe, that my depression, addiction, and low self-esteem could be cured by a relationship;
• Being more concerned with not being alone than with building a partnership with somebody;
• Not knowing how to build a partnership with somebody, or what that really meant;
• Using relationships to avoid the deeper issues I didn’t want to deal with;
• Having a basic negativity about men and relationships in general; not really believing that a good relationship was possible.

In short, I was getting into relationships for all the wrong reasons. And this was largely because I didn’t know what the right reasons were. And because I didn’t know, I also didn’t know what I was doing wrong. So I would get into a hopeless relationship with a person I wasn’t compatible with–sometimes, with a person I didn’t even like very much–and try to make it work. But because my motives for being in the relationship were very primitive–that is, self-centered and childish, from a place of terrible neediness–how could it possibly work? The truth is that it could not.

Perhaps the worst thing of all that I had to face was that I was using people to avoid unpleasant thoughts and feelings about myself. More than anything else, these men were props for me to hang my issues on so I could avoid carrying them myself. Not only was this self-centered and childish, it was dehumanizing. Whether many of them had been cruel, abusive, and self-centered in their own right (which they definitely had) was beside the point, as was the fact that they were using me in the same way I used them. If I wanted to do things differently, I could only look at my part. But I had to do so with the most honesty, the most scrutiny, and the most compassion for myself that I could muster.

These were unpretty things to realize–no wonder I’d avoided it all for so long! But if I hadn’t faced it down and owned it, I’d still be trying to fit square pegs in round holes and wondering what was wrong with me. To a large degree, I have figured out what’s wrong with me, and I know this because I was able to step out of the awful pattern I was in, define the kind of partnership I wanted, and be at peace with being single if it never happened.

Yes, I am responsible. And I am willing to own my part. But it is wonderful to know that my part is often not what I think it is–something bad, wrong, or unlovable–and is far more likely a misunderstood part of myself struggling for a voice. As with everything, the answers lie within, and owning that great truth with compassion and gentleness was the beginning of having true partnerships with other people.

“This, too, shall pass.” I can’t say how many times I’ve heard this over the years–or how many times I’ve said it myself to others. Usually, it is said in an effort to help a person gain some perspective on painful circumstances: no matter how bad you feel right now, it won’t last. It isn’t permanent. Things will get better. Though used by many people in many circumstances, “this too shall pass” is a staple of self-help groups, sort of an emotional version of water, offering sustenance in times of spiritual drought. I know that when spoken to me, it was always a comforting thought, one that actually did help me to put things in a better perspective.

Its power, I think, lies in the fact that it is absolutely true. Circumstances will change. Nothing is permanent. (Or almost nothing, which I’ll get to in a minute). No matter what’s going on in your life now, you can be virtually assured that it won’t be going on a week, month, or year from now–or that if it is, it will feel very, very different. The only constant is change.

All absolutely, irrevocably true. But this means, of course, that good things also do not last. If you are happy today, you may not be happy tomorrow; if things are going well for you today, that may not be the case in the future. Then again, it may be; things might continue to go well for you, but in different ways. Or things might continue to be painful, but in different ways. There is no way to know–all you can know for sure is that, whatever your circumstances are, they will change. And this is true whether you are a human being, a mountain, or a solar system, because of the impermanent nature of everything we think, see, and feel.

What is the point of this, then, of resting assured that the only certainty in life is change? If it means that happiness as well as sadness will pass, is there any comfort to be taken from this truism at all? Does it hold any wisdom beyond the obvious fact it imparts about change and the passing of time? I think it does, and I think it is this: that because all things must pass away, we should not hold on too tightly to any one thing. Doing so is a recipe for misery, while learning to let things flow–in, around, and through us–brings serenity. Since everything changes and eventually passes away, this is really the only way it can be.

How can you let go of joy as well as sorrow, you may wonder. Or why should you, when joy is such a precious, wondrous commodity in life. I’m not saying not to appreciate the good things in life, or not to enjoy them. You should enjoy all that you can in life, to wring the most out of each moment you have. But if you examine this idea a little more closely, you will find that experiencing the simple emotions that a situation evokes is a superficial endeavor, one that is ultimately rather unsatisfying, regardless of how wonderful the feelings involved might be. There is always more going on, and understanding what that might be is, paradoxically, the way to both let go of and fully experience all the joy life has to offer.

I discovered this early in my recovery, although it took many years to fully grasp and articulate it. When I began the process of figuring out why I was the way I was–depressed, addicted, and miserable–in my mid-twenties, the deluge of emotions I experienced was overwhelming, to say the least. Since the age of fourteen, I had been using drugs and alcohol to numb all the bad feelings I didn’t want to feel, so when that possibility ended with sobriety, I had no choice but to feel them. I’ve written many posts about all the crying I did, crying that went on for years, crying so deep and soul-shaking that I thought it must be what death itself feels like. All the grief, terror, shame, and self-loathing of a lifetime just mushroomed up from inside, layer after layer after layer, and there was nothing I could do about it. Oh, I tried to fight it. I went on antidepressants briefly. I jumped from relationship to relationship. I considered getting high, many times, but thankfully did not. I even took healthy measures like therapy, self-help meetings, and journaling. And somewhere in the midst of “feeling my feelings,” of all this pain and suffering I’d been fighting my whole life, I surrendered. And it was the beginning of freedom.

I’d like to say it was wisdom that got me there, but I think it was really exhaustion and hopelessness. At some point, I just gave up: whatever was going to happen, I thought, was going to happen, be it loneliness, insanity, death–or something else. I couldn’t fight anymore. I was done. And in the very moment that I ceased to struggle, I found serenity. Not a total, full-body feeling, but a kernel, a beginning. A crack of light under the still-closed door.

Hope.

From this point on, I began to see that at the core of every sadness there is joy, just as at the core of every joy, there is sadness. They are as inseparable as darkness and light, and just as essential to each other if one is to have a full human experience. In trying to run from one to have the other, or cling to one and avoid the other, we miss out on both, because they are essentially facets of the same jewel. When we do this, nothing is satisfying because we miss the deeper, fuller experience of being alive, which encompasses everything, and not just what we, in our limited vision, think we want.

Eventually, after years of trying to surrender to my pain and let it pass through me (something I can always improve on), I realized that that core, that jewel I discovered at the center of my emotions, is the one permanent, unchanging thing in life. I’ve called it many things, including my Higher Self, my True Self, God, and Enlightenment. It is all of these and more, and it is not only at the center of my emotions, but of everything. Finding it was like finding the greatest joy imaginable, a joy beyond emotion, rooted in everything good and right and beautiful. I still forget this often, but having had the awareness at all has given me a “peace that passeth all understanding,” for which I will always be grateful.

“This too shall pass” may be a self-help cliche, but it is a powerful idea, and the ability to truly embrace it is a tremendous gift. Allowing feelings to pass, neither clinging nor avoiding but merely being present with them as they arise and fade, promises a fuller, deeper, more meaningful human experience on every level. More importantly, it offers the opportunity to glimpse your True Face, the God within, which is what all of us are trying to do anyway, whether we are aware of it or not.

Here is an explanation of the Empty Boat parable in my last post. I had debated whether I should include an interpretation when I posted it, and in retrospect, I think I should have. So here it is.

I like the Empty Boat parable because it can be interpreted on at least two levels. One level is about how we react to other people’s less-than-thoughtful behavior, which is usually to get annoyed. This is because we attribute certain intents to the behavior: thoughtlessness, self-centeredness, aggression, or some other affront to our sense of justice and fair play. Our default belief is that when someone behaves badly, they are doing so deliberately and maybe–likely!–even maliciously. But this parable says it’s far more likely that such intent is not there. Most of the time, people act out of their own self-interest, and their actions have little or nothing to do with us–so it’s pointless to waste energy being annoyed by it.

In the same vein, I think the parable is also saying that even if people’s actions are deliberately intended to be hurtful, there is still no reason to get too awfully perturbed about it, because people who want to hurt others are like empty boats: they might go around making waves, but they only do so because they lack the capacity to act differently. It is only from a place of brokenness/lack of understanding that people try to hurt others, and we should have compassion for that. (This is not to say that we need to tolerate mean-spirited behavior or put ourselves in its path. Having compassion for people’s brokenness and allowing them to treat us badly are two entirely different things–but that is another topic.)

Another level of the Empty Boat is that we should strive to be the empty boat. In this meaning, being the empty boat means living in a thoughtful way, striving to be conscious of how our actions affect others. Or, to follow the parable terminology, we should strive to empty our vessel (self) of all the bad-temperedness that causes people to get annoyed at each other. When we hold such awareness as a value, there is little chance that we will offend, hurt, or anger other people.

Thus, being an empty boat can be good or bad, depending on the level at which it occurs. If your boat is empty because you lack self-awareness and compassion, then you will go through life causing problems for others and for yourself. But if your boat is empty because you have consciously emptied it–because you have developed self-awareness and compassion–you will cause no strife for others and bring no opposition or aggression into your life. One emptiness is caused by ignorance; the other by understanding.

Perhaps the overarching moral is that there is never a need to take other people’s behavior personally. If someone acts thoughtlessly or even out of deliberate cruelty, you can say to yourself, “empty boat, empty boat,” transcending the impulse to be offended. And each time you do this, you’re a step closer to the self-awareness and compassion that empties your vessel of the pointless strife and anger that brings so much misery into your life.

These explanations are only my personal interpretations, which may feel incomplete or even wrong to someone else. The beauty of parables such as this, obscure and quizzical as they are, is that by pondering them for awhile, you can arrive at your own meanings, meanings that have the most significance to you. If the parable has made you think in a new way about anything, that can only be a good thing.

from The Way of Chuang Tzu, by Thomas Merton:

If a man is crossing a river

And an empty boat collides with his own skiff

Even though he be a bad-tempered man

He will not become very angry.

But if he sees a man in the boat,

He will shout at him to steer clear.

If the shout is not heard, he will shout again,

And yet again, and begin cursing.

And all because there is somebody in the boat.

Yet if the boat were empty,

He would not be shouting, and not be angry.

If you can empty your own boat

Crossing the river of the world,

No one will oppose you,

No one will seek to harm you.