When it comes to career success, the best advice is offered by Socrates, “Know thyself!” There’s a popular beer commercial, where the most interesting man says, “The secret to success consists in finding out what you’re bad at, and not doing it.” Ah, if only Willy Loman had heeded that advice. Are you familiar with Willy Loman? He’s the protagonist of Arthur Miller’s play, “Death of a Salesman.” At Willy’s funeral, one of his sons says, “He never knew who he was.

And indeed, Willy never did know himself. Willy was a poor salesman and barely supported his family at it. The sad truth of it is that Willy was very good with his hands and could have been, for example, an excellent carpenter, and made a nice living at it. I might add that sales can be a wonderful profession for the right person. It’s just that Willy wasn’t the right person and lacked the self-awareness to realize it.

Now I’ve a question for you. There’s a profession that people go into because it offers a chance to earn plenty of money, it’s fairly prestigious, and it appears interesting, or at least it’s portrayed that way in the movies. Alas, a high percentage of those who pursue this field soon realize that they’ve made an expensive mistake! Don’t you make this mistake. And make sure that your kids don’t either. The profession I’m referring to is…

[Musical interlude]

Greeting folks. I’m Dr. Mark Dillof. I offer career counseling, business consulting, relationship advice and philosophical counseling. I help people undergoing life transitions and with many other life challenges. And maybe I can help you.

In any case, the profession I’m referring to is attorney. Now, don’t get me wrong. There are people who have a very happy and fulfilling life as an attorney. That said, over the years, I’ve met quite a few people who graduated law school, passed the Bar, and then found that they really hated working as a lawyer. Some, for example, found it dull, while others couldn’t stand the continual pressure to accrue billable hours. The cause of their error is twofold. First of all, they never understood the actual work lawyers do, on a daily basis. Secondly, they failed to know themselves well enough to determine whether, based on their personality, being a lawyer was a sound choice.

I’ve also known people who do chose the right profession — one that they really enjoy and are skilled at. Consequently, they’re offered a position as a manager. Now some people do like being a manager, but not everyone. I had a client once who really enjoyed working as an engineer for IBM. But because he became so skilled, they continued to promote him. Finally, when he became a senior engineer, IBM offered him a fast-track career path to becoming a vice-president. But my client knew that if he became a manager he would miss doing what he truly enjoyed, which was engineering. So he turned down IBM’s offer. Turning down the offer required self-knowledge on his part.

Sometimes a really perceptive person in the field of human resources can tell you about skills and capacities that you didn’t realize that you had. For example, some years ago I offered my executive coaching services to a company. The HR director told me that they didn’t really need an executive coach, but based on my resume, she offered to hire me, fulltime to do conflict resolution.

Conflict resolution? I thought to myself, I’m good at fomenting conflicts, not resolving them! I had never done conflict resolution, and I really didn’t know what it was about. Well, I accepted her offer and it turned out that the HR director was accurate in her assessment of me, for I ended up really enjoying resolving employee conflicts — and some of the conflicts were between different managers — and I became pretty good at it. Thus other people can sometimes help us to gain self-knowledge, for they can discern things about us are that we ourselves can’t see.

Elsewhere, I refer to Ted Williams’ book, “The Science of Hitting.” Mr. Williams was the last man to bat over 400. He contends that knowing oneself is essential for anyone seeking to be a great baseball player. And it’s true universally. What, then, is the lost secret to career success? It’s knowing yourself, which means — among other things — knowing what you’re bad at and what you’re good at. It’s easier said than done.

Finally, I offer career & life coaching, and business consulting. You can probably tell that my approach is philosophical, for I help people to use life’s challenges to gain self-knowledge and emotionally liberating insights. There’s a link here to my website. I’d look forward to hearing from you!

Out of the millions of people who smoke cigarettes probably not a single one of them knows why. Nor do the great majority of psychologists and psychiatrists understand why people smoke. Nor do the well-meaning folks at major health organizations, such as the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association.

If you ask a so-called expert, he or she will offer you the familiar explanations, such as people smoke because they see other people smoking. There’s some truth there, but it’s merely a reductio ad absurdum argument, for it fails to explain why anyone smokes in the first place. Then there’s the dubious explanation that cigarettes are an oral fixation, but there’s lot of things that people could stick in their mouth. Why burning leaves?

Why, then, do people smoke? It was back in the 1930s that one of the great philosophers of the Twentieth Century solved the enigma. He analyzed smoking  — and many other things as well — in a difficult book that few people read today. His explanation initially sounds far out. But when you think about it, you realize, by golly, he’s right!

Mes amis, it was Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist. In “Being and Nothingness,” Sartre says that he would smoke everywhere, in the Parisian cafes, at the theater, on walks, and so on. The act of smoking made him feel free of the limits that he experienced everywhere he went. What sort of limits? There are, of course, the usual limits that we experience as finite beings. For example, we can’t fly, like a bird. We can’t be in two places at the same time.

But I think that Sartre was really referring to the limiting structures that the social world imposes on each of us. For example, especially if you live in the city, you find yourself waiting on line everywhere — in restaurants during lunch hour, in banks and being slowed down on the highway. And wherever you live, you’re required to deal with large bureaucratic organizations — from insurance companies to the Department of Motor Vehicles, from the tax department, to those that regulate how you do business. They all requires that you to complete long applications, comply with complex laws, and if you attempt to contact them with a question, you must, at the prompt dial three, and then enter your social security number, and so on. We encounter laws, regulations, rules and structures everywhere, which limit our freedom and oppose our will.

What, then, does cigarette smoking have to do with encountering these limiting structures? According to Sartre, the act of smoking is a destructive act. It destroys structures! How is this so? According to Sartre, to a smoker, a cigarette symbolizes the world, with all its many limits. Sounds far out, but I think he’s right.

The smoker sucks in the world, such that it no longer limits him. Smoking, then, is an anarchistic activity — Vive la Revolution — for the smoker symbolically seeks to destroy the entire world, and in so doing to attain freedom from the limits that the world imposes on him.

Now this is the thing: Obviously smoking doesn’t destroy anything, other than a cigarette and also one’s lungs. After completing the smoke, the world is still there in all its limits. You would think, then, that the smoker would abandon smoking, for it failed to accomplish what it promised to do, i.e., to destroy the world and all its limits, and set him free.

But instead, the smoker — just as anxious as before, and knowing full well the futility of the activity — anxiously grabs another cigarette. And this leads us to the mystery of addictions. It’s been rightly said that at every moment life asks us certain ultimate questions. One question is how can you be free? The destructive activity, known as cigarette smoking, is one such unsatisfactory answer to the question. And, although he doesn’t consciously realize it, the smoker’s answer is: “I can be free by symbolically destroying the world.”

Despite the inadequacy of the answer, a person continues to do it. And the reason why, as it all addictions, is that he or she continues to do it because, psychologically speaking, it seems better to do that which cannot work, than to admit to oneself that one has no answer to the question of how to be, how to be free as an individual in the world.

And so, take a look at your addictions. Are you addicted to smoking? To drinking? To gambling? To marijuana? To sweets or some other food? To watching TV? Are you addicted to another person whom you know is bad for you? Are you addicted to surfing the Web? Is it to watching the Louisville Cardinals or the Kentucky Wildcats?

Here, again, in all cases, an addiction is an answer to an ultimate question, one that fills us with anxiety. It’s an inadequate answer, but we continue to desire certain things or to engage in certain activities out of despair, because we don’t have a true answer. But if you realize what is really at issue with any addiction, you then have an opportunity to uncover the hidden question and to find a satisfactory answer. And yes, Sartre claimed that his analysis did free him of his smoking habit.

Here is a link to the video of which the abolve is, more of less, a transcript:

The Mystery of Smoking

What is anxiety? It’s not synonymous with stress! Rather, stress is merely the physical dimension of anxiety. In other words, stress is how anxiety registers in your body. In your shoulders, your head, in your arms.

But anxiety is not just physiological. On the contrary, anxiety involves a perception, or cognition, of some sort. We see something and know something, when we’re anxious. And what we see and what we know, during moments of anxiety, we regard as dreadful. What, then, is the dreadful thing that we know when we’re anxious?

The Dark Secret

Soren Kierkegaard once wrote that the soul is educated through anxiety. Ultimately, anxiety can be a road to inner-peace, wisdom and self-realization. Keep that in mind as we plunge into the depths…

I don’t know where you’re standing or sitting, at this moment. It may be in your living room, or your office at work, or you’re standing on line, at a coffee shop. But whatever the case, imagine now that you glance down and, instead of seeing the floor, you see that you’re standing over nothing! Yes, you’re standing over an abyss, one that’s infinitely deep. So how do you feel at this moment? You probably have a terribly sickening feeling of vertigo. Maybe the room is spinning. That vertigo is what we experience when we discover that we no have a ground to stand on. And that is the moment of anxiety.

What, then, does it mean to have a ground? And what does it mean that what we take to be our ground turns out not to be a firm foundation? A clue to these questions might be found in yet another question: What is it that you do that gives your life meaning, purpose or direction? Isn’t that your ground?

For example, let’s say that you subscribe to a certain belief system. It could be a religious belief, or even a secular or scientific worldview. Or it could be a political belief. It could even be another person who gives your life meaning, such as a movie star, or a political leader or even someone to whom you are married. You live your life around this person or belief system. He or she or it becomes your center, and provides you with orientation. And so you ask, for example, “What would Elvis do?”

Well, something happens. Perhaps you outgrow your belief system. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child…” Or you find it riddled with insuperable contradictions. As a system, it’s no longer able to organize your experience into a unitary and coherent whole.

Or after being married, you find that the person you loved, or at least you thought you loved, has never ever really reciprocated. It’s all been a charade. Or you discover that the person to whom you devoted your life has clay feet. Yes, the emperor has no clothes.

In all cases, you suffer disillusionment, but it actually feels like the ground has dropped from under you. In one sense, it’s very good to no longer live in illusion. The problem, though, is that now you no longer have a ground. Or, another way of conceiving it is that you no longer have a center.

Actually, the truth is that you never really had a ground. It’s just that at certain dreadful moments you come to look down and then realize it. Yipes! And when you do, you go plunging into the abyss. Without a ground, a person feels unreal. Why is this so? That’s a difficult question, one that we may explore subsequently.

[Dear Reader, This is more or less the transcript of the video, with minor improvements in the wording. Please scroll down to the bottom of the post to find the video. Thank you, Mark]

The Mystery of Anxiety

http://youtu.be/tJbipmOM-PE

As you might note, I haven’t written an essay in quite a while. That is because I’ve been busy with the publication of my new book, “The Paranoid Vision: Deciphering the Mystery of Malevolence.” It is now available. Here is a blurb and some reviews, from the back cover of the book:

No worldview is more dangerous than

the paranoid vision

Everyday, we hear news reports about acts of madness and murder, and wonder what’s behind it all. Mark Dillof contends that there exists a certain way of seeing the world called “the paranoid vision.” Unlike clinical paranoia, it can infect an organization, even a society. It often hatches pernicious conspiracy theories and apocalyptic fantasies. Those under its sway include cult leaders, fanatics, terrorists, school shooters, and genocidal murderers. No worldview is more malevolent, nor more deadly. Dr. Dillof explores the paranoid vision from multiple perspectives, even contrasting it to the comic vision! Like a modern-day Virgil, he takes the reader on a Dantesque journey, from theinferno — created by the paranoid vision —to joyful wisdom.

“Mark Dillof proves that the paranoid vision is a deeply meaningful way of looking at life.He offers four cogent examples: Freud’s circle of disciples, the cult of Rajneesh, the Khmer Rouge, and the Islamist political theory that sets Islam in irreconcilable conflict with the West. ‘THE PARANOID VISION’ is highly informative and fascinating. There is nothing quite like it!” — Dr. Maurice Friedman

“Dillof’s book is replete with psychological and moral insights. It is in the tradition of those by Erich Fromm, Rollo May, Erik Erikson, and Wilhelm Reich.” —Dr. John Farrell, Author of PARANOIA AND MODERNITY (2007)

“Mark Dillof has written a deeply informed, provocative, and insightful analysis of the paranoid mindset in politics and ideology, picking up where the eminent Richard Hofstadter left off fifty years ago. While there is room for debate with Dillof on matters big and small, it would be a terrible mistake to ignore the critical issues he raises in this important work. —Dr. Neil Kressel, “The Sons of Pigs and Apes”: Muslim Antisemitism and the Conspiracy of Silence (2012)

Would you like to read some of the book? Go to Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Paranoid-Vision-Deciphering-Mystery-Malevolence/dp/0985595337/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371046358&sr=1-3

It is also available as an e-book:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DCCJSDI/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=1535523722&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0985595337&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0X3QY7P5GYV68M4PCRK6

And it’s available from Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/mark-dillof

P.S. Perhaps you’d be interested in the Louisville Mystical Academy: www.mysticlou.com 

P.P.S Perhaps you’d be interested in Sherlock & Zen, LLC, business consulting: www.sherlockzen.com

Four years ago, I wrote a short essay on the winter blues. I posted it on my other websites, www.deeperquestions.com and www.platosattache.com, but not here on my blog. If I had more time, I’d write more and wouldn’t be recycling the old stuff.

Anyway, I wrote it when I resided in Binghamton, which being in Upstate New York, sure gets some frigid winters. Here in Louisville, Kentucky, they’re lot milder, but it still gets dark early and cold, and people do suffer from seasonal depression. And so, here is the essay:

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“Winter is icummen in, Lhude sing Goddamn.” — Ezra Pound

Alienated though we urbanites may be from the primal rhythms of nature, the four seasons still do resonate in our soul, manifesting themselves in a variety of feeling tones. What interests us here is not the long, warm, sunny days of summer, when Eros, the life principle, is ascendent, but the cold, dark, short days of winter, which is the reign of Thanatos, the death principle. For that is when we are most prone to gloom.

Furthermore, winter — which means shoveling snow, shivering on cold, dark mornings, while our frozen hands scrape the ice off of windshields, slipping on the sidewalk on our way to work, large heating bills, and all else that is endemic of the season — can not only be an emotional low, but a downright annoyance.  Are we, then, to suffer, each year, another “winter of our discontent”? Should we sing “Goddamn,” as Mr. Pound recommends? Or is there a more cheerful side to winter?

Ecclesiastes declares that “to everything there is a season.” If he is correct, winter has its place in the scheme of things. It is suited for great labors and important projects, for sad remembrance, and for merriment with friends and family. But, it is especially a time for reflection, for thinking deep thoughts, for wrestling with life’s ultimate questions. For in winter, when life dies, the spirit comes to life. Summer, spring, and fall have their own challenges. To be attuned to these three, and winter too, is to be a “man (or a woman) for all seasons.”

If there is not wintry reflection, then spirit lies dormant, and the result is melancholy. That, indeed, is what happens when the spirit issues a challenge to us, and that challenge is refused. That is the real cause of seasonal depression, as well as what some doctors and therapists are labeling as “S.A.D.” (Seasonal Affective Disorder). This is not to suggest that their various treatments for the malady — the most popular consisting of viewing a device that produces a very strong artificial light — cannot be “effective,” at least temporarily, as can spending most of the winter in Florida. But such therapies are treating a symptom, i.e., depression, rather than the cause of that symptom, which, we contend, is a failure to address the deep questions that winter invites.

At best, such therapies merely defer the questions. Sooner or later, often in March, the spirit comes to collect its dues. It casts its frozen shadow on us, and addresses us such, “You, who are doomed to die, have you yet discerned my secrets? We have spent the winter together, allowing you ample time for reflection. Have you, yet, figured out what this phantasmagoria, called ‘life and death,’ is all about? Or shall I continue to haunt you in the spring, summer, and fall?”

We may not yet have discerned the answers to the ultimate questions, but a valiant effort does not meet with winter melancholy. It is only our turning away from those ultimate questions that causes melancholy. Be, then, of good cheer, this winter, fellow voyager.

About 2500 years ago, somewhere in ancient Athens, there was a drinking party. As Plato tells it, each of the guests was required to give a speech about the nature of love. Among the illustrious participants, there was Aristophanes, the playwright. In his speech, he suggested that Eros is a longing to join together with one’s missing half, in the hope of becoming a complete being. In other words, the longing for completeness is the reason why opposites attract.

This attempted union of opposites is otherwise what’s known as marriage. Needless to say, this effort at union is problematic, even under the best of circumstances. Ideally, husband and wife will mature, such that other forms of love emerge to compliment erotic love, including affection, friendship, and agape. (For more on this, see: C.S. Lewis’ book, “The Four Loves.”)

Alas, this maturation can abort. Instead of affection, friendship and agape coming to the rescue, Eros can transmogrify into something far afield of a loving union: a miserable battle for moral superiority, an attempt to prove oneself the good person in the relationship and one’s partner the bad.

“I love you” then transforms into the battle cry, “I do everything for you and you do nothing for me!” And then the erotic longing for self-transcendence transforms into two individuals with their own accounting systems, arguing over who does more for whom, as heard in such phrases as, “I cooked dinner for you, last night and you didn’t even put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher!” Which is then met with, “Well I worked overtime to make the money so that we could buy the food for our meal last night! I wouldn’t have to if you got yourself a part-time job!” In some relationships, nothing is said, but one of the partner’s silently suffers, and feels herself or himself to be a martyr, and then perhaps waits for 25 years, to surprise her partner, by filing for a divorce.

This is not to deny that sometimes a serious inequality exists in a relationship, nor is it to deny that either partner can let down his side of the an equitable arrangement. What interests us here, though, is something far more common and a good deal darker: a perceived inequality, where none really exists, the insidious intent of which is to declare oneself morally superior to one’s partner. Related to this is an unconsciously manufactured inequality, so that one has grounds for accusing one’s partner of being selfish, and oneself the generous one in the relationship.

Here, then lies a mystery. How does the erotic longing for completeness quite often devolve into this miserable battle to prove moral supremacy? How does this unhappy state of affairs emerge?

Is My Existence Justified?

The erotic quest is not exactly what it initially appears to be. Looking deeper, we discern a clue. We see that it’s actually a quest to justify one’s way of being, in the spiritual sense. Let us see how this plays out. To experience one’s existence as justified means that one is living one’s life in the light of the infinite, absolute and eternal. Traditionally, the way to do so was by following God’s commandments for a righteous life, thus affording one’s life meaning. That is how one transcended the finitude, transiency and limits intrinsic to being a human being.

When Nietzsche declared, “God is dead,” he contended that this connection between the finite and the absolute, the temporal and the eternal no longer existed for a great many of us. It was feared, at the time, that people would respond to Nietzsche’s terrible realization by jumping off their roofs in despair. That didn’t happen because those who had lost their faith sought, in various ways, to supplant God as the absolute. Erotic relationships are one such effort!

After all, the desire to be loved romantically is essentially the wish to be regarded by another person as infinite, ultimate and absolute. This wish can be found in the expression, you mean everything to me. “Everything” is an expression of the absolute. Or it can be found, for example, in the expression, “You’re the one.” Instead of regarding God as the one, another person, through a kind of secular idolatry, becomes the one. That is why at root of romantic relationships lies a moral question: Is my existence justified? In other words, have I been able to transcend the finitude and transiency of my earthly existence either by having my partner regard me as the absolute or by regarding my partner as the absolute?

This effort to justify one’s existence by means of an erotic relationship fails for a variety of reasons. For one thing, there cannot be two absolutes, and if each partner in a relationship wishes to be regarded as such, there exists a problem. Secondly, if we succeed in seducing the other person into regarding us as the absolute, then we lose respect for the person. That is why there is much truth to Woody Allen’s notion that relationships are like the Groucho Marx line, “I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that was willing to have me as a member.” Yet another reason for this failure is that when we live with a person we see that he or she “has feet of clay.” It is impossible, in other words, not to realize that our beloved is neither a god nor a goddess, but a suffering human being, like oneself. There are many other problems as well.

Ideally, the discord between two people should lead to an investigation of the nature of romantic relationships. They would see that their failure was not necessarily a personal one; rather it was due to the nature of erotic relationships. Unfortunately, though, the failure of the erotic project most often leads to a sense of anger and accusation, a blaming of the other person for one’s disappointed expectations. This then turns into a battle over who is at fault for this failure, with one or both parties becoming self-righteous.

One might then view oneself as a good-natured chump, who foolishly became involved with a selfish person, if not a demon. C.G. Jung states somewhere that unhappy marriages have a certain stability, for once we think that he know the true source of our problems in life — namely our spouse — we lose our anxious openness to life. Closure sets in, which is comforting, but we cease to evolve as a person, for it’s that anxious uncertainty which is the catalyst for deeper questions and for our psychological and spiritual evolution.

The Acute Need for Self-Justification Among Secularists

There would appear to be strong evidence that this sort of bickering is more common amongst those whose orientation to life is predominantly secular and, therefore, egocentric rather than theocentric. After all, if one is not oriented to God or some other transcendent meaning, one will seek the absolute in various idolatrous ways, from social causes to utopian vision, from scientific progress to relationships.

But a relationship or marriage is a poor surrogate for being connected to an ultimate meaning, to the transcendent. Constant complaining, caviling, bickering and criticizing in a censorious way have, as their subtext, that one is the moral partner in the relationship. It bespeaks an inner emptiness, a bad conscience and a lack of true relation to the universe. The psychological mechanism of projection makes one’s partner into the image of one’s own faults.

A guilty conscience is even more likely to be found by those who are not just secular, but who seek to outsource their giving through government programs, i.e., by political liberals who feel that they are generous if, rather than giving their own money and labor, they vote for programs of government subventions to those in need, which, of course, essentially means stealing from those who earned the money. This pseudo-generosity doesn’t lead to genuine selflessness and self-transcendence. Rather its fruits are ego-inflation, an overbearing self-righteous, and a puffing oneself up with sanctimony.

This debased effort to justify one’s existence, though a pseudo-giving, allies itself with power motives. In the context of a relationship or marriage, one uses it as a weapon to attack one’s partner. It would also be all the more prevalent among liberal women, who tend to be animus possessed, and especially among feminists. They have an axe to grind in regard to some social injustice, which they use as a weapon to gain power in a relationship. So it is, then, that the quest for self-justification becomes coupled, in an unholy psychological alliance, with the lust for power.

A client of mine’s unhappy romance can serve as an example of this dynamic. He became involved with a woman who was politically was very liberal and a feminist. Not long after becoming engaged to my client, she told him that she would like the two of them to adopt a mentally retarded adult. My client  started laughing, for he had thought that his fiancé must have been kidding. In any case, it led to a major quarrel between them.

They finally became reconciled, whereupon she told him that she wasn’t really interested in adopting a retarded adult, but that she just wanted to know that she was the kind of person that would, if the need arose. In other words, the idea of adopting a retarded adult was not a real idea on her part. It was merely a fantasy, the purpose of which was to have her feel good about herself. What she didn’t tell my client, was that her other purpose was to assign him the role of the mean-spirited villain, who was unwilling to save the world. He just wanted to save some money for their future marriage.

This argument set the discordant tone for their future encounters, she continually claiming, in essence, that she was the angel and he the selfish demon. They broke up, one evening, about six weeks later. She had invited my client over for dinner. He brought with him a book that he had purchased for her as a gift. But she was angry because he had neglected to bring over the scallions that she had requested.

When those who are secularists do anything at all for their partner — such as cooking dinner, in the example we just considered — their initial mood of selfless sacrifice soon gives way to feelings of being a chump or a sap. They are likely to completely forget anything that their spouse has given them. Indeed, they will sometimes engineer such a result. More particularly, they will decline gifts from their spouse, for it would hurt their case, their accusation that, “I do everything for you and you’ve never, ever done anything for me!”

Other Examples of this Devolution

We might add that this sort of dynamic can also occur not just amongst secularists, but by those who are overbearingly scrupulous and sanctimonious in their religious beliefs and who use religion as way to fault their spouse, for not living up to a standard. And so, one might hear something along the lines of, “Why can’t you be like Preacher Jones!” Here a churchgoer uses her pastor as a way of undermining the moral authority of her husband.

Another example might be a husband who denigrates his wife by insidious comparisons of her to his mother. His wife is being condemned for failing to meet up to an impossible standard. It’s an impossible standard, for his mother is no more than a fantasy ideal, on his part.

We have discussed the battle to establish moral supremacy in the context of marriage, but it can occur in other social relationships, including those between family members and in friendships. Many people’s lives consist of an anxious navigation, continually seeking to avoid the Scylla of feeling self-centered and the Charybdis of feeling like a chump. It is far better to follow the advice that Marcus Aurelius offers in his Meditations, to be generous and goodhearted because it is in accordance with one’s nature, rather than expecting reward or fearing that one is being used.

Here, again, inequalities do exist and often seriously need to be addressed and redressed, if a marriage, friendship or other social arrangement is not to end up on the rocks. But our concern here has been with the perception of inequality or with situations in which the slightest inequality is turned into a major issue or someone does a favor for us and never, ever lets us forget it.

As we have suggested, this devolution points the problematical nature of erotic relationships, their failure to provide what they initially promise: to satisfy the “everything dimension,” of selfhood, and with it the hope that one can feel one’s life in harmony with God’s will and the universe, and thus moral and justified.

To summarize, when the romantic quest to be justified in the eyes of one’s beloved fails, which is inevitable, there is a strong temptation to make disappointment, acrimony and accusation one’s fallback position. What true lover would seek the joys of vindication, by daily pointing out that one’s beloved is in the wrong? Alas, there are few true lovers, especially these days, but there are many people who have their own idiosyncratic accounting system. It consists of a tendentious and arbitrary manner of counting one’s own good deeds and excluding those of one’s partner (or one’s friend or family member). As a result, one’s partner’s account is always in the red. Wretched social relations are often the pernicious fruit of one’s own bad conscience, owing to inadequate moral and spiritual development.

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P.S. You read my essay, so don’t be a schnorrer. Purchase yourself a copy of, “Awakening with the Enemy,” available on Amazon. And while you’re at it, big spender, buy yourself a copy of my new book, “Mysteries in Broad Daylight,” also available from Amazon.

How can one explain the ever-growing popularity of hatha yoga? What does it reveal about the zeitgeist that millions of people are seeking to bend, turn and twist themselves, like a pretzel, into a variety of odd positions?

There is the ostensible explanation offered by hatha yoga practitioners: holding certain yoga poses (asanas) is an effective way to relieve or prevent bodily aches and pains, to eliminate stress, to improve posture and balance, and to maintain good health. Furthermore, some practitioners contend that yoga benefits them spiritually. Maybe yoga offers these benefits, but people rarely pursue an activity for merely practical reasons. Hatha yoga, no doubt, has a certain symbolic appeal. What might it be?

Many people sense that they are psychologically stiff, inflexible and rigid. They suspect, quite rightly, that they are creatures of habit. Indeed, they see themselves as conditioned to certain cues, as is Pavlov’s dog. For example, whenever their friend brings up politics, they get upset, even though they vowed to stay calm. Furthermore, there are times when they suspect that their attitudes, beliefs, ideas, and ideologies — which, quite ironically, they usually fiercely defend — are the source of their imprisonment.

Now here is the curious thing: They picture their inner stiffness and inflexibility on the physical level! Thus they imagine that the cure for their psychological rigidity would be to become physically flexible. Of course, the whole thing is absurd, for physical flexibility doesn’t equate to psychologically flexibility. Indeed, one could be a very advanced hatha yogi and still be extremely rigid, psychologically speaking.

Apropos of the symbolic appeal of hatha yoga is its feminine quality, which would explain why it’s a good deal more popular with women than with men. Masculine reality subscribes to the reality of form, identity, law and structure. Feminine reality, by contrast, seeks a release from form, identity, law and structure. Needless to say, this is a feminine age, for a great many people no longer regard form as the route to true reality, but as an obstacle to reality. Rather than cleaving to values, ideals and principles, many people seek to “go with the flow,” i.e., do what’s expedient. It’s not surprising, then — that in an age when form, law and structure is regarded as nothing more than a limit — that flexibility is valorized.

Yoga practitioners imagine that the temporary release of the tensions endemic to their ego-driven sense of self, coupled with their newfound flexibility, allows them to attain a kind of feminine fluidity and formlessness. To attain true fluidity and formlessness is a significant spiritual accomplishment. It requires self-knowledge and self-overcoming. Performing hatha yoga offers no more than a symbolic enactment, on a physical level, of that attainment.

It is similarly the case that people experience conflicts and anxieties from being in the world and contending with other people. Yoga enthusiasts believe that practicing the asanas, coupled with meditation and breathing exercises, can help them to dissolve their ego, which they understand to be the source of their suffering. It is true that when one is breathing regularly that one can experience a sense of calmness, free from the incessant desires, anxieties and perturbations that derive from ego-consciousness. Alas, this state of calmness is transient, because it doesn’t derive from deep insight into the nature of ego-consciousness, but merely from a behavioral change induced by an alteration in breathing patterns, from shallow and irregular to deep and regular. Consequently, when they find themselves inevitably falling down, from their yoga high, into the Earth’s atmosphere, the reentry burns them out.

Outer Balance Cannot Improve Inner

Hatha yoga can improve a person’s physical balance and posture, and there is much to be said for that. But it cannot improve a person’s inner balance. We came to that conclusion in our essay on Philip Petite, the tightrope walker who walked from tower to tower of the World Trade Center. As the documentary film about him illustrated, he had an incredible sense of physical balance, but was emotionally unbalanced at the time. The same is true of many practitioners of hatha yoga: They are outwardly balanced, but emotionally unstable.

Indeed, they are not centered in God, the Self, or Eternity. They do not possess a moral and spiritual compass. For the most part, they are merely self-centered, which means that they lack the type of secure foundation and center that would allow them to face the stresses of the day with equanimity. Becoming a truly balanced person requires a journey inward. It requires a purgation of all that is false and empty. Seeking the physical balance that practicing yoga provides is useful in itself, but it is not a surrogate for what is needed most of all: inner balance.

Sweating Out the Impurities

A recent phenomenon is the popularity of “Hot Yoga,” which consists of a yoga class in which the temperature in the room is at least 100 degrees. Apparently, there is an effort here to lose weight by sweating, which is not very effective. After all, what is lost is merely water weight, which is quickly regained. Here, again, there is likely something symbolic at issue. Sweating, while engaging in the supposedly spiritual activity of yoga, has the symbolic appeal of sweating out one’s impurities. On this level of consciousness, one’s egotism is viewed as an impurity, as is evidenced by any fat on one’s body. One then seeks to become pure by sweating it out. Needless to say, one can sweat till one is completely dehydrated, but it will not rid one of the feelings of defilement that belong to an egotistical existence.

Symptom Substitution

As we have argued, we are enslaved by our attitudes, which derive from our outlook on life. Our attitudes find bodily expression as a system of tensions. Now here is the curious thing: to be who we are, we must hold ourselves in a certain way. If we do not maintain these tensions — unpleasant though they may be — we will experience a curious sense of not being ourselves, of having lost contact with some fundamental reality, or truth about life. The fact that we return to who we are, after seeking any physical change — from becoming more relaxed to losing weight — is not simply due to a lack of mindfulness, but to an attachment to who we are, as well as a fear of the uncanny, of losing touch with the familiar signposts of who reality, of entering into “…the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

In any case, the tensions that make us who we are reside in our face, stomach, arms — anywhere. They are usually subtle, but they can lead to all sorts of aches and pains and physical maladies. Of course, there is nothing controversial in our thesis. We might correctly surmise, for example, that if we are angry most of the time that it can cause everything from backaches to high blood pressure.

The problem with hatha yoga, as a form of relaxation therapy, is that its treatment is behavioral. It attempts to eliminate one’s stress, by means of a change of behavior, without seeking its real source, i.e., the underlying attitudes, sense of self and worldview that creates the stress. Thus hatha yoga leads to what Freud called “symptom substitution.” If, for example, we manage to cure our backache, a different malady will soon ensue. Only penetrating insight into the nature of selfhood can free us from suffering.

As a route to that, it might prove useful to seek to connect each tension in one’s body, subtle though it may be, as well as certain breathing irregularities, to particular thoughts. For example, one might connect a certain tension in one’s neck with one’s ex-spouse or a tension in one’s lower back whenever one thinks of the IRS. This way one can gain insight into the incarnate dimension of selfhood, as well as a deeper level of mindfulness.

Addendum: The Real Yoga

We have been critical of hatha yoga, but hatha yoga is far afield of the yoga to be found in the Bhagavad Gita, and as espoused by a tradition of profound Hindu philosophers, from Shankara to Vivekananda, up to the present.

On the other hand, the physical forms of yoga should not be dismissed. When seen as expressions of certain metaphysical truths, the asanas are profound indeed. Mircea Eliade, in his book, “Yoga, Freedom and Immortality,” (Princeton, 1969) contends that the headstand, for example, is a physical representation of a deep truth, one on which Plato would agree: The world is upside down, meaning that people value and pursue the wrong things, while ignoring that which has true value. Thus if one wishes to see the world aright, one must stand on one’s head. Thus when the metaphysical meaning of the asanas is deeply understood, they become a kind of full-bodied meditative prayer. Then they can become psychologically transformative.

Executive Summary: What is real? Is it matter or is it form? To be masculine is to owe one’s allegiance to form, identity, law, essence and structure. The subscription to form as the real is reflected everywhere, including in masculine styles of dress. How exactly does the suit and tie reflect the masculine allegiance to form as real? We shall explore that question momentarily.

Here, though, is the rub for the masculine: Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” written in 1781, undermined the belief that what is graspable by the mind — form, identity, law, essence — is what is ultimately real. The result was devastating. For reasons that we shall explore, it demolished culture, style, class and manners. It didn’t do so right away, for in the 19^th and 20^th centuries people continued to dress elegantly, in quite a variety of styles. Rather, it took almost two centuries for the implications of Kant’s critique to register on the zeitgeist. When form was dismissed as mere formality, it spelled the end of men’s formalwear — suits, ties, dress slacks, and wing-tip shoes.

There exists, though, a route beyond Kantian skepticism and the existential despair that follows in its train, to a mystical apprehension of true reality. What, though, is a guy — who has undertaken this perilous journey from existentialism to mysticism — supposed to wear on a Friday night?

————————————————————

A little over two hundred years ago there occurred a terrible disaster — not an earthquake, a flood or a fire, but rather a philosophical and cultural calamity. It reverberated down to the present age causing damage of apocalyptic proportions. And it all began when Immanuel Kant proved that the human mind is incapable of grasping ultimate reality.

One might think, “Ah, that’s too bad for those philosophers, but everyone else must get on with their lives.” The truth of the matter is that the mind’s inability to grasp ultimate reality profoundly impacts everyone, even the least philosophical among us. And it does so in ways that we don’t consciously realize. Let us, then, examine the disaster and its implications, so that we might discern how it all began and whether there might be a remedy…

Whither the Masculine?

Human reality is constituted by a very fundamental distinction, one between masculine and feminine. That distinction finds metaphysical expression as form and matter. Feminine reality finds metaphysical expression as the endless transformations of a material substrate, but at the heart of the masculine is a belief in the reality of form, identity, structure, law, meaning and purpose. I.E., what the masculine takes to be real must have a definite and definable shape. Only that which is definite, definable and determinate is graspable by the mind and therefore intelligible.

Furthermore, the masculine believes that what it takes to be the formal dimension of reality is neither relative, nor transient, but absolute and eternal. Plato, for example, regarded Ideas, or Forms, as eternal. The Jewish people have regarded the Ten Commandments and the Torah as God’s law and therefore eternal. If our life is to make sense, we wish it to be guided not by just any set of rules, but by the eternal verities. There are verities; as to whether they are non-relative, unconditional, absolute and eternal is another question.

It was inevitable that men would come to disagree over which set of laws, forms, ideals and and ideas are the true ones. Consider, for example, the realm of theoretical physics. For centuries Newton’s laws of physics were deemed to be absolute. They were so regarded until Einstein proved that Newton’s laws are true only under certain limited conditions. Similarly, various cultures, people’s and societies take the laws, rules, and customs that that govern them to be absolute. When they encounter an alien culture or society  — one that has a very different set of laws or rules  — they often feel threatened by cultural relativity. The result is often war, a fight for cultural supremacy.

In our day and age, it’s almost impossible not to be exposed to beliefs and ideas that put one’s own beliefs and ideas into question. For example, we might go off to college only to discover that our roommate, who had a different upbringing than we had, does things quite differently than we do. Then it sets our mind to wondering, what is the true way?

Now enters Immanuel Kant, whose ideas undermined the masculine subscription to form, but from a far more fundamental level than cultural relativity. Kant contended that the various forms that the mind apprehends may be intelligible, but just because something is intelligible does not mean that it is reflective of ultimate reality. I.E., that which the mind can grasp — law, form, structure, identity — are merely manifestations of the cognizing subject and not true reality. Alas, to use Plato’s metaphor, it means that we are forever stuck in the cave of shadows, never able to emerge so that the light of truth might shine upon us. That is unless, as has been suggested by subsequent philosophers, there is another doorway out of the cave, one that lies beyond reason.

Kant’s Skepticism Leads to Existential Despair

The curious thing about philosophical, artistic and scientific ideas is that — abstruse though they may be — they manage to enter into the bloodstream of everyday life. So it was that Kant’s skepticism has, after almost two centuries, entered into the zeitgeist and affected millions of men. For many of them, the very foundation of masculine identity — law, form, and structure — no longer appears as the route to freedom, happiness and fulfillment.

Rather, law, form, and structure seem to them to be an obstacle to freedom and happiness. The existentialists realized that if we cannot know ultimate reality, then law, structure and form are relative, rather than absolute, and masculine reality finds itself without a foundation and threatened by nihilism.

This intellectual cataclysm has had myriad manifestations, all of which are reflective of cultural disintegration and collapse. We shall investigate here only one manifestation, namely the loss of the suit and tie and the emerging supremacy of the informal, or casual, in men’s apparel. After all, if form is no longer the route to reality, then neither is formality — and similarly customs, laws, and manners and all else — which is a manifestation of form. And when men started thinking, “Let’s dispense with the formalities,” it spelled the end of culture, class and formal wear.

From the Loss of Meaning to the Loss of the Necktie

“May the outward and inward man be at one.” Socrates. 

If there are no ultimate meanings, then, as songwriter Cole Porter expressed it, “anything goes.” Of course that was the 1930s. But real meltdown of form, law, identity and structure occurred in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The antihero eclipsed the hero, who had long been the embodiment of masculine principle. Thus there began to appear films like “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” (1969), in which the protagonists are bank robbers. When life loses it’s meaning, work becomes mere busyness, labor without ultimate significance. Then the only reason to work is to make enough money so that eventually one will no longer have to work. No longer did men see work as a calling, nor their occupation as their station in life, in the religious sense.

If the only meaning of work is to get the money such that one day one won’t have to work, then men began to wonder why they were bothering to get all dressed up for work. Some simply abandoned suits and ties, but others realized that the reason to get dressed up was simply to get ahead in the world. Indeed it was in the 1970s that books began to appear, with titles like, “Dress for Success.” (1975) The reason, then, to get dressed up was not to bear witness to some higher-level truth, but rather for Machiavellian reasons, because if one wished to succeed in the world, one should look more stylish than one’s rivals for positions of power.

Dressing for success, which is about self-aggrandizement, gave rise to men who were “empty suits.” They wear the outer trappings of a life expressive of masculine principles, but like T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” they lack inner substance, and culture, which is not surprising since they do not know who they are.

In any case, something happened about twenty years latter to undermine the premise that dressing well necessarily accrues to one’s worldly success: Men who regularly dressed in tea shirts and jeans were becoming internet millionaires and billionaires. Furthermore, many people who dressed well and were hard working were unemployed. As a result many men thought, “Why bother?”

And so they asked their managers, “Why do we have to bother to dress up?” And the managers couldn’t come up with a valid answer. Thus informal Friday was born, which soon gave way to everyday of the week being informal. It was a sad day for those who sold men’s suits, ties and other formalwear. This is not to suggest that there isn’t a place for informal dressing. One can be casual, but well-dressed.

Before further considering the untoward results of this cultural and sartorial shift, we might add that in addition to the Machiavellian dresser there exists another fellow who has lost connection to the deeper roots of men’s formal wear, the dandy. He has made himself, by means of his exquisite clothing, into an object of self-adoration. Alienated from its connection to masculine values, the pursuit of elegance reflects narcissistic vanity.

On the other hand, dandyism, within limits, has its virtues. Various sartorial accouterments — such as attractive sports jackets, colorful ties, pocket-handkerchiefs, and all the rest — can, like Cyrano de Bergerac’s plume, express pride in oneself as well as panache. Masculinity, at its best, balances a subscription to the straight and narrow with a sense of boldness, daring and adventure. It balances fidelity to moral principles and modesty with verve and joie de vive.

Related to the dandy is the fashion plate. He is the man who, having lost contact with the Tao of masculinity, seeks to achieve self-worth by appearing to be hip, trendy, or fashionable by adherence to the latest fashions. He is, in that regard, effeminate, for to be manly in regard to clothes is to eschew what is fashionable in favor of that which reflects classic styling. Naturally, styles do change significantly over time and it would look comical for a man to be adorned like Julius Caesar, Napoléon or George Washington.

What most concerns us here, though, is neither the empty suit nor the dandy, nor the fashion plate, but rather the man who is slovenly dressed, no matter how tasteful the locale, no matter how formal the occasion. The slob is a walking eyesore, the most egregious example of which is the man who wears his baseball cap on backwards and his underwear showing, due to lacking a belt or suspenders. During the warmer weather we see him dining in a restaurant, shopping, or at a concert wearing a sleeveless shirt and flip-flops on this feet. The slob, lacking all sense of propriety, is the waste product of our egalitarian age.

The popular expression, “letting it all hang out,” is pregnant with meaning, in that respect, for why bother to tuck one’s shirt in (and one’s gut in), when it’s more comfortable to let it hang out?  The slob is obviously wanting in manly pride and self-respect, for who would wish to be seen by other people in such a demeaning light? But he also displays a severe lack of respect for other people, for everyone is forced to suffer the visual offence of his disagreeable presence. Alas, we cannot escape these yahoos. They continue to pullulate and their numbers are now legion.

Casual Wear and Cultural Decay

It’s rightly been said that the word “casual” is related to the word “casualty.” The casualty involved here is, as we have been suggesting, the decline of the masculine. Take, for example, the necktie. It’s placement and its shape are symbolic. Placed around the neck, the tie serves the same function as does the white collar of the Catholic priest: the tie separates a man’s head, which is his rational and spiritual dimension, from his body, which represents the animal instincts. On its deepest level, masculinity involves a denial of the body, instinct, and sensuality.

The fact that most ties are shaped like fish is also significant, for the fish — as C.G. Jung tells us — represents Jesus, and more universally, represents sacrifice to God. Sacrifice lies at the heart of the masculine, the sacrifice of earthy fulfillment for the realization of the heavenly. The hero — and every hero is the very embodiment of masculine reality — is ready, willing and able to sacrifice his happiness and comfort for higher ideals. It’s much more comfortable to have one’s collar open, but the masculine disdains comfort when principle is at stake.

The suit, with its even lines and symmetry, similarly symbolizes the order and rational proportion endemic to masculine reality. Of particular importance is the crease in the slacks, which, like all that is linear, represents the straight and narrow, the moral dimension, of masculine reality. The feminine, by contrast, finds expression as an unbroken roundness. Dark colors are masculine, for they represent the denial of life, which is an implication of one’s subscription to the life of the spirit.

That many men today are far less likely to wear a tie, that they often wear colorful garb and slacks without creases, that they have abandoned suits and sports jackets so as to feel comfortable, is indicative of the collapse of the masculine. Related to this is the fact that men have become overweight, thus losing their linear masculine shape. Here, again, the masculine — which represents the denial of comfort — has been lost, for to overeat is to seek pleasure, with self abandon, to the detriment of self-discipline. For a man to abandon form, to embrace comfort, is to shift to feminine reality, and thus to degenerate. The casualty that is casualwear is reflective of the loss of masculine dignitas.

Regaining the Tao of Suits, The Logos of Neckties

Can men ever regain their faith in the formal dimension of reality? Can there be a post-Kantian rebirth of form, identity, and of the masculine? Nothing less than that would be required, if men’s formal wear is to arise, like a well-plumed phoenix, from the ashes of our present cultural decline.

What, though, would be the manifestations of this renaissance? How might it find expression stylistically, not only in men’s clothing, but in all things, from buildings to woman’s fashions, from music to painting, from automobiles to cooking? For the answers to these questions we must turn inward. As James Joyce wrote, “Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.” Perhaps, then, the old artificer might guide us as we tailor a new and expanded vision of the person we might become.

How very different are the world’s of Superman and Batman. Superman inhabits the heavenly realm of Apollo, assuggested by the iconic image of him flying through the sky. He even comes to Earth, from somewhere in the heavens, the planet Krypton. Superman is really a demigod. He is a mythic expression of the hope, that many people have, of a savior who will bring come to the rescue of the weak, in the name of justice.

Batman, on the other hand, doesn’t possess superpowers. Thus, unlike Superman, he is not a demigod, but a mortal being. That is what makes him a hero. Batman inhabits a much different world than Superman. His is not realm of Apollo, but the dark underworld of Pluto. Everything about Batman suggests bats, caves, and the dark depths. The name of the most recent Batman film, Dark Knight (2008), suggests that he inhabits that realm.

On those evenings, when he sees the bat signal flash across the sky — indicating that Gotham City needs his help — Batman returns to those subterranean depths to fight crime. He does so not because he has been condemned to be there, like a denizen of Dante’s Inferno. On the contrary, he returns there, for it is his mission to battle evil in that hellish realm.

It has rightly been said that clothes make the man. Superman’s outfit is an inspiring red, yellow and blue, not far afield from the colors of the American flag. Batman’s bat costume is a lot more somber looking and is intended to be frightening to criminals. In so far as what we wear reflects our inner being, Batman’s garb suggests that there is something dark about him. This theme is hinted at, but not really explored in the Batman comic books and films. Indeed, Batman never becomes the type of antihero that finds expression in the noir detective novels and films of the 1940s and 1950s. The suggestion, in any case, is that to spend one’s life in the underworld, one must become a bit dark oneself.

Interestingly enough, in the recent Batman film Dark Knight, the crime-fighting district attorney, Harvey Dent, does become corrupted, terribly so, expressing the truth of Nietzsche’s maxim “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become one.” Perhaps, then, DA Dent is a foil for Batman, for to not become corrupted one must be not just a man, but a saint.

1939: A Dark Year

It makes sense that the comic book hero Batman was created by Bob Kane in 1939. For that was a time when millions of soldiers were leaving America to fight abroad, in the darker climes of Europe and Asia. And they were fighting very dark, deadly foes, the Nazis and the Japanese. Like those soldiers, Batman was there not because he wanted to be — for America could have avoided entering the war, at least for a time — but out of a sense of moral obligation. If Batman is popular, once again, it is because American forces are “over there,” once again, only this time in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they may soon be in other nations as well.

Soldiers, in uniform, are, to a large degree, anonymous. Their anonymity reflects the ideal of non-egotism. Similarly, Batman is disguised. Few know his true identity. (He is a lot like the Lone Ranger, in that respect.) By day, he is Bruce Wayne, the billionaire industrialist. Mr. Wayne cannot receive credit for Batman’s heroism.

We had stated earlier that Batman is seeking justice, and that is true. But he is also seeking revenge. As a young boy, he witnessed his parents being murdered by criminals. He thus seeks vengeance, but vengeance tempered by justice. His tragic past and his mixed motives makes Batman a more human and a more interesting character than Superman.

Batman as Doppelganger

There are a number of literary characters that represent the doppelganger, or double, theme. Sometimes, the double consists of a person who represents some element of character missing from the protagonist. Examples include Conrad’s short story The Secret Sharer and Dostoevsky’s The Double. In the case of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide, the protagonist has developed a split personality. The evil Mr. Hyde is the good Dr. Jekyll’s dark side.

We see the doppelganger effect in both the Superman and the Batman epics. Superman’s disguise is that of the news reporter Clark Kent. Clark, who is described as “mild-mannered,” is good-natured, but a bit dull. At least his fellow reporter, Lois Lane, feels that way about him. What is missing from Clark’s personality is heroism. In a sense, Clark is everyman who — like Walter Mitty — dreams that his true being is that of a hero.

Batman’s disguise is that of billionaire industrialist, Bruce Wayne. Here, again, it is really the other ways around. We might say that Batman represents the “secret sharer,” the alter ego, of every person who has become a bit bored by his comfortable lifestyle and who feels an inner calling to pursue a greater cause. In the film Casablanca (1942), we see Rick’s transformation from comfortable, but cynically jaded restaurant owner, back to being the hero he once was. Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne need not transform, for they have doubles who actualize their heroic potential.

Afterword: Superhero or Normal Person? Which is the Real Disguise?

Sherlock Holmes is almost always appears wearing his trademark deerstalker hat, cloaked coat, clutching a magnifying glass, except on those rare occasions when he goes undercover. He has no double life, but Superman and Batman do. We have explored this doubling in regard to the doppelganger archetype. There may, though, be more involved here.

When Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne go out in the world to fight crime, they become Superman and Batman. Everyone can tell, by their garb, that they are superheroes. It is often the case, though, that those who have great aspirations must, if they are to succeed in the world, hide their light under a bushel. That means going through the world appearing as a regular person, in a common profession.

Soren Kierkegaard, in one of his diaries, states that if he had not become a philosopher, he would have made a good…

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“Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.”— Friedrich Nietzsche

Summary: In the pages that follow, you will encounter the seven most dangerous insights:

1. The Conservation of Suffering Principle

2. Existential Groundlessness

3. Fate

4. Transiency

5. The Antinomies

6. The Dark Side

7. Otherness

Are these insights really dangerous? Suffice it to say that if you know what’s good for you, you won’t read any further. Instead, you’ll pour yourself a nice strong drink and forget that you ever saw this essay. But I suspect that you’re about to confirm the adage that “fools rush in, where angles fear to tread.” Bon voyage!

The deepest insights are also the most dangerous, for they call into question our fundamental assumptions about life. They don’t teach us anything new. Rather, they reveal the hollowness of our hopes, ideas, concepts, and beliefs. Instead of helping us to fulfill our dreams, they awaken us from our dreams. They don’t promote our self improvement or “growth.” Rather, they precipitate something akin to death and transfiguration. Finally, they don’t make us feel good about ourselves. On the contrary, they’re more likely to make us sick to our stomach.

For example, most of us assume that — given enough hard word and some luck — we can achieve happiness and fulfillment. Certainly, we can improve our lot in life. And yet, we find ourselves perplexed over why the proportion of good times and bad times always seems to remain fairly constant, no matter what changes we make in our lives. If we become perplexed enough to investigate this phenomenon, we discover that the quest for happiness and fulfillment is riddled with contradiction.

We are no longer the same after such insights. We become, to paraphrase the title of a film, the man who knows too much, unable to return to who we were and to our familiar life. Nor do we know, just yet, how to navigate within our new world. That in between state is psychologically disorienting. No one would face such hardships, were it not for the fact that these insights are pathways into life’s depths, where joyful wisdom can be found. The potential rewards are worth the dangers of the journey.

There is, of course, an immense difference between reading about these profound insights and actually having them. All the same, reading and seeking understanding can plant the seeds for future epiphanies, even if they take ten or twenty years to sprout. On the other hand, the alchemy of insight can occur immediately. It all depends on whether one’s life experiences are able to confirm the truth of these insights.

But life experience, although necessary, is not sufficient. A person must be inwardly ready and ripe for insight. This ripeness only occurs for those who have been honest with themselves, who have not turned away from the truth of what life has revealed. The rate at which ripening occurs varies from person to person. There are, for example, people who need to have been married as many times as Elizabeth Taylor, for doubts to arise as to the promise of romantic relationships.

There exists, though, another danger, and a more likely one. Ironically, it is that nothing will happen. Those who have been to college have learned to keep their ideas at a safe distance from their personal lives. That is why our minds grow sharper, but our emotions remain just as dark, four years later. For real transformative knowing to occur, a different type of thinking is required. We must think not abstractly, but existentially, which means with our entire life on the line. The Buddhists say that we must learn to think with our guts, rather than just with our head. After exploring these insights, we’ll suggest what we can do to allow these insights to work as catalysts.

Now here is the curious thing: once an insight has struck, one would think that there could be no turning back. It’s very common, though, for people to flee what they’ve just seen. Drinking oneself to oblivion is a common means. But the effort to forget often assumes subtler, but equally desperate, forms. Any pursuit — from overeating to romance to politics — can be a hideout from the truth of human existence.

Thus, while a devastating insight can upset our psychological stability and perhaps be traumatic, the flight from the insight can itself be physically, morally, and spiritually deleterious. Indeed, the flight from such insights is often more dangerous than the insights themselves. Goethe clearly knew the dangers of profound philosophical insights, for he said, “Any growth in consciousness, without a corresponding growth in self-control, is pernicious.” That is why it is essential, for those who pursue wisdom, to live a life that can sustain them along the path to self-knowledge. Goethe spoke of the need for self-control. Other virtues are also important. After discussing these seven dangerous insights, we’ll explore practices that can give us strength and sustain us on our journey.

If these philosophical insights are dangerous, why pursue them? First of all, they may already be there, lurking on the periphery of our consciousness. Their ghostly presence periodically appears to us for a frightening second, and then disappears into the darkness of unawareness. It is far better to turn around and face the insights that have been haunting us, dreadful though they may seem.

Jacob wrestled the angel. Similarly, if we survive our wrestling match with these insights, they will confer on us their blessings. What sort of blessings? Those who embark on this perilous journey — depending on how far they get — will be blessed, to varying degrees, with self-knowledge, self-realization, freedom, inner peace, as well as mind-blowing wonder, amazement, and awe before the astonishing mystery of existence.

What follows now are the seven most dangerous insights. They are presented in no particular order. If there is sufficient interest, the author may expand on this essay, to create a larger work.

The Conservation of Suffering Principle

The belief in a happier tomorrow is what makes our present woes endurable. That belief might be contingent upon anything, from a new car to a new career, from a new relationship to a new world. Sometimes, we imagine that a certain event will make us free — such as graduation, the weekend, or retirement. But, whatever the anticipated improvement to our circumstances may be, when it finally arrives, there’s inevitably a letdown, for whatever we really hoped for did not come to pass.

Most people, after each letdown, find new objects of desire. Very few people begin to suspect that there’s something suspicious going on. Far fewer become perplexed enough to inquire into the nature of desire, to ask, as did Epictetus: “What is it about life that there is always something missing?” Were they to do so, they would be afforded a glimpse behind the Veil of Maya, to see that delusive shape-shifter known as human suffering.

Due to its plasticity, or shape-shifting abilities, suffering bears a curious resemblance to matter, for it can neither be created nor destroyed. Efforts to eradicate it only succeed in changing its form. We free ourselves from anxiety, but now feel bored. We are no longer lonely, but now suffer from conflicts with others. Within these transformations, the magnitude of suffering remains constant. Consequently, no matter what we do to find fulfillment, we still find that our world is “out of joint,” that something is lacking. These changes are guided by what might be called “The Conservation of Suffering Principle.”

If someone were asked why he was unhappy and he answered, “Because I lost my farm,” or “Because my dog died,” such a response would be quite reasonable. If he then declared, “It didn’t have to happen!” he would still be right. But he would also be naive, because his focus would only be on his suffering’s immediate cause. He would have failed to consider its ultimate cause.

The immediate cause of our dissatisfaction is always something in particular, and the fact that it happened may be purely accidental. But the fact that we suffer at all — apart from the particular form that our suffering may take — is not accidental. If it is not a lost farm, or a dead dog, it must, out of necessity, be other things, equally negative, that plague us.

What is source of this dark necessity? It consists in the fact that within us there is a lack, or emptiness. Just as nature abhors a void, so it is that the void within must be filled with suffering. Schopenhauer observes that when one big problem is gone from our life, another one will immediately replaces it. Sometimes a large problem gets replaced with a number of smaller ones. But, the quantity of suffering remains constant.

The reason why we are never satisfied is that our images of happiness are poor surrogates for that obscure, true object of desire. What, then, do we really want? That’s a long story. But here are two short answers. Plato, in the Symposium, suggests that behind all of our many desires is the desire for the Form of the Good, which is an image of the absolute, of the world understood in its totality. The answer that Hindu and Buddhist mystics give is that what we really desire is Self-realization. Plato and the eastern mystics are essentially saying the same thing: life is really about the Self, or the Absolute, seeking to know itself. Paradoxically, it can only do so through us, but we are standing in its way. Furthermore, the Self needs all gradations of desire to see itself. That’s all well and good; the difficult thing is to actually see it.

Even apart from Self-realization, the reward for penetrating insight into the conservation of suffering is a certain emotional clarity and peace, coupled with a sense of wonder about human existence. Insight into the conservation of suffering is certainly mindboggling enough to stop us in our tracks, but it is the least dangerous of these seven insights. (I have written more on this principle in a separate essay. I have also explored this principle, in the context of relationships, in Awakening with the Enemy.)

Existential Groundlessness

Everyone’s life is founded on a set of unexamined metaphysical assumptions. We have, for example, assumptions about the nature of reality, life’s purpose, and the meaning of suffering. They constitute our worldview. We also have assumptions of a social and political nature. Finally, we have a more personal set of assumptions, which include ideas about who we are and how life should be lived.

It’s rare that we become conscious of our assumptions, for introspection is difficult and can be emotionally trying. The only time when we are sufficiently motivated to turn inward is when we become seriously perplexed by life. Then, we seek to understand how we got to where we are. A person might come to realize, for example: “No wonder I haven’t any good friends. I always assume that everything is about me.” If we bring a hidden assumption to the light of consciousness, it ceases to function as a guiding principle for our life. The flow of our life energies has been interrupted and we are in crisis.

When our basic assumptions about life fall into doubt, it leaves us without a ground, center, foundation, meaning, or organizing principle to focus our energies. Imagine that you’re the cartoon character called Wile E. Coyote. You run off a cliff, in pursuit of the roadrunner. You’re doing OK, until you dare to look down and notice that you’re not standing on anything. Then, you go plunging into the abyss! That’s what it’s like to realize that you have no foundation for your existence. After having glimpsed that scary truth, many people will then seek to obliterate it from their awareness.

Sometimes, in the ordinary course of life, we may find ourselves asking the type of existential questions that cause us to realize that we do not have a ground for our existence. For example, a young woman decides to pursue a career as a lawyer. After four years of college and three of law school, and passing the Bar Exam, she is ready to practice. But she begins to question of the significance and purpose of her career. Whatever meaning being a lawyer might have once had for her is gone. Ironically, sometimes only after the “how” question (in this instance: how to get the law degree) has been addressed, does the “why” question” (why be a lawyer) emerge.

She could, as often happens, view her work as a means to making money, so that she can do what she really enjoys, playing golf, traveling, or some other such activity. Or, if she is a more authentic person, she may suffer an existential crisis. People often desperately pursue distractions, so as to hide from the vertiginous perception that their life is without a ground.

Suffering of any sort, if it becomes great enough, can often perplex us enough to raise questions about life. Even those who are philosophically phlegmatic seek, at times, an explanation or justification for suffering. The effort to make sense of how God — who we assume to be just — could allow us to suffer as we do, is called “theodicy.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet said that “There is a providence in the fall of a sparrow.” I.E., all that happens to us is not simply accidental or arbitrary. On the contrary, it is meaningful.

But the notion of providence implies that God is all-powerful, infinite, absolute, omnipotent, and omniscient. For how else could God be implicated in the fall of a sparrow? One implication is that if God is omniscient, then there is no free will, for He already knows what we are going to do. Consequently, there would also be no ground for morality. After all, how could we be held accountable for our acts, if we are not free, by virtue of everything in life being predestined?

Furthermore, we want to believe that God is good. God must be good, for if He is a malevolent and capricious tyrant, then there is no ultimate justice, and life is meaningless. But here is the problem, if God is absolute, then He is also the author of all of the evil that exists. In that case, God is no different than the gods of ancient Greece, i.e., all-powerful, but neither good nor just, and all that befalls us in life is meaningless.

The other alternative is to limit the power of God. In that case, God is not the author of the evil that exists in the universe. But, if God is not all-powerful, there is not “a providence in the fall of a sparrow.” On the contrary, it would mean that what happens to us is accidental, meaningless, and absurd. There are, of course, all sorts of twists and turns, within theodicy. The truth of the matter is that suffering can neither be explained nor justified. This is not to say that we cannot rely on religious faith, but faith cannot satisfy the hunger of human reason to make sense of it all.

The realization that we cannot find an intelligible connection between our individual life and that which is eternal and absolute has a number of consequences. For one thing, it means that our life does not have an ultimate ground or center. The result is metaphysical vertigo. If most people do not encounter this dizzying perception, it is because they never look down to notice that they have no ground. More specifically, they take what is not an ultimate ground to be an ultimate ground.

If, in the proceeding example, we had asked the student about the purpose of her life, she might have said, “to be a lawyer.” That would have served as her first principle, or ultimate ground. It would have been that which organized her activities and focused her life energies. But if we then asked her why she want wants to be a lawyer, she would realize — if she was honest with herself, and open to philosophical inquiry — that becoming a lawyer cannot be an ultimate ground, but needs to be related to that which is ultimate. In truth she does not have an ultimate ground.

Furthermore, people distract their mind — with everything from important life projects to various trivial pursuits — so as not to notice that their life is without an ultimate ground, purpose, and meaning. To ask questions about life’s meaning and purpose is to tamper with our metaphysical underpinnings. Such inquiry is risky business.

Fate

One of the delusions of youth is that we are free to choose the direction of our life. In an obvious sense, we are free to make decisions. But it takes a certain amount of living to perceive that the force of fate was guiding those decisions. This discovery is not contingent on the degree of success or failure that we has thus far achieved. All the same, the thwarting of our goals and the perception of failure is far more likely to lead us to conclude that the actual course of our life belies our youthful belief in freedom. Thus, the tragic vision of life — as Whitehead states, in Science and the Modern World — is not about bad things happening. The tragic vision is really about fate. Our inability to prevent bad things happening merely confirms the existence fate.

What really is fate? The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote, “A man’s character is his fate.” I.E., just being who we are is our fate. Apropos is the film Ground Hog Day (1993). Its protagonist, a cynical and unhappy newscaster, played by Bill Murray, finds that he is living the same day over again. That is really a metaphor for the discovery of fate. After all, if we remain the same person, then everyday will essentially be, more of less, the same. What seems different will be but a variation on a theme.

We are the same person, in so far as we subscribe to the same set of assumptions about life. Intuiting this identity causes us to feel heavy and trapped. Many people, in midlife, are burdened by that sense. The youthful belief in freedom has been replaced with the feeling of bondage. Often, people will attribute their sense of bondage to the situation that they have created for themselves — the job, the house, the mortgage, etc. But, the true bondage, which we may see in our more lucid moments, is to none other than oneself! This is a disturbing insight. The danger is that we could become despondent. It is ironic, then, that in youth we pray that we can have the opportunity to be ourselves. But, when a man realizes that none other than himself traps him, he then prays that he may be free of himself.

Even knowledge of our fate is not sufficient to prevent it. After all, King Oedipus is actually told, by the oracle, that he would murder his father and sleep with his mother. He is horrified. But in fleeing his fate, he ends up fulfilling his fate. Similarly, the baby boomer, “me generation,” of the 1960s rejected their parents’ material values. They particularly despised big government bureaucracies. There were, back then, plenty of oracles predicting that the hippies would end up like their parents.

The oracles’ prophesies have come to pass, for the 1960s generation is thoroughly materialistic, even more so than their parents, who still retain certain religious values. Furthermore, the 1960s generation’s embrace of big government is moving America toward socialism. Like Oedipus, they have murdered the father. I.E., they have rejected patriarchal, Judeo-Christian values. And like Oedipus, they have married the mother. I.E., in championing a government that promises to take care of everybody — at the expense of individual initiative — they have placed their sympathies with matriarchal values. But, whereas Oedipus was horrified by what he had done, the baby boomers’ lack of memory renders them ignorant of what they have done. Where memory is lacking, fate reigns unchallenged and selfhood remains an unrealized possibility.

We had said that knowledge of one’s fate is not enough to prevent it. And yet, the antidote to fate really is self-knowledge. The problem is that for knowledge to be efficacious, it must penetrate our very being. The path to freedom lies not just in intuiting, but in seeing, with great clarity, the hidden identity that underlies everything about us, i.e., the unconscious set of assumptions that constitute our worldview, or way of seeing life. We must see its operation everywhere — from the foods we eat to the job we do to our inner conflicts.

Were we to begin to gain this clarity, we would initially feel even more trapped. It’s not that we are more trapped; it’s just that we notice it a lot more extensively. But, if we do gain enough clarity, we can begin to perform actions outside the narrow parameters of our character. In so far as we can illuminate our character, it is no longer our fate. Thus self-knowledge really is the route to freedom, and what initially was a dark insight, can become the door to our inner liberation.

Transiency

Many people go through life viewing death as an abstraction, as something that happens to other people. That is how Ivan Ilyich — the protagonist of Tolstoy’s novelette The Death of Ivan Ilyich — experienced death, until he became seriously ill. The awareness of death usually comes as a serious of shocking realizations that one is a mortal being. Such moments can begin early on, even in childhood. But they are followed by forgetfulness again. The awareness of one’s morality, although an obvious fact of life, is also an important insight for each person.

Most of the time, the realization of one’s mortality may comes as a shock, but not as one that is dangerous to the system. On the contrary, it is very sobering, placing the concerns of our life into their proper perspective. Compared to death, getting dumped by our sweetheart, losing our job, and even having our house burn down, seems not quite so tragic. And, compared to death, life’s lesser kicks an pricks — from obnoxious salespeople to neighbors who neglect to clean up after their dogs — seem rather trivial.

It is the flight from the awareness of death that is far more likely to be dangerous. For it is when we forget our mortality that the stresses and strains of everyday life get blown out of proportion. Taking everything too seriously, we become miserable and exhausted. Now here is the curious thing about human beings: after having come to the sobering realization that they are mortal, they then proceed to forget that they are! Even after having narrowly escaped death the day before, most people soon return to their state of forgetfulness. As T.S. Eliot said: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” That is why almost every religion seeks to correct the weaknesses of human nature, by encouraging its followers meditate on death.

There is another aspect of mortality that is also important here: not only will we die, so will the society, nation, or world that we presently inhabit. Even if it be in a thousand years, it will eventually come to pass. This brings us back to the question of ground, meaning, and purpose. We commonly seek to transcend the finitude of our life by thinking that what we do will somehow contribute to the future. People, in other words, justify the suffering they experience and the sacrifices for the world that will come about. But, the end of the world that we know breaks the chain of meaning.

In truth, though, it rarely takes a thousand years for the chain of meaning to be broken. After a lifetime of struggle, the South American revolutionary Simon Bolivar concluded, “Those who have served the cause of revolution have plowed the sea.” Whether it’s creating a revolution or a business or children, nothing that is created can forever withstand the ravages of time.

Bolivar, at the end, experienced bitterness. But that need not be the only response to the perception of life’s transiency. We could also experience the heights of sublimity. As Shakespeare writes in The Tempest:

“And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
 Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

How, then, can we move from the sense of frustration, futility, and bitterness, to a sense of the sublime? A clue can be found in our linear sense of time. We, therefore, assume that we personally, as well as our civilization, should be headed somewhere. Thus, when all of our strife and struggle does not bring about the millennium, but ends with ruination, we despair. Our present struggles then seem meaningless. The Hindus, by contrast, have a circular notion of time. Worlds come and they go. It may all come to nothing, but it is not meaningless, nor is it meaningful, as we usually understand the word. This is because the perception of life as a cosmic dream and as divine play is beyond the category of meaning. Thus, to cure the fallout from the insight that life is transient, a deeper insight is required. It is often the case that the cure for an insight is an even deeper one.

The Antinomies

Imagine that, at birth, each of us is given the same puzzle to solve, something like Rubik’s Cube. We are told that if we can solve the puzzle we can achieve happiness and fulfillment. So everything that we do in life is essentially an effort to solve the puzzle. What we are not told, though, is that this puzzle, called life, is impossible to solve. The reason why it is impossible to solve is that the requirements selfhood are in contradiction to each other, such that if we satisfy one requirement, we must fail to satisfy another.

For example, a lot of effort consists in making our world safer, for we all desire security. But, we also desire adventure. Too much security, and we feel bored. Too much adventure, and we wish to back home again. Obviously, security and adventure are opposites and contradictory requirements. Modern life consists of various attempts to adjudicate these requirements. There are, for instance, theme parks created to give people a sense of adventure, but without any real danger. And many people get their fix of virtual adventure by watching TV shows. Of course, these are poor surrogates for the real thing, for we know that there isn’t any real risk involved, and so boredom soon returns. We shall explore just a few more instances of contradiction. Actually, “antinomy” is the more precise word here, for an antinomy is a contradiction that cannot be resolved by removing one of its terms. That is why we have entitled this section “the antinomies.”

The reason why we seek to be in a relationship is because we realize that we cannot embody opposite requirements for selfhood, try as we may. For example, most people see the need to be responsible, focused, centered, and goal-directed. But, we also wish to be carefree. One common solution consists in being responsible on the weekdays and carefree on the weekends. Apparently, the effort to balance these requirements within our week is not sufficient. That is where relationships enter the scene.

In a relationship, we implicitly agree to embody one set of qualities, while our partner implicitly agrees to embody the opposite qualities. That is why opposites attract. But, what inevitably happens is that both people in a relationship want their own side to be superior to the other. Thus, the person who agrees to be the responsible one criticizes the one who is carefree: “You can’t even balance a checkbook. Now I have to deal with your overdraft!” But the carefree one might criticize the responsible one for being too stiff and serious all of the time: “All you even talk about is work and money. You’re never any fun!” In truth, the person in a relationship would like his or her partner to embody contradictory qualities, and at the same time. If, by analogy, our sweetheart asks us, while driving, to turn left, we can do that. And we can turn right. But, if our sweetheart says” “If you love me, you’ll drive left and right at the same time,” that request cannot be completed.

In truth, life is riddled with contradiction. There is, for example the contradiction between our plans and what actually happens, due to the unforeseen. That discrepancy is the underlying premise of both tragedies and comedies. According to Kierkegaard, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, “The tragic and the comic are the same in so far as both are based on contradiction, but the tragic is the suffering contradiction, the comical the painless contradiction.” For example, we see Jackie Gleason, in the classic TV series, The Honeymooners, making plans, and everything happening to upset those plans.

Everyone must intuit that life is riddled with contradiction or else they would not seek comic relief. But there is vast difference between intuiting that life is a contradictory enterprise and clearly understanding it to be so. The latter is a devastating insight, for it points to the hopelessness of our efforts to be in the world. For the person who does come upon this insight comedy is all the more valuable.

But neither tragedy nor comedy is the last word, for the effort to attain deeper insight into this contradictory project we call human existence is a rather curious route out of Plato’s Cave and into the sunlight. Stated another way, it is the path from ordinary unconscious life to existential clarity and despair to Eastern wisdom, the great awakening, and to a realm that lies beyond those opposites that are at the root of contradiction.

The Dark Side

There are two related insights here. The first is about the darkness within. C.G. Jung referred to each person’s unacknowledged dark side as “the shadow.” Those who fail to recognize their shadow project their sins on to other people. It is, indeed, very common for a person to blame someone else for what is really his own fault. People do it, and entire nations do it with other nations.

The acknowledgement of our dark side is often the product of trials and tribulations, often occurring over the course of many years. It can sometimes be a shattering experience. Often, it is a necessary preparation for other major insights. After all, if we can survive an encounter with the shadow, then we have the requisite strength to survive the other dangerous insights as well.

There is no standard procedure for recognizing the shadow, other than to accept the verdict of life experience. Living long enough, we are able to detect patterns, particularly in the interpersonal realm. In other words, if our life history continues to repeat itself, we may then suspect that, as Pogo says: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” An extreme example of people who deny their shadow are those that go through life nurturing a grievance over one thing or another. On the other hand, we must also know when our problems really are due to the ill will of other people. It often takes honesty, coupled with a discriminating mind, to know which is which.

The second insight has to do with the nature of evil itself. Some theorists, such as M. Scott Peck, distinguish those who are sinful, from those who are evil. Peck, in The People of the Lie (1998) contends that evil people know quite well that they sin, but feel no compunction about it. While most people are sinful, or egotistical, to varying degrees, very few posses the level of malevolence characteristic of those who are evil.

Martin Buber, on the other hand, had argued that there are really two varieties of evil. What Peck regards as sin — or what is commonly referred to as egotism — Buber regarded as the first form of evil. Buber, in his book Good and Evil (1953) called it the evil of indecision, for it derives from a person becoming lost in a swirl of life possibilities. The person of this sort lacks focus and direction in his life.

Buber contends that there exists, though, a second type of evil, the evil of decision. It is akin to Pecks notion that the truly malevolent person has chosen to be so. And it corresponds to what had Kant referred to as “radical evil.” While very few people are radically evil, there exists enough of them, such that sooner or latter everyone is bound to have an encounter with such an individual. (Of course, when an evil person becomes the leader of a nation, a great many people become witness to evil.)

No doubt, the notion of radical evil is troubling. That is partly why there have been varying efforts to explain it away, by reducing evil either to human stupidity or to mental disease or to poor behavior stemming from poor upbringing, etc. Even Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the banality of evil,” although thought provoking, is reductionistic.

Those who deny the existence of evil — either by means of reductionistic explanations or simply outright — sometimes do so out of naiveté. But their denial most often stems from a failure of nerve. They hide behind the supercilious claim that they subscribe to a “nuanced morality,” or some other form of moral relativism. That one’s nerve would fail in the presence of evil is understandable, for the existence of evil flies in the face of rational understanding. Like any encounter with the irrational, or the uncanny, the encounter with evil can be disorienting, dizzying, and nauseating.

Some theorists have described evil as a mystery, and indeed it is, to a large extent. But if it is a mystery, how then can we have insight into it? First of all, there are insights to be had; indeed we have just explored some of them. But, apart form the valuable theoretical distinctions in regard to the nature of evil, and apart from the encounter with our shadow, the mere recognition that evil exists is itself an important insight into human reality. Whatever evil may be, the encounter with it, and the concomitant acknowledgement that it exists, reveals that the world a more frightening place and than we had imagined. It awakens us from the Utopian fantasy that we can have peace in our time. It also reveals that the world is a more mysterious place than one had imagined. There lies the insight.

We shall add that even more perplexing than the mystery of evil is the mystery of good. After all, evil does make a certain intuitive sense, for we see people, all the time, pursuing their own self-interest, just as we pursue our own. But the idea of sacrificing one’s self-interest, and maybe even one’s life, to help another person is far more inexplicable than the existence of evil. It seems to emerge from another realm. There are important insights to be had about goodness. But such insights are uplifting, and are not dangerous, which is why we shall not be exploring them here. Well, maybe they are dangerous, in so far as they inspire, and awaken in us the hero.

Otherness

In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, “…there are men who die without — save for brief and terrifying flashes of illumination — ever having suspected that the Other is.” Aren’t most of us aware of the existence of others? Obviously, in some sense, we are. But, Sartre believes that there is a very important sense in which we normally are unaware. In what sense, then, are we typically unaware of the existence of other people?

Egotism, for example, is an attitude in which we are minimally aware of other people, for they are nothing more than a means to an end. The egotist divides other into three groups. There are:

A. Those whom the egotist believes can help him to achieve his goals, be it happiness, success or worldly power.

B. Those whom he views as obstacles to his goals.

C. The rest of humanity, who occupy a neutral position.

There is a scene, from a comic film, that illustrates this attitude of mind. There is a lively party going on, and a man and woman, apparently in love, spot each other from opposite ends of the room where the party is being held. As romantic music plays, they run towards each other with their arms open, ready to embrace. But, as they’re run, they’re accidentally knocking over everyone and everything that is in their path. People, platters of food, and all else go flying. This sort of romance has rightly been called a folly a deux, for the two parties are neither aware of themselves, nor each other, nor of the rest of the world.

But there is a deeper sense to Sartre’s statement. Typically, we not only view other people, but the world itself, through a kind of self-enclosed bubble. I.E., we see everything through the prism of our preconceived ideas, concepts, and worldviews. Consequently, we believe that other people are not that different than we are. It comforts us to think that.

The Jungian psychologist, M. Esther Harding, in The I and the Not I (Bollingen, 1973), argues that most people are so enclosed in their Umwelt, or world of self-relevance, that even their notion of helping each other remains locked within that self-enclosed bubble. As Harding states:

…one judges everyone else by one’s standard and from one’s own standpoint. The universality of this condition is even reflected in the moral injunction to do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. For actually it is at least possible that the “other” would prefer something quite different from yourself. (I once hear a woman say, “I have learned to let people enjoy themselves in their own way.”) (p. 25)

Thus, it is not just the egotist who is unaware of other people. Even our good-natured efforts to do a good turn to our fellow beings often backfires, when we do not recognize how different their tastes and values can be from our own.

There can come a time, though, when those whom we thought we knew very well, friends and family, no longer look familiar. Rather, they appear as strangers, as profoundly alien to us. Sartre calls such moments “brief and terrifying flashes of illumination.” The terror is that of the uncanny, the perception of that which is beyond all the categories of our understanding. Here, then, is a dangerous insight. It is dangerous because once a crack has appeared in our self-enclosed bubble, it threatens to grow and to make the entire world appear to be unfamiliar. Then we are truly “a stranger in strange land.” If such moments are brief, as Sartre says, it is because there is some sort of mechanism — a kind of internal circuit breaker — that shuts down our awareness, resealing the crack in the bubble, before the perception of the unfamiliar becomes too dangerous.

Practices

Over the centuries, the various spiritual disciplines have created thousands of practices. They are designed to help people to endure and to progress along the arduous path of knowledge. The best practices are custom-designed for each spiritual seeker. But there are practices that would be of value to anyone pursuing these seven dangerous insights. We have already mentioned the practice of remembering death. I.E., it consists of viewing the concerns of everyday life from the vantage point of death. Here are a few more that are recommended:

1. Illuminating the Everyday

2. Awareness of thoughts, emotions, and bodily feelings

3. Awareness of Routines

4. A Stabilizing Activity

5. Letting go of excess seriousness

The first, illuminating the everyday, constitutes much of the real work in any spiritual pursuit. Practices two and three have to do with breaking the chain of habit. They are designed, in other words, to free us from clinging to who we were, after we have changed. Practices four and five are designed to sustain us amidst the difficulties of spiritual practice. They are designed for stability, and to relieve us of some of the stresses and heaviness that can emerge along the journey.

Illuminating the Everyday

This practice involves illuminating the symbolic dimension of our everyday life, including our interests, activities, and desires. Even a quotidian activity like eating is replete with symbolic meanings. Unless we were to clarify the symbolic dimension of our life, we would experience a painful discrepancy between our emotions and the life of spirit. This is a large topic and it would require separate essays to explore the deeper symbolic meaning of everyday life. The clue to knowing that there is a symbolic meaning at the root of our interest in an activity is not being able to explain our interest in the activity on a practical level. In any case, it is a good idea to keep a journal, to record one’s observations and analysis of our desires, interests, and activities.

Awareness of thoughts, emotions, and bodily

Those who seek wisdom do not just want knowledge. They want a transformed life. The problem is that even after we have had these seven insights, we may still find ourselves falling back into outworn ways of experiencing the world. We might find ourselves with the same old feelings and thoughts. To have these return, after we thought — by virtue of our insights — that they were gone, is a real source of suffering. What makes it so painful is that we are experiencing what we no longer believe in, but cannot stop doing so. In other words, we find ourselves prisoners of our outmoded habits.

The Buddhists recommend mindfulness. A lot there meditation practices involve watching feelings and thoughts arise. The thing to do is to watch them arise without going along with them. It is difficult to watch the restless mind while meditating. It is more difficult to watch it while in the world, in the midst of our everyday activities. Oftentimes, we shall want to trace back a particular feeling or thought to the particular philosophical assumptions at their root. Doing so will increase our wakefulness and centeredness. In essence, what emerges is a sense of our true identity, as a free awareness, apart from feelings and thoughts. This is a very liberating feeling. But it takes a lot of practice, to cultivate mindfulness in this way.

This is also where the body enters the equation. Apart from thoughts and emotions, there are bodily feelings. These are all too familiar tensions of all sorts. They could be anywhere — in our backs, arms, legs, and so on. These tensions have the power to hold us to who we were. Thus, if we hope to no longer be the person whom we were, these tensions must be let go of. Here, again, mindfulness is essential. In practicing, we might observe that certain feelings and thoughts are connected to certain bodily feeling. Thus, if these bodily feelings are let go of, the emotions and thoughts will go too.

Awareness of Routines

Routines also fall under the general category of habits. They keep us feeling, thinking, and acting as the person we no longer really are. Routines can include, for example, anything from taking the same route home every evening from work to eating the same foods to having the same type of conversations with our friends. The thing to do, then, is to take a different route home from work, teat different foods, and to have a different sort of conversation with friends.

It is important, though, not to seek to break the chains of habits without first spending time with the seven dangerous insights. For unless there is real insight on our part, just engaging in these practices will be akin to behaviorism. In that case, the practices will not be effective in changing who we are and how we experience life. There is a good chapter on letting go of routines in Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan (Washington Square, 1991)

A Stabilizing Activity

There are occasions when we might find the fallout from spiritual practice — such as disorientation, anxiety, and heaviness — to be too much to take. What often does the trick is a stabilizing activity of some sort. It could be anything from gardening to playing the piano to jogging. Such and activity has the power to guard us from the winds of inner change. The key here is being able to rest, without regressing.

Letting Go of Excess Seriousness

There is a danger that those who explore the seven deadly insights will become too emotionally heavy. After all, the road to wisdom is not a walk in the park. This practice, then, consists in letting go of excess seriousness. We might utilize comic media — such as humorous TV show, films, and standup comics — to help rid us of excess seriousness. There is a danger, though, that these media could become a crutch. It is far better to simply not take oneself and the world too seriously. What is really required is an attitudinal shift, from serious to light-hearted. That shift takes work. If such efforts are rarely undertaken, it is because the notion that we must work to become lighthearted does not sit well with people. It’s much easier to turn on the TV, or to utilize a similar such drug.

The ability to laugh amidst one’s difficulties indicates that one is not a slave to the world and its meanings, but a free man. It requires a certain fighting spirit not to allow the world, and its terrible seriousness, to intimidate us into losing our smile. It takes practice not to take the world too seriously. In any case, the cultivation of the comic spirit can provide a necessary inner balance, when pursuing the seven dangerous insights.

Conclusion

We had referred to these seven dangerous insights as pathways into life’s depths. They can also be viewed as rites of passage, the fruit of which is an expanded vision of reality. They can lead to yet other insights, to those that can be characterized as mystical. There can, therefore, be a happy ending to this dangerous journey. But, even apart from how far along the path one gets, to travel along that path is feel fully alive.

This essay, by Dr. Mark Dillof, first appeared in The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism and is being reprinted here, with their kind permission.

http://www.jsantisemitism.org/index.htmlBroad Daylight!

The key to understanding antisemitism lies in Judaism itself. This is because what Judaism esteems most highly is the very thing that incurs the wrath of antisemites. There is something that they intuitively hate about Judaism, even though they cannot articulate what it is. Nor do Jews seem to know what it is. And judging from the existing research, those who have studied antisemitism are also in the dark.

What, then, is it about Judaism that incites antisemitism? Of the various theories that have sought to answer that question, two are relevant to our investigation. One focuses on morality and the other on envy. Together, they can get us two-thirds to the answer. The final leg of the journey requires venturing into unknown territory. That’s where we shall finally unravel the mystery of antisemitism.

The Dread of Morality

The world is full of people fleeing their conscience. Some are tormented by what they’ve done. Far more feel guilty for sins of omission. They haven’t become the person they know they need to be. Nor are they living as they know they should be living. Among this very large class of people, are those who anathematize anyone who reminds them of their moral failings. Some, for example, lash out at their parents or spouse for this reason. Others despise their clergymen or their teachers. But some hate the Jews.

It’s not that the Jews seek to remind them of their faults. Those who are antisemitic may never have actually spoken to a Jew. It’s just that the Jews, by being who they are, offer an implicit criticism of the guilt-ridden person’s manner of living. This is because at the heart of Judaism is a moral vision of life. The path to salvation is straight and narrow, which means that it is possible to stray from the path, to be in sin and to be punished by God. The antisemite projects upon the Jews his inner-accuser and hates them for that reason.

Obviously, not all Jews obey the Ten Commandments, are observant and subscribe to the tenets of their faith. One can get lost in worldliness, become a humanist, a postmodernist, a relativist, a nihilist, an atheist, an apostate, or a convert to another religion and still not escape the sway of the moral law. Nor does it ultimately matter whether or not one acts righteously. A Jew can even become an antisemite (as was Karl Marx), a hypocrite, a malefactor, a thief or a con artist (such as Bernard Madoff). However, for those under the sway of the moral vision of life, there is never any real escape from “the hound of heaven,” the inner demand that one’s heart be pure and one’s actions be scrupulous.

Even in the most secular of Jews, a kind of collective Jewish consciousness exists, the inheritance of thousands of years of history. Needless to say, all human beings — with the exception of those who are puerile, imbecilic, sociopathic or downright iniquitous — are, to varying degrees, under the sway of “the moral law within,” as Immanuel Kant called it. However, for no other people is the demand to be righteous so deeply ingrained in their identity, such that they continually judge their actions under moral categories. This problematic sense of self — which elevates us from the animal level of being, where instinct holds sway, to the truly human — owes much of its development to the moral struggles of the Jewish people.

It is shallow to contend that morality is merely a social phenomenon, as had Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and other influential modern thinkers. Moral awareness is fundamental to what it means to be a human being, even if it comes into its own, in a decisive way, historically, in Judaism. What is relevant, then, is that to be born Jewish is to be so thoroughly imbued with the moral vision, that all of one’s actions are judged in terms of their rectitude or lack of it.

Antisemites, although harboring a distorted view of Judaism, intuit that it embodies a disturbing truth, one that they both fear and loath. It is morality, then, that they despise and hate. They hate those who are concerned about divine judgment, because it reminds them of their own moral failings.

There is, though, something related to morality for which the Jews are also hated. It is the same thing for which the ancient Greeks executed Socrates. Like Socrates, the Jewish people are forever asking questions — the big questions. After all, the god of the Jewish people not only permits his people to question him, He insists that they do. Thus have the Jews become freethinkers, philosophers and iconoclasts.

The ancient Greeks, therefore, executed Socrates for the same reason that antisemites have murdered Jews: they hoped to remove the source of their self-doubts. Critical thinking is related to morality, for some of the questions that emerge for a person who becomes reflective are: Is my life founded in truth or do I inhabit a world of ephemeral shadows? How, then, should I be living? What is the good life? What is most holy?

Here, again, it is not that the Jews regularly engage people of other faiths in philosophical debate. It is just that antisemites correctly intuit that the Jewish people are thinkers and are, therefore, dangerous. Thus antisemites project their inner-questioner upon the Jews, who are viewed, in a kind of medieval morality play, as devils casting unsettling doubts everywhere. Freud correctly considered projection to be a defense mechanism.

Apropos are the various anti-intellectual movements, which provide a milieu favorable for the virus of antisemitism to pullulate. Fascism, although not intrinsically antisemitic, is the most notorious of such movements. It rejects the intellect in favor of the body, and thinking in favor of feeling. It views the products of the mind — including ideas, culture, morality, and religion — as alienating us both from our “organic” relation to nature and from our animalistic instincts. And it rejects individualism in favor of collectivism.

Those who despise both mind and morality often anathematize the Jews, who highly value mind and morality. This was certainly the case when Fascism emigrated from Italy to Germany, where it transformed into Nazism. Fascism would merely be of historical interest, were it not for the fact that it has reappeared in what writers like Christopher Hitchens have called “Islamofascism.”

The Envy Factor

There is another, equally pernicious, factor that comes into play in antisemitism: envy. Of course, the Jewish people were certainly not always materially successful. They were terribly persecuted in Russia and Europe, even when they were poor peasants. It might seem that in past centuries there wasn’t much to envy about them. Worldly success is not, though, just a matter of affluence. It also includes such things as becoming a well-balanced individual, achieving a stable and emotionally satisfying family life, seeing to it that one’s children become educated, achieving competence in one’s profession, and developing oneself both intellectually and culturally. And, as we’ve discussed, it means becoming a mench, a person of integrity and moral worth. In all these respects, the Jewish people have excelled to such a degree that they have survived and thrived, despite terrible persecution, to become the envy of the world.

If it were simply worldly success at issue, the Jews would be envied and hated, but not with such virulence, for century after century. As we shall now see, it is not success in itself that is envied, but divinely sanctioned success. Both the flight from morality and envy play a decisive role, but in a manner different than previous theories have conceived.

The Two Triangles

Can a person pursue worldly happiness while living righteously? Every religion provides its own answer to that question. Consider the Star of David, the symbol of the Jewish religion. It is composed of two triangles, one pointing downward and the other upward. Symbolically, one triangle is pointing to Earth and the other to Heaven. The star symbolizes an ideal — the integration of Earth and Heaven, of happiness with spiritual life, of living as a finite human being in accordance with God’s law. The goal, then, is to live your daily life within the purview of a divinely commanded morality.

Judaism believes that a synthesis of Heaven and earthly existence is possible, by virtue of a covenant between God and man (although, in the Book of Job, the way in which God fulfills his end of the bargain is deemed unintelligible to human reason). What is, most essentially, envied about the Jews is their ability to integrate ethical and religious values with worldly success. It is envied and hated because it is evidence of God fulfilling his covenant with the Jews. Therefore, what antisemites most envy are the Jews’ blessedness, the love that they receive from their heavenly Father. Everything that the Jews may have — from affluence to a cohesive loving family to intellectual achievements — are proof that God is upholding his covenant.

The antisemite, feeling bereft of that blessedness, wishes to vilify or murder those who remind him of his unworthiness before God. In that sense, the Cain of the Bible — who, out of envy for his brother Abel, murdered him — was the progenitor of future generations of antisemites. Sometimes the antisemite murders, but most often he slanders. He accuses the Jews of everything from greed to lust to treachery. In other words, he is accusing the Jews of being immoral. These slanders arise out of the belief that if he traduces the Jews — and everyone comes to believe his lies — that the Jews will then no longer threaten his conscience.

We have been arguing that the antisemite envies and resents the Jews, for their worldly success is evidence that they have, by obeying God’s commandments, been granted His blessings. It could be objected, though, that antisemites do not make these theological connections. Perhaps, most have never even heard of the biblical notion of a covenant between God and the Jewish people. Furthermore, some antisemites are atheists, with little interest in religion, other than to denounce it. Finally, some antisemites may discern — as we all do, soon enough — that virtuous people often suffer and that rotten people often seem to prosper. It would seem, then, that those who never heard of a divine covenant as well as those who have rejected in as absurd would have little interest in the Jews and their beliefs. They might mock the Jews for being naïve, but they would not envy and hate them. And, yet, they do envy and hate them! What then is going on here?

The notion of God rewarding a person for virtuous action is not arrived at through reasoning, but is a deep-seated way in which we seek to understand our experience. Furthermore, despite cogent reasons to deny that virtue is rewarded, the continued success of the Jews flies in the face of arguments discounting the efficacy of an ethical and religious life. The mere fact that the Jewish people still exist — despite pogroms, holocausts, and all else — and that they prosper makes one pause for thought: Is virtue really rewarded? Does a covenant really exist between God and the Jews? Whether, in point of fact, there is a God and whether a divine covenant actually exists between God and the Jewish people is not our concern here. We are simply observing that the success of the Jews creates hostility among those people who — whether they consciously realize it or not — have troubling doubts about the morality and legitimacy of the life they are leading.

The love of the Father is a powerful affair, even in the modern world. After all, in many godless totalitarian nations, the people make their dear leader into a god, plastering his photo everywhere. So it is that no one gets over the Father archetype so easily.

Demanding that the Jews Ascend the Cross

Why is it that the United Nations continues to pass endless resolutions condemning Israel? After all, there are presently peoples from all over the globe — from Kosovo to Darfur, from Syria to North Korea — who are being cruelly tortured and murdered. Why, then, is Israel’s condemned for supposedly persecuting the Palestinians? And why is this same anti-Israeli sentiment rife at colleges and universities?

It is because what is known as “anti-Zionism” is but the disguise for a certain insidious species of antisemitism. It consists in seeking to make the Jews suffer the trials of integrating worldly interests with ethical and religious values. For example, the wall that Israel erected to keep out suicide-bomber murders is judged by the anti-Zionists, at the UN, to be illegal. The essential accusation is that if the Jews are really ethical they will give up all of their land, rollover and die. Since most Jews do not honor the absurd demands of the anti-Zionists — which is essentially that they ascend the cross and die for the sins of the antisemites — they are accused of being mean-spirited.

Antisemites choose the Jews for this sort of villainy for they intuitively know that the Jews are sensitive to questions of morality. The antisemites then think — by virtue of the Israel’s refusal of their demands — that they have proved that God’s demand to live ethically is impossible to fulfill. Having apparently proved the Jews hypocrites, the anti-Zionists at the UN — who are, ironically, neither Jewish nor Christian — feel that they are exculpated for their human rights abuses and other  criminality. And the many anti-Zionists elsewhere feel free of the moral demands in their own life, such as being honest in business and being faithful to their spouse. There is something truly demonic involved here, a perversion of the truth of Christianity. Such antisemites are essentially saying that unless the Jews ascend the cross, that they, the antisemites, are free to go on sinning.

But many Jews — those of the liberal persuasion — are willing to suffer a crucifixion, to the delight of antisemites. Indeed, some Jews go so far in this direction as to become self-loathing masochists, while simultaneously beating their chests in pride over their apparent moral superiority. These Jews hope that their actions will inspire other people to be moral, selfless and goodhearted.

Such hopes are dangerously foolish, for instead of inspiring antisemites to be good people, the Jews’ largess of spirit causes them to be envied and resented all the more. After all, hatred tinged with envy is not ordinary hatred. Ordinarily, if we act kindly to those who hate us, their hatred is likely to abate. But if their hatred is tinged with envy, our kindness will only exacerbate their hatred. It will exacerbate it because now they will envy our largess of spirit. Of course, antisemites would never admit to envying the Jew’s goodwill; nor do they ever seek to emulate it.

Other Religions and the Two Triangles

There are certainly other religions that have sought a synthesis of ethical and religious values with worldly success. The question naturally arises as to why the practitioners of these other religions have not been vilified as frequently as have the Jews. Let us, then, compare other the Judaic synthesis to that of other religions, for clues to that question.

Only in Judaism does God appear in the guise of a father who takes an active role in the world. Although the Trinity is central to Christianity, the focus is not on the Father, but on the Son, namely Jesus. As such, Christianity does not evoke the type of envy for the love of the Father that Judaism evokes. After all, who envies Jesus nailed to the cross?

Like the Star of David, the cross symbolizes an effort to integrate the horizontal and vertical dimensions of life. The vertical is longer, though, on the cross, indicating Christianity’s shift to otherworldliness. Thus, if the Covenant is to be fulfilled, for Christians, it will have to in Heaven, for this world of ours is a place for suffering and repentance, a “veil of tears.” Anti-Christian sentiment, throughout the ages, has had a different basis than antisemitism. It is not based on envy. In recent years, those who are have been murdering Christians in the Middle East and Pakistan are simply Muslim fanatics, who wish to murder those they cannot convert.

Despite the focus on the Son, there have been “Christians” envious towards the Jews for the love of their heavenly Father. Theologians sometimes cite the so-called “scandal of particularity” — in other words, the notion of “the chosen people” — as a major cause of Christian antisemitism. That notion has, of course, been misinterpreted. To be chosen is not akin to winning a lottery. On the contrary, it means that one has to be chosen to suffer in the service of a holy life. In that sense, it is comparable to the Christian notion of bearing one’s cross. Although Christianity has a long history of antisemitism, in recent years many Christians have displayed brotherly love towards the Jews and have courageously risen to their defense.

The way to integrate religion with the worldly life, has long been a concern for Hindus, as seen, for example in the Bhagavad-Gita. Hinduism is often misunderstood to be polytheistic, but as the perceptive Huston Smith points out, the many gods of the Hindu pantheon are actually manifestations of Brahman, the supreme god. Brahman is really a mystical notion and not a father God. That is why there is far less envy, by the peoples of the world, for Hindus who are both religious and successful. It is similarly why antisemitism among Hindus is virtually non-existent.

The same is true for the other Eastern religions. Buddhism, for example, is a religion without a god. Furthermore, Buddhists are not generally known for worldly ambitions. Consequently, Buddhists are neither envied, nor are themselves prone to envy nor are known to be antisemites.

Islam does have a father God, namely Allah. But Allah is distant and remote, and does not intervene in human affairs the way that the Hebrew god does. Furthermore, Islamic theology is founded upon a deterministic metaphysics. A person’s fate was decided before he was born. As such, there is less a sense that worldly success is a sign that a person has won God’s favor. Consequently, it less likely that religious Muslims, who attain worldly success, will be envied and hated to the degree that the Jews are. Although Muslims do not inspire envy, they are themselves prone to envy. Islam is still, after all, an Abrahamic religion. It therefore inherits, to a certain degree,  the Jewish notion of a God who rewards the faithful. As such, Muslims are capable of envy and antisemitism.

What about paganism? Pagans do not worship the Father God. On the contrary, they worship the Divine Mother, often in the form of nature. Atheists, on the other hand, would appear not to worship anything at all. Upon examination, we discover that some actually have a pseudo-religious notion of the Millennium that will be brought about by scientific progress. Other atheists actually worship the state. Dictators, like Joseph Stalin, correctly perceive that religion is in competition with the worship of the state and its leader.

Consequently, any sort of secular totalitarian creed, whether it be communism or fascism, is likely to be hostile to Judeo-Christian values. Even though those on the political left have consciously rejected Judeo-Christian values, they still have a proclivity for antisemitism. That is because, as we have suggested, they have not truly rejected these values. On the contrary, they have simply put old idols in new bottles.

Summary and Sobering Suggestions

Previous studies of the role of Jews in the Christian and Islamic worlds have told us how antisemitism has been able to spread. We discern that it is carried along by a scandalous narrative, such as the libel that Jews drink the blood of Christian children or the fantasy of a Jewish world conspiracy, articulated in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Although helping us to understand Christian and Islamic antisemitism, such studies never get to very heart of the mystery, for antisemitism is thousands of years older than those religions. Indeed, antisemitism is as ancient as Judaism itself. In order to have made sense of this hatred, we have sought to grasp its essence, independent of time, place, circumstances and narrative.

Here, then, is the essential hatred that lies behind a thousand slanders: the Jewish people’s worldly success appears to be proof that — by following God’s commandments — they have had God’s blessings conferred upon them. It is envy for the love and approval of the Heavenly Father that is most bitter to the antisemite. Once again, these connections are not consciously made by the antisemite. Having emerged from subterranean depths, they are all the more powerful.

More than likely, antisemitism will always exist, just as will alcoholism, domestic violence, terrorism, criminal activity and other social ills. What is important is the degree of its severity, for antisemitism can range from relatively mild to virulent. It really depends upon the spirit of a nation. The Jews have thrived in the United States partly because most Americans are far less susceptible to the poison of envy than most other people. Thanks to capitalism, with the opportunities it offers to improve one’s lot in life, most Americans are too busy building their own lives to obsess over what other people have on their plate. (Of course, during hard times there is a danger that a demagogue will foment class warfare and envy, thus indirectly creating the type of milieu that breeds antisemitism.)

The Jewish people have also thrived in America because there is a fundamental connection between American exceptionalism and the notion of the chosen people. In other words, Americans have traditionally viewed themselves as having a God-given mission to spread liberty and democracy to the peoples of the world. They have seen themselves chosen in that respect. American idealism has made the United States the most generous nation; time after time, Americans have selflessly contributed their goods and at wartime sacrificed their lives to assist the peoples of other nations. And, like the Jews, they have become hated for their goodness. Indeed, they have become the “ugly Americans.” In any case, where the spirit of capitalism, democracy and liberty exists, the Jewish people are welcome, but it is unlikely that this spirit will ever prevail worldwide.

Many people believe that education is the antidote to antisemitism. But the German people, one of the most educated in the world, elected Adolph Hitler to be their leader. Furthermore, antisemitism — in the guise of anti-Zionism — presently flourishes at many universities, including Ivy League ones. That’s not surprising since universities have been transformed into indoctrination centers for the leftwing variety of antisemitism. When the doctors have become carriers of the disease, there is little hope.

What is really needed are teachers who — blending exorcism with Socratic midwifery — can free students from antisemitism, as well as the many other demons that can possess the soul. That would require teachers who have themselves been delivered from evil, but such individuals are hard to come by. After all, one of the most influential philosophers of the Twentieth Century, Martin Heidegger, was himself an admirer of Hitler. And one of the last century’s profoundest psychologists, C.G. Jung, got aboard the National Socialism bandwagon. Consequently, unless teachers can first become truly educated, there is little hope that education on a mass scale can minister to an ailing body politic.

The world being as it is, the Jewish people must…

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Sometimes a psychological problem has its day in court. Last year, I was contacted by a middle-aged woman from Pennsylvania, who had been arrested by the local police for having shoplifted in a supermarket. Now here is the interesting thing: she claimed to have no memory of having shoplifted (and I still believe her). But the supermarket had video tapes of her having stolen food and other items, on at least three separate occasions.

Ellen (I’ve created that name to protect her identity) certainly didn’t fit the profile of a typical shoplifter. She was neither an indigent person in search of her next meal, nor a rich, but neurotic, Hollywood movie star afflicted with kleptomania. On the contrary, she was the image of middleclass respectability. More specifically, she was the principal of a Christian-based high school in Pennsylvania.

In her position as principal, Ellen certainly earned enough money. Obviously, there was little practical reason for her to have stolen, on each occasion, a handful of food items, flowers, etc. It was apparent that something deeper was going on with her.

Ellen feared that if her employer, the high school, found out about her arrest she could lose her job as principal. Certainly, it would tarnish her reputation in her local community. I mention that fact because she really had dual motives for seeking my assistance. She wanted to be cured of her malady. More importantly, though, she hoped that seeing a psychotherapist about her shoplifting might inspire the local district attorney to convince the supermarket to drop the case against her. At least that was the strategy of her lawyer. The fact that I am not a psychotherapist, but a philosophical counselor — who insists on delving into the deeper meaning of life’s problems — was of little concern to Ellen and her lawyer, who requested that I write a letter on Ellen’s behalf.

Attention Deficit?

The day after meeting with Ellen, her lawyer telephoned me to offer instructions regarding the letter. Over the years, I’ve known some modest lawyers, but far more who were arrogant. Alas, Ellen’s lawyer clearly belonged to the latter category. Rather than asking to hear my diagnosis, he immediately told me that he had diagnosed her.

“And what have you concluded?” I inquired. He then told me that it was a clear case of Attention Deficit Disorder. I started laughing, for Attention Deficit Disorder has become the psychological flavor of the month, used to explain and to justify a multitude of sins. In other words, according to the lawyer, Ellen had become so distracted by her problems that she had simply forgotten to go to the cash register, prior to leaving the supermarket, on at least three separate occasions.

I told Ellen’s lawyer that his diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder was very dubious. I then offered him my own diagnosis, which he in turn found to be dubious. It was clear that I was dealing with a well-meaning but narrow-minded and psychologically provincial person who had absolutely no understanding of the symbolic dimension of human desires and actions, nor was he interested in acquiring any understanding. I asked him to at least to consider it, but he said: “Well, I know the DA and he would never believe in such an explanation.” In any case, here is what I believe to be the key to the mystery of Ellen and her shoplifting…

What the Supermarket Symbolized

Now here was a real mystery. Ellen didn’t dispute that she had shoplifted, for she had seen the store’s video, but she insisted that she had no memory of having done so. Was Ellen telling the truth? It appeared to me that she was telling the truth for, on a rational level, it would have been insane for her to have jeopardized her career and reputation by engaging in petty larceny. Whatever were Ellen’s motivations, they would therefore have had to be unconscious. But what could they have been?

Let us consider her background for clues. To begin with, she has been emotionally overwrought for over a year. In addition to the quotidian pressures, concerns and anxieties endemic to being a principle at a Christian-based high school, she has been caring for her sister and her best friend, both of whom are dying of cancer. Ellen has had no one to turn to for support in these matters. Her parents  are deceased and she is unmarried.

Might it be that life’s pressures had caused Ellen to undergo psychological regression episodes? Exhausted from her role as caretaker — for her friends and siblings, as well as for the students and teachers at her school — she has been psychologically longing to assume the reverse role, i.e., to be taken care of by someone else. Although it may sound strange, I believe that Ellen had, in essence, projected the role of nurturing mother on to the supermarket. The friendly and pleasant atmosphere of that particular supermarket invites that sort of projection. There are no guards standing by the doors nor other evidence of store security in view. When you arrive on the checkout line with a bag of bagels (or muffins), the cashier doesn’t look inside the bag, but simply asks you how many bagels you have. The pleasant staff and friendly store announcements augment those maternal vibes.

The mother, archetypally speaking, gives freely, without expecting anything in return. Therefore, it wouldn’t make any sense to pay the mother. Rationally, all this is absurd. But we are not rational beings, especially when under some real psychological stress.

It, therefore, makes sense that Ellen would have no awareness of having shoplifted on those occasions, for she was not in the mode of awareness of being a responsible adult, a citizen who is required to engage in fair and honest monetary transactions with other citizens. On the contrary, being in that supermarket invited a regression to that mode of awareness in which she was a child being fed by her nurturing mother. It is important to understand that none of Ellen’s thinking or actions, in this regard, occurred on a conscious level.

I never saw Ellen again, after the initial intake session. I didn’t think that I would, based on the expression that on her face upon hearing my analysis of her malady. The popular expression is “deer in the headlights look.” Yes, the look was one of complete incomprehensibility.

That was a disappointment, for I had thought that since she was educated in the humanities she would be open to the possibility that a persons’ everyday life has a symbolic overlay. But, if we are dark to anything, it is to our own psyche and educated people are no exception.

There’s an apartment building in Brooklyn, New York that’s not really an apartment building. On the contrary, it’s really a secret subway entrance! [See photo of faux building.] Furthermore, there are secret subway entrances, disguised like this one, throughout New York City. A news item about the faux brownstone recently appeared in a number of New York City papers. Apparently, it captivated quite a few readers, as it did I.

What is it about this fake building that is so fascinating? Why are such appearance/reality mysteries so intriguing?

Classified Secrets of the Manhattan Transit Authority

Before we delve into the heart of the real mystery, which is metaphysical, let’s try to understand the ostensible mystery. Why did the MTA — the agency that runs the New York City subway system — wish to build a subway entrance at that particular location? One cannot, from the various newspaper accounts, discern precisely why. Some suggest that it has something to do with counter-terrorism. But it’s unclear as to how these disguised entrances would function in that capacity or as part of any other stealth operation.

Furthermore, the people living in the neighborhood of this particular faux brownstone have long known that it’s a secret subway entrance. We also learn, from the newspaper articles, that workers with the MTA will often enter and leave the secret entrance and have their lunch on the steps of the building. So it can’t be all that much of a top secret.

Let’s say that, for whatever the reason, the MTA needed to have a subway entrance at that particular location. Perhaps, then, they thought that it should be aesthetically pleasing, that it blend in with the surrounding buildings and not be an eyesore. All that is reasonable enough.

Yes, the MTA used both security and aesthetics to justify the project. All the same, unless city workers have souls of mud, the clandestine project must have really intrigued them, even if they could not admit it, for fear of having the expenditures for the faux building scrutinized by the taxpayers. Perhaps, they thought to themselves: “Wow! We’re building a secret subway entrance, disguised to look like a brownstone. Holy James Bond! This is super cool!”

The secret entrance certainly evokes images from spy stories, as well as films of intrigue. One can imagine Orson Welles emerging out of the brownstone, like he emerged from the secret entrance that led from the sewers of Vienna, in the film “The Third Man.”

Evoking Appearance and Reality

The deeper question here is not about the motives of the MTA. It’s really about why secret entrances — and all things disguised — engender a certain thrilling sense of wonderment and perplexity? They seem to tap into the fundamental metaphysical belief that things are not what they seem. Indeed, it evokes the appearance/reality distinction, that lies at the heart of philosophy, mysticism, and paranoia. The notion that we are sleepwalkers in a dream — one from which, with great effort, we can awaken — is a very old notion. We find it in the ancient Hindu Upanishads and in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in The Republic.

If the defining moment of ancient philosophy was Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the seminal moment of modern philosophy was Descartes’ metaphysical doubt, which he resolved — perhaps a bit too facilely — by his realization “I think, therefore I am.” And we find this same doubt expressed in films like The Matrix, and The Truman Show.

Odd though it may seem, everyone suspects that things are not what…

Would you like to read the rest of this insightful

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