© 2012, mdillof. All rights reserved.

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 feelings

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.

© 2011, mdillof. All rights reserved.

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 integrate spiritual insight with worldly wisdom, if they are to survive. This requires, to paraphrase the lyrics from an old song, praising God but passing the ammunition. Due to increasing secularization, the Jewish people have been praising God far less. That is not a good sign, for the fear of God is the foundation of Judaic ethics, and Judaic ethics lies at the core of Jewish identity. It’s foolish, as it says in the New Testament, “to gain the world, but lose one’s soul.” Only when the two triangles are aligned, can the Jewish people receive the blessings of Heaven.

The survival of the Jews should be the concern of everyone who values life and liberty, if only for the reason that those nations that threaten to annihilate the Jews eventually seek to enslave and destroy everyone else as well. Furthermore, the Jews embody a vital set of ethical values. When the Jews are murdered or are expelled from a nation, those values cease to have concrete embodiment. In such instances, the moral fiber of a nation has, in essence, been eviscerated and its people weakened.

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.html

© 2011, mdillof. All rights reserved.

The limits of language require that I say that “I awoke,” but it would be more accurate to say that something, which has had many names — the Self, the It, Consciousness, the Universal Dreamer, Vishnu — awoke. Yes, it awoke from a long, crazy, fifty-seven year old dream called Mark Dillof. It was what led up to this awakening that I shall now recount, for it might offer some valuable clues to those seeking answers to life’s profoundest enigmas.

My early morning awakening didn’t come out of the blue. Rather, it was the paradoxical consummation of a long struggle to answer certain terribly perplexing questions. These questions reached crisis proportions about five years ago. They revolved around the problem of suffering, as do all existential questions.

Gautama Buddha sought to understand the How of suffering, its origin and causes. His analysis of the nature of self, desire and suffering made him the most insightful of psychologists. Rather than seeking to understand the How of suffering, I was totally perplexed by the Why. I pondered a most ancient puzzle, one of biblical proportions: If God is good, how is it that He permits evil? In other words, I was interested in suffering’s meaning, purpose, and justification, assuming it had any.

The various answers — proposed by philosophers and theologians to the question of suffering’s meaning — are referred to as “theodicy.” There exists a quotation, attributed to Epicurus that sums up the skepticism that might emerge in regard to a justification:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

Simply stated, if God is not the cause of human suffering, then what happens to us on this Earth is arbitrary, random and meaningless. There would be, then, no “special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” nor any “divinity that shapes our ends.” But if God is responsible for the evil in the world, then He is evil, in which case He isn’t God. Epicurus’ logic has led many a skeptic to become an atheist, for neither solution is acceptable. That didn’t happen to me, because I couldn’t abide the notion that suffering, and life itself, was meaningless. And yet I found the various theological answers to the question of human suffering to be unconvincing.

And so it was that about five years ago my questioning became intense. After a few months of pondering the question, I experienced an unsettling shift. Instead of me pursuing the question, it became evident that the question was pursuing me. Everywhere I went, the question would follow me, and would often arrive at my destination ahead of me.

The question was not just intellectual, for there was a powerful pathos to it.  Looking back on those two years of intense searching, I remember that a certain image would sometimes appear to me, that of Anne Frank, the young girl who had died in a Nazi concentration camp, and who we know from her diary. I could neither make sense of her death, nor could I abandon the question. In that sense, my question became akin to a Zen koan, for koans are questions that can neither be answered, in their own terms, nor can they be abandoned until the sheer pressure of this unresolvable situation causes the mind to reach a new level of answer to the question.

After two years of intensely examining every justification that I could find for human suffering, and finding every answer to be insufficient, the moment came when I realized that there was no justification. Were I a man of faith, I would have concluded that there is a meaning to human suffering, but that I could not discern what it was, for “we see through a glass darkly,” and “God moves in mysterious ways.” But, for whatever the reason, I’ve never been able to abide in faith. Consequently, my inability to attain an answer left me in dark despair.

Enter the Dragon, Enter Shankara

I must add that I had been reading a good deal, over the years, including a fair amount of mystical literature, most of which left me al the more confused. But there was one such book, The Crest Jewel of Discrimination, by Shankara — a 9^th Century Hindu Advaita, philosopher — that sat like some food in my stomach that I could neither digest nor eliminate. Consequently, over the years, a thousand times I would pick up Shankara’s book in yet another effort to discern its meaning, only to end up throwing the book against the wall in frustration. In any case, Shankara was known for his philosophy of nondualism, for the mindboggling idea that the world that appears to be a great multiplicity is really — on some level — really one and that we, as subjects, are not separate from it, but one with it.

I mention Shankara’s mystical book, for I had been reading it the evening before. And so, I was doubly frustrated, for I could neither discern the meaning of nonduality, nor had I found a meaning for human suffering. And so I fell asleep, which brings me back to the very next morning that I had began discussing, at the beginning of this essay. When I awoke, Shankara’s philosophy made “sense,” as did the meaning of human suffering.

The solution to the enigma of suffering was not at all what I had expected, for the very terms of the question had shifted. As Albert Einstein stated: “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking as we were when we created them.” What justification, then, had I discovered for human suffering? As might be expected, any answer reaches the limits of intelligibility, once self, world suffering, justification and explanation are seen as ultimately mental constructs and therefore illusory.

More importantly, what solace has mystical insight provided me, in the face of life’s suffering? I’ve only found real peace of mind when I’ve returned to that elevated level of consciousness. Alas, consciousness is wont to drift downwards. Then, whatever insights are gained at the higher elevations become like an ever fading memory of happier times. Thus the consolations of philosophy — especially those to be discovered at the mystical heights of the spirit — require reascending the mountain of consciousness, to one’s highest level of awareness. The task then becomes staying there, for increasingly long periods of time, and forging ahead to new altitudes.

© 2011, mdillof. All rights reserved.

Consequently, they seem merely irrational. There exists, though, a logic or method to their madness. To make sense of these maladies, we need to decipher their symbolic meaning. Once deciphered, they reveal more than we bargained for: the darker secrets of human existence! Consider acrophobia, the fear of heights. An evolutionary biologist might explain that fear in terms of its survival value. Those of our ancient ancestors who were unafraid of heights had a bad habit of falling off of cliffs, whereas the fearful ones became fruitful and multiplied.

Somehow, though, in our shift from being troglodytes to being urbanites, something went awry, such that many people today are fearful of situations where little real danger exists. Evolutionary biology cannot shed much light for, if anything, most fears and phobias are counter-evolutionary. They hinder a person’s ability to survive and to thrive in the modern world. For example, job seekers who fear heights might not advance their career by traveling to another city, if it required taking a plane to get there. Nor would they accept a job offer, if it meant working in a tall building or traveling by car over a tall suspension bridge.

The prevalence of maladies of this sort would suggest that they have little or nothing to do with childhood or other trauma, so the usual psychological explanations are dubious. Nor do they represent the reemergence of some sort of primitive instincts. On the contrary, they reflect the type of challenges to selfhood endemic to modernity or postmodernity.

There exist an amazing variety of fears and phobias, but we’ll focus here on two: acrophobia (the fear of heights) and agoraphobia (the fear of open spaces), as well as the panic attacks that derive from those fears. What we shall discover may offer us insight into the dark knowledge behind all irrational fears.

Dark knowledge? Yes, people who have irrational fears are similar, in a key respect, to those who suffer from a trauma: they know something, but they do not consciously know what they know. Paradoxically, they are in the dark about it. But we also use the oxymoron “dark knowledge” in another sense: this knowledge is of the contradictory — and therefore impossible — nature of the effort to achieve happiness and fulfillment.

For example, if we have enough insight into relationships, we can meet a young couple and predict, rather accurately, that they are fated to get divorced in a few years, and we could even discern the essential reason why. Those with fears, phobias and traumas intuit something far more devastating about the impossibility of selfhood. At least on the face of it, this knowledge is deeply pessimistic; it is dark, in the sense of gloomy. There exists, though, a light at the end of the tunnel, but that is another story and we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Acrophobia, Loss of One’s Ground

Everything about human beings — including their interests, desires, activities, conflicts and anxieties — is incomprehensible, unless we can decipher its symbolic meaning. What sense, then, can we make of the fear of heights? The symbolism of height is actually positive. Mountains are images of transcendence, of being above worldly concerns. Mythologically, they are the realm of the gods and, in some cases, have a sacred significance. For example, Moses climbs Mt. Sinai to speak with God. Similarly, we can, for example, speak of people who have reached great heights in their careers, a person who has lofty ideals, and someone wishing to take the highroad. We can also speak of the elevation, or apotheosis, of a person to the status of a saint.

It’s when there is a sense of false ascension that there exists a concomitant sense of fault coupled with nemesis. The ancient Greeks had warned that hubris results in a tragic downfall. We sometimes hear, for example, of a business leader who, like Icarus, flew too high and then came crashing down. Acrophobia is undoubtedly connected with this moral fear even if, in point of fact, a person is not seeking climb to the top, whether it be legitimately or illegitimately.

The sense of disorientation connected with acrophobia does not always have a moral dimension. In other words, it does not always derive the sense of fault for making a hubristic claim. It can also derive from a lack of meaning. A purpose, or meaning, is often thought of as a ground, or foundation. Everything rests upon that foundation.

Existential groundlessness is the sense of lacking an ultimate purpose for one’s actions and meaning for one’s existence. The lack of a ground or foundation, in the philosophical sense, expresses itself — quite literally, as in all neuroses — as the lack of an actual ground or foundation. A person looks down — like the cartoon character Wile E.  Coyote, having chased Road Runner off the cliff — only to realize that he is actually not standing on anything. Hence he plunges into the abyss of nothingness. This metaphysical vertigo, caused by a lack of meaning, expresses itself as actual vertigo. Those who suffer from vertigo have entered a psychological drama, a waking dream, in which actual elevation symbolizes having lost contact with a solid foundation, i.e., a meaning, or purpose.

Agoraphobia, Loss of One’s Center

If acrophobia has to do with the loss of one’s ground or foundation, agoraphobia has to do with the loss of one’s center. There is a story in one of Mircea Eliade’s books, about a primitive tribe who would stick a pole in the ground when they move to a new territory. The pole represents the center of their universe. It happens one day that a storm comes and blows away their pole. Eliade states that the result was disastrous. The tribe wandered about for two weeks and then died. People in modern society do not use a pole to center themselves. Instead, they may have an internal center. We say of such a person that he or she is centered. A purpose or meaning is one’s center. But those who lack a center or who have lost their center have the essential problem of the tribe whose pole was lost. They lack purpose and meaning and so wander about life, in an unfocussed way.

To find ourselves in an open field or in an unfamiliar space can cause us to lose our orientation, or center. Here, too, agoraphobia is the literalization of an inner perception about one’s existence. I.E., to be oriented, or centered, is to have one’s life have unity and focus, in relation to an ultimate meaning. Everything, in one’s life, must radiate from that center. To lose one’s center, then, means that everything one does has no connection to an ultimate meaning.

A fellow I know, who recently vacationed in India, tells me that he had a panic attack, of the agoraphobia variety. It was quite a long one, lasting about ten minutes. He said that the attack occurred while walking down one of India’s many rural roads, in the countryside. The sights and sounds were so unlike anything that he had ever seen or heard, that it precipitated a jamais vu experience, resulting in a profound sense of disorientation. Yes, he knew that he had, a few days earlier, taken a jet from New York to Bombay, and his tour map was able to tell him, more or less, his present location. But all that didn’t help, for during those ten minutes all connection to meaning, purpose and personal identity vanished. He had a profoundly disturbing sense of actually being nowhere. Although this sense of unfamiliarity and disorientation occurred to him in very unfamiliar surroundings, it can also occur in the midst of the familiar, in a nearby shopping maul.

Some people, like this India vacationer — due to greater intelligence, sensitivity, or openness to insight — are more prone to what the psychiatrist R.D. Laing called “ontological insecurity.” Consequently, they are more prone to the anxiety that puts their very being in question, but they are also closer to the truth of life, for our anxieties are the revelation of the truth — which is really about the unreality of that which we take to be real — even if the terrors of the moment prevent us from seeing it.

Anxiety and Dark Knowledge

Like all fears, acrophobia (the fear of heights) and agoraphobia (the fear of open spaces) is the product of an underlying anxiety. Freud was perceptive in contending that we seek to turn anxiety into fear, for anxiety is shapeless and free-floating. How do you avoid something without a shape? You can’t. A fear, on the other hand, has a definite shape and, as such, can be avoided. Thus if you fear snakes, you can make an effort to avoid dark forests. Similarly, if you fear heights, you can avoid mountaintops and if you fear open spaces, you can avoid driving along the Great Planes. If, on the other hand, you dread the existential void, there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. One way or another, it will find you.

Anxiety is the perception of one’s unreality. To have a panic attack is to be suddenly flooded with that perception. By reality, we mean one’s familiar world, the realm of the intelligible, where things make sense. There are other situations and events that can bring one to the edges of one’s world. Karl Jaspers wrote about border situations, which are situations in which we find ourselves having to act, but have little more than contradiction and paradox to guide us.

To encounter one’s anxiety is to reach the outer edges of the world. That’s where we find the truth. The paradox here is that we are really discovering is the unreality of what we normally take to be reality. What, though, is the world? The world a person inhabits is partly function of his personal identity, his values, goals, beliefs, worries, etc. It also has a social aspect, involving the worldview of the culture and society that he inhabits. Finally, one’s world, considered in the most universal sense, is a construct of the laws of reason and rationality. The edge of the world is the place of no place where life’s most fundamental terrors have their origin.

Sometimes, when the edge is reached, it has the sense of the world shrinking. There is a scene in the film Cast Away (2000), in which the protagonist (played by Tom Hanks) gets aboard the small ship that he has built starts sailing beyond the island that he has inhabited. The island that had been his entire world gets smaller and smaller, as he sails further and further away. Anyone who has left a significant interpersonal relationship, a place of long employment, a religion, a cult, a house that one has lived in or other emotionally invested environment, can have similar sense of leaving the known world. The film represents it as a critical situation, but not an anxious moment. The scene symbolizes the type of moment when the world we inhabit shrinks in significance. (Castaneda used the term “the shrinking of the tonal”). This is disorienting, for one is still in one’s world, in one sense, but the meanings are no longer there.

I remember having a powerful experience of this sort, quite some years ago. I had taken a nap in my apartment. I awoke and walked over to my desk. It was then that I had a feeling that the meanings of the various objects in my apartment had slipped off of them, in some sort of surrealistic way. It was a terrifying moment of jamais vu, for my world was right in front of me and yet not there. The feeling lasted maybe five terrifying seconds and then the meanings returned.

A more common experience that I used to have was simply wake up from a nap and be unable to remember where I was, even though it was obvious that I was in my apartment in New York City or in Binghamton, after I moved there. I do not know why this experience would only occur while awakening from a nap, but whatever it was, it pulled the rug out from my familiar sense of space and time.

A related experience — which would occur not only when awakening from a nap, but any time — would be one of intense vertigo, upon the realization that the world was round and therefore up and down were just relative notions. This relativity vertigo could also occur to me while in the waking state. I remember once, for example, browsing some in the philosophy section of a bookstore in Manhattan. I picked up a book about Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, whereupon I everything stared spinning. I quickly put down the book and found a chair where I could sit down for a time, until I recovered from my panic attack.

Possible Cures

Is there a cure for acrophobia and agoraphobia? There exist a variety of behavioral techniques. Back in the Nineteenth Century, Wolfgang von Goethe described how he had cured himself of his fear of heights by an act of will, which consisted of climbing to the top of a very high church and remaining there for hours on end. There is much to be said for taking on one’s fear head-on life this, and thus desensitizing oneself to them. The problem, though, is that one never comes to understand what these fears are really about. Consequently, the opportunity for self-knowledge is lost. If Freud is correct, the result would be a symptom substitution, since these fears are, as we have seen, reflections of an underlying anxiety.

There is another possibility. Since these maladies are due to the lack of a ground, center, orientation or ultimate meaning, a solution would consist in gaining all of that. Sometimes this is possible, but sometimes it is not. It may simply be that a person suffering in this way has not been able to connect with an ultimate meaning.

Or, it could be that he or she — having reached that state of being we have been calling “the end of the world” — now knows too much about the ontological nature of the category of meaning to be able connect with it. Such a person now regards meaning as akin to a Kantian category, a form of cognition that organizes chaos into an intelligible world. Once hip to the transcendental illusion, the notion that we as subjects create our world, it’s not possible to return to objective meanings, in quite the same way.

Instead of seeking to satisfy the requirement of meaning, would it be possible to transcend the requirement of meaning, or at least one’s relation to it? This does not mean that we would act haphazardly, seeking to live spontaneously, abandoning the categories of consistency and wholeness, such that our lives took on the chaotic quality of a Jackson Pollack painting. Nor would we become nihilists. On the contrary, we would live in terms of meanings, while knowing real nature of meaning, into its “hollowness,” as the Zen Buddhists say. It would then take on a game-like quality.

Ursula Le Guin wrote a book with the thought-provoking title “Dancing at the Edge of the World” (1989). To reach the edge of the world and to dance — rather than, let’s say, to throw up — would be quite an accomplishment.

Fear of Flying

My effort to understand these fears has had an existential relevance. Most particularly, I wished to overcome my fear of flying, which had always been a vertiginous ordeal. It hadn’t helped that the airlines have steadily declined in quality, during the past twenty years, resulting in an increasing sense of passenger dehumanization. In any case, flying was stressful enough for me when the skies were a cloudless blue, but when the plane encountered turbulence, I felt like I was grasping the edge of a cliff, my fingers were slipping and I was about to plummet into the abyss.

I knew that my anxiety derived from existential groundlessness, so I struggled with finding meaning in a religious life. To be honest, I’d become religious a few days before I knew that I had to take a plane somewhere. Reading various philosophical, religious and mystical texts to read provided some comfort, but not nearly enough. At the time, I was just beginning to explore these fears and phobias and didn’t have a lot of insight into their deeper meaning. Whatever insights I did gain were inefficacious, for I still dreaded flying.

Out of a sense of frustration that my efforts to find inner-peace had proved futile, I found myself becoming angry at the whole situation. Oddly enough, I didn’t really have an object for my wrath. Was I angry at the winds that caused airplanes to encounter turbulence? Was I angry at myself, at my own faintheartedness? At God? At  the void? I wasn’t sure, but from then on I would become fierce when the plane encountered turbulence.

Crazy though it may sound, adopting this attitude of righteous anger greatly diminished my anxiety and freed me from further attacks of airborne panic. I hadn’t achieved the ataraxia — the inner peace that the ancient philosophers sought — for anger itself is a turbulent emotion, but I had gained inner resolve and intestinal fortitude, such that I could remain upright amidst the winds of the spirit. Sometimes, on such flights, the defiant words of Shakespeare’s King Lear would come to mind:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!

Ah, but that is not the end of my tale, for deliverance came when I least expected it. It happened one afternoon last year, on a flight from Pittsburg to Louisville, that my plane encountered a particularly aggressive thunderstorm. As the plane rocked and reeled, I looked around at my fellow passengers. Some were wide-eyed with horror, clutching their seats. Some, like I, gritted their teeth like soldiers preparing perhaps for our last battle. But, apart from the roar of the plane’s engine, there was a chilling silence.

It was then that I heard — from a few rows behind me — giggling. I turned around to see a girl, of about six or seven, sitting next to her mother, who was nervously smiling. As the plane danced drunkenly in the wind, the little girl would giggle and then say, quite joyously, “Whooooooeeeeee! Whoooooooooeeee! And then she would giggle some more. Well, I could maintain neither my fear nor my anger any longer, but started laughing. At that moment, through a gift of grace, I was able to let go and embrace the void.

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“Three metamorphoses of the spirit do I designate to you: how the spirit becometh a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.” — Nietzsche

© 2010 – 2011, mdillof. All rights reserved.

Why do they call it the blues? Blue is the color of the sky, which symbolizes transcendence of earthly labors and woes. To be blue is to yearn to be free, whole, and complete, but to have that longing abort. It is to long to soar into the sky of hopeful possibilities, but to have life’s disappointments leave one earthbound.

What follows is a very incomplete analysis of the experience of being blue, melancholy or depressed. Our search for clues will take us to Abraham Lincoln, to an old 1960s song, to Casablanca and then back to Lincoln.

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Consider those occasions when you’ve been down, depressed, or had the blues. What have they in common? They emerged out of the gap between what you wished life to be and what it actually is. You might, for example, have hoped that someone you love would love you in return, but your affection goes unrequited. Or you would like life be fair and just, but it’s often quite the opposite. Or you wished that your pet collie could have lived forever, but it had to die, like all mortal beings.

That gap feels like a fissure in your world, a black hole sucking all dreams of a happy life into oblivion. The particular disappointment, setback, or tragedy you experienced made your world no longer seem a place of hope and possibility, but a broken, or fallen world, a wasteland. In the words of Matthew Arnold:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Here’s the curious thing: the perception of the fundamental gap — between the ideal and the real — doesn’t always engender tragic sadness. Sometimes, it results in laughter. Consider any comic situation, whether it be from a play, film or TV series. The real belly laughs come from the gap, or discrepancy, between what the protagonist attempted to accomplish and what actually befell him or her.

Obviously, it is more pleasant to laugh at the gap than to cry about it. What, then, the tears? Horace Walpole offers us a clue when he writes: “Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.” Are feelings, then, the culprit?

Of course, it is one thing to be occasionally sad or even to be temperamentally disposed to sadness. But it’s another matter to feel blue for long periods of time, with little or no respite, as in the case of melancholy, or depression. Might it be that those who suffer from chronic depression tend to dwell in their feelings?

Lincoln’s Melancholy

The life of Abraham Lincoln might offer us some clues to the mystery of depression. Lincoln suffered throughout his life from melancholy. His life might afford us some insights into that affliction. According to historian Joshua Wolf Shenk, in an article entitled “Lincoln’s Great Depression” (Atlantic Monthly, October 2005), Lincoln’s depression was pretty much continual and it was serious. It was serious enough, according to Shenk, that Lincoln would often talk and write of suicide.

Lincoln had a powerful intellect and was of course a deep thinker, which might lead one to conclude — by Horace Walpole’s reasoning — that Lincoln viewed life as a comedy. But, that is not so, for Lincoln was a man with strong feelings, especially those that arise de profundis, from one who knew heartbreaking calamities from his early years. His sentiments were also a function of compassion, which latter found expression in his second inaugural address: “With malice toward none; with charity for all…”

There is no denying the truth of the tragic vision of life, that the world is a “veil of tears,” but heartfelt caring need not lead to melancholy. It can lead to the effort to redeem our fallen world. Furthermore, decisive action is an antidote to melancholy and Lincoln certainly acted decisively. Comedy, too, is an antidote, and Lincoln was an avid collector of jokes and funny stories. How, then, are we to explain Lincoln’s chronic depression? Indeed, how can we explain any persistent depression?

We are back to the question of feelings. Are dark feeling, such as melancholy, addictive in some way? If they are, they must fulfill some psychological need. Perhaps sadness is orienting in its constancy. We might say: Same gloom, different day. We know what’s coming. The danger, of course, is that we might, when we least expect it, be surprised by joy. Certainly, joy is one of the most disruptive of emotions.

The End of the World

“Why does the sun go on shining?

Music has the power to stir up emotions and feelings. That, according to Plato, is dangerous, who would have us live the life of reason. In so far as songs make us feel, do they evoke, by Horace Walpole’s logic, the tragic sense of life? Not at all, for not all songs are sad, or in a minor key, but as Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote: “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts…” Back in 1965, Skeeter Davis sang a plaintive love song called “The End of the World,” which includes the lyrics:

“Why does the sun go on shining?

Why does the sea rush to shore?

Don’t they know it’s the end of the world,

‘Cause you don’t love me any more?”

“Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?

It ended when you said goodbye.”

Here the song on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgcy-V6YIuI

One could substitute any lost hope for the romantic one that is the subject of this song. Although it might be a bit less lyrical, one could say: “How does the sun go on shining? It ended when I failed to make junior partner at the law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.” Or “It ended when the town’s zoning commission turned down our application for an easement, which would have allowed us to open a hotdog concession across from City Hall.” Or “it ended way back in 1957, when the Dodgers left Brooklyn.” It can be anything that should have happened, but didn’t, or that didn’t happen, but should have. Either way, it creates the gap, that we discussed earlier, between the way life should and the way it is.

Most of the time, we soon get over such passing disappointments, but to be depressed is to allow the disappointment to feel like the end of the world and an occasion for eternal gloom. Moroseness involves a self-indulgent clinging to despair. That clinging prevents the buds of a new life from allowing something new to emerge.

We cling for we fear an apocalypse of a deeper sought, one in which we are called upon not just to passively be in despair, but to actively despair, to use Kierkegaard’s language, of our present way of living. It means to “put away childish things.” When that happens, it really is the end of the world, as we know it, which can be a very good thing.

In Skeeter Davis’ song, the world doesn’t really end for the lovelorn woman. Rather, the world has a fissure, or hole, in it, the correlate to what people mean by a broken heart. And so she wonders how the sun can go on shining and the world can continue to exist. Indeed, she is puzzled how it is that objective reality belies her inner state of sadness. The contrast between inner and outer even creates a certain wonderment, which might even launch a philosophical question.

In any case, there may come a point, in our inner-development, when our world, whether it be fallen or not, must really end, in a very real way. More specifically, our particular mode of existence — and the world we create, which is a product of who we are — must come to an end, so that something new can emerge. It must end in the way that a dream must end, when it is time for the dreamer to awaken.

In the film Casablanca, Rick went through a long period of bitter melancholy and despair following

The temptation to be depressed

his romantic disappointment in Paris. When he sells his restaurant and go off to war, it’s the beginning of a new life for him.

Thus, oftentimes, the end of the world is the end of the life that we have been living. It may, more specifically, be the end of a career, a marriage, etc. But, more essentially, it is the end of a certain mode of existence, the end of a certain worldview. Might we say, then, that the clinging to past dreams — which are the fabrications of outmoded ways of being and seeing — after it’s time to awaken, is the ultimate source of melancholy?

Kierkegaard argues that melancholy is a hysteria of the spirit. When the spirit is ready to transform, it faints out of dread before the terrifying openness of freedom. Might our fainting — and falling back into the grounding darkness of feeling — be a flight from spiritual freedom and the key to melancholy?

Addendum: On the Sadness that Arises from Compassion and How It Needs to Be Balanced with Wisdom

Not all sadness, melancholy, or depression arises from compassion. But it does, in some instances, as in the case of Lincoln’s melancholy. Compassion is a feeling and we should remember Plato’s warning about the dangers of the emotions and feelings. And yet, feelings can be elevated to a very lofty level. We see that elevation, or sublimation, in the lives of noble souls, in great works of art, literature and music, and in Lincoln’s speeches. In his

Contemplative Lincoln

First Inaugural Address, he wrote:

“Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Lincoln meant by “mystic chords of memory” that the sacrifices by patriots and soldiers connect to our everyday lives as Americans. But it might be fair to say that bonds of affection and mystic chords connected Lincoln to the entirety of human suffering.

Is it possible to be attuned to those “mystic chords of memory” without being knocked over by tidal waves of fellow-feeling? For those waves can drown one in melancholy, as they often threatened to drown Lincoln. What’s required is a difficult balancing act. Certainly, those bonds of affection didn’t prevent Lincoln from defeating the Confederacy by whatever means possible, including having General Sherman burn Atlanta to the ground and all else in his path. So Lincoln’s affection for his fellow man was not sentimental, but was made of sterner stuff. His compassion was tempered by a keen perception of life’s sometimes agonizing realities.

Apropos is Mahayana Buddhism, whose goal is to balance compassion (karuna) with wisdom (sunyata). Wisdom, in this case, is not simply a sober-minded acknowledgement of life’s realities, but mystical insight into the ultimate emptiness of all phenomena.

But what a paradox! It means awakening to the unreality of the world and of the self, and to the illusoriness of human suffering and yet to devote ones life to ending that suffering. How does one devote one’s life to ending that which — according to the deepest insight — does not really exist? Such is the paradoxical task of the Bodhisattva, he who awaken others so as to release them from their suffering.

A well-balanced life really calls for us to accomplish difficult feats of equilibrium. In addition to balancing compassion and wisdom, life calls upon us to balance this-worldliness and otherworldliness. That, too, is quite an accomplishment — no matter what one does for a living and no matter what one’s role in life may be — for worldly affairs have a way of making us lose awareness of the big picture, such that the world, as Wordsworth wrote “is too much with us.”

It takes a Marcus Aurelius to balance active life in the world (he was emperor of Rome) with being a profound philosopher. And in the Bhagavad-Gita, it takes a mystical intuition for Arjuna to be both warrior and sage. Balancing acts are significant accomplishments, for the rope we must tread hangs over the abyss of despair.

The historical evidence suggests that Lincoln never overcame his proclivity for melancholy. But history also suggests that Lincoln found his balance, among life’s polarities, as he walked the path that leads to glory and salvation.

The sadness that grows out of fellow-feeling cannot be avoided, nor should we attempt to do so, for as Franz Kafka advised: “You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.” In any case, melancholy is another matter. Unlike sadness, who visits for a time and eventually departs, melancholy seeks to become a permanent resident of one’s heart.

Anyone on life’s journey is likely to encounter the demon of melancholy. The best defense is to illuminate the dark demon with the light of insight and understanding. The light will cause the demon to wither, like a witch that’s been drenched with water. Then, we should prompt the weakened demon to flee, by evoking the spirit of laughter. (It is not advised to skip step one, for laughter without insight is not powerful enough to exorcise the demon.) Having subdued the demon, we can continue on our journey. But we must stay on guard, for the demon of melancholy shall bide its time, waiting for another opportunity.

P.S. I can imagine the response of many a reader — including many a therapist — to my analysis of melancholy: “Balance, shmalance! Lincoln Sminkin! My depression is purely chemical. I’m a victim! So just prescribe me some Prozac. Let me remain in life’s shallows!” The problem is that perplexing questions are like sharks. From time to time, they swim from life’s depths into the shallows. And then they gleefully consume those who inhabit those waters.

© 2010 – 2011, mdillof. All rights reserved.

What follows is not from the article in Commentary Magazine, but a more contemporary version of the joke. It appeared on an internet website, several years ago. I hope that I am citing the source correctly:  posted by BitterOldPunk http://www.metafilter.com/user/12903 at 3:45 PM on December 8, 2008 http://www.metafilter.com/77219/Some-Jewish-Humor. I have revised the wording very slightly.

So I get on the plane and settle into my seat and as soon as we take off, the old guy next to me starts talking.

“Oy, am I THIRSTY!” he says.

A moment later:

“Oy, am I THIRSTY!”

Every fifteen seconds, like clockwork.

“Oy, am I THIRSTY!”

Finally I can’t take any more. As soon as the seatbelt sign flickers out, I get up, go to the back of the plane. I get two of those cone cups, fill them with water. I walk back up the aisle and wordlessly hand the man the two cups.

He brightens. “Thank you, young man!” He eagerly drinks both cups of water and smacks his lips in satisfaction. He’s silent for a moment.

Then he says, “Oy, was I THIRSTY. Oy, was I THIRSTY.”

OK, why is it funny? According to Mr. Shriberg, Jews are enjoined to remember grievances. The Jewish holidays commemorate them. Mr. Sherberg makes the point that there is a conflation that occurs between grievances to the Jewish people and personal grievances, such as being thirsty. Mr. Sherberg’s perceptive analysis offers us insight into the premise of the joke, but he doesn’t explain why it makes us laugh. After all, where’s the humor in the fact that Jews remember grievances?

The Fundamental Contradiction

There’s a key to discovering why any joke makes us laugh. All humor is founded on an incongruity, or contradiction. Therefore, to discern why a particular joke is funny, one must detect the particular contradiction at its heart. Let us see if contradiction is the key that can unlock the mysterious risibility of this joke…

It’s often funny when what initially appears to be a significant change turns out to be no change at all. It points to a fundamental discrepancy in our lives between what we seek to effectuate and the actual result. Sometimes we are rewarded by our labors, but oftentimes well laid plans and assiduous efforts come to naught. That is the bitter truth that the heroic Simone Bolívar experienced. He said that all if his efforts had been like “plowing the sea.” Sisyphus also comes to mind as an image of futility. We struggle to roll the boulder up the hill and down it comes. Elsewhere, we had discussed the Conservation of Suffering Principle. The basic idea is that suffering, like energy or matter, can neither be created nor destroyed. Only its form changes. For example, we solve our problems. The result? Instead of being anxious, we become bored. In that sense, human suffering is eternal.

Of course, there’s neither anything intrinsically humorous about labors that prove to be Sisyphean, nor about the conservation of suffering. They seem redolent of tragedy rather than comedy. It’s only when we gain an emotional distance from contradiction that we are able to let go and laugh.

Consider some instances of this phenomenon from classic comedies. The film “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” (1948)  is a case in point. After an enormous effort to bring the gold down from the mountain, a dust storm comes and blows it back to where it came. The same sense of “back to square one” is the case in the plays “The Front Page” (1928) and in “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” (1939) Laurel and Hardy were masters of the art of depicting futile efforts, in a comic way.

The perception of the ultimate hopelessness of human endeavor — seen from the emotional distance that comedy invokes — releases us, if only for a moment, from our overly-serious effort to make significant changes in our own life.

Of course, there is a change in the water situation. The old man has gone from saying “Oy, AM I thirsty” to saying “Oy, WAS I thirsty.” What is constant is his preoccupation with suffering. If he isn’t suffering, then he is reflecting upon suffering. It makes sense that this should be a Jewish joke, for the Jews, as a people, have certainly suffered these past few millennia. It would seem that most of the Jewish holidays celebrate how the Jews survived. Indeed, it’s been said facetiously, although with much truth, that all Jewish holidays have the same premise: “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!” Mr. Shriberg is, therefore, correct in respect to why it’s a Jewish joke.

Youth Versus Age

But the joke really has a universal appeal, in so far as suffering is a preoccupation of all people, although particularly older people, as they have usually been through a good deal more than younger people, especially in terms of physical ailments, but really in terms of all suffering.

One could object, though, that in the version of the joke that appeared in Commentary Magazine it was not an old man who says “Oy, am I thirsty!” On the contrary, a woman says it. We do not know her age. But when reading the joke I couldn’t help infer that it was an older woman, one who was at least middle-aged. A young woman would, more than likely, have gotten up and got herself some water. And a young woman would be less likely to say “Oy.”

Those who are young look forward to life with enthusiasm, as does the fool in the tarot deck, who is just about to walk off a cliff. The energy of youth is predicated on that naïveté. And it’s just as well, for otherwise they wouldn’t attempt anything and wouldn’t learn anything, and human evolution would come to a standstill. That is why there is much wisdom in Erasmus’ praise of folly.

But those who are elderly view life in a different light. They see it as a series of beatings, assaults, and trials. So it is not surprising that they pride themselves in how many diseases they survived, how many family conflicts they endured, how many tragedies they made it through — indeed, how many of life’s arrows they either dodged or managed to endure.

Thus, if they aren’t suffering, they are reflecting on how they had suffered in the past. When together, they even compete in a kind of tsuris Olympics: “You think you’ve had it bad? Well, I survived cancer, three heart attacks, gout, stones, gingivitis, the Black Death, AIDS, beriberi, tuberculosis, rickets, chronic stink foot, an impacted molar, tennis elbow, and acne! Furthermore, my left leg hurts when I dance the Hora!”

Implicit here is a sense of moral purification for suffering. Dostoevsky often presented characters whose suffering constitutes a kind of moral catharsis. “Sweet are the uses of adversity,” as Shakespeare tells us. It is sweet, for it tells us who we are, as it exorcises pride, hubris and egotism in its many form. Adversity is grounding, in that regard.

Consider, by way of contrast, the superficial optimism of youth, with it’s denial of old age and death. To quote the Bard again: “Men turn their backs on the setting sun.” That has always been so, but it’s even more true today, due to our youth-oriented culture.

The joke is as symbolic as a dream. The young man thought that by relieving the old man of his thirst, he would no longer be reminded of old age, suffering and mortality. Alas, the young man finds himself subject to the Conservation of Suffering Principle. More specifically, instead of having to endure the sight of suffering, the young man must now hear suffering memorialized. “I WAS thirsty” is just as bad as “I AM thirsty.”

We laugh along, for we too are subject to the conservation of suffering. And here, again, we are for a moment — due to the emotional distance that comedy engenders — released from our problematic and exhausting efforts at selfhood, as everything we take most seriously explodes into laughter.

© 2010 – 2011, mdillof. All rights reserved.

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.

© 2010 – 2011, mdillof. All rights reserved.

Almost lifelike woman robot created by Japanese scientists

Japanese scientists have been making rapid strides creating automatons that look and act like human beings. But, in recent years, they’ve encountered a disturbing phenomenon. Mori Masahiro, the roboticist, named it “uncanny valley.”

Here is what happens: Up to a point, the more lifelike a robot appears, the more favorable will be our emotional response to it. Were we to represent this on a graph, we would see an upward pointing diagonal line, representing the positive correlation between a robot’s lifelikeness and emotionally warm feelings on our part.

But, at a certain point — when the robot’s looks and actions become almost indistinguishable from that of a human being — the robot will elicit, in us, feelings of revulsion. Indeed, it will elicit, in us, that horrifying sense of dread associated with the uncanny. By the uncanny, we mean the supernatural, strange, eerie, or weird. The encounter with the uncanny can be the most terrifying of all experiences.

To represent this shift — when the correlation between lifelikeness and affection becomes negative — the line on the graph precipitously descends, creating a dip, or valley, known as “uncanny valley.” (For more information on this, see the article in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)

A number of “scientific” explanations for uncanny valley — from the fear of death to poor mate selection — have been proposed, all of which derive from theoretically ungrounded abstractions.It is not surprising that scientists — tending to be out of touch with their emotions, fearful of the irrational and disdainful of metaphysics — would formulate such farfetched theories.

What, then, is really involved here? The revulsion to hyper-realistic robots is but a species of the uncanny. Exploring some of its other varieties may offer us clues to this intriguing mystery. As we’re about to discover, the dip, or valley — that these robotic engineers have stumbled upon — leads down the metaphysical rabbit hole, through a kind of worm hole, to the edge of the intelligible world.

When Home Sweet Home Becomes Dreadfully Unfamiliar

In his intriguing essay on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud offers a valuable clue to its meaning:

“The German word ‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich’ ['homely'], ‘heimisch’ ['native'] the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation is not capable of inversion.” (Essay on the Uncanny, by Sigmund Freud)

Freud then proceeds to analyze what he considers to be the factors that, under certain circumstances, make the unfamiliar frightening. We wont explore Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of repression and the uncanny. Suffice it to say that like other theories of the uncanny, Freud’s theory fails to discern the very key to the phenomenon.

It is neither the unknown nor the revelation of that which had been hidden (or repressed) that is most terrifying, but rather the loss of the familiar! Another way of saying this is that it is not leaving home that invites the uncanny. What is most frightening is when home begins to look disturbingly strange. Let us consider several instances of this phenomenon, before finally returning to the subject of robotics.

An example from my own life comes to mind. It is akin to the Uncanny Valley in so far as it involves a disturbingly close resemblance between the real and the unreal. As a child, I remember getting lost several times and, just for a

moment, being relieved to find my apartment building. (see photo)

Ah, but then a moment latter I realized that it was not my apartment building, but one that looked just like it. That was an easy mistake to make, because the apartment house in which I grew up, as a boy in Brooklyn, NY, was identical to about thirty other apartments in the same building complex.

The feeling of being lost is very unpleasant, and can be a dreadful one for a child. But the feeling of mistakenly taking the wrong house to be one’s own evokes the horror of the uncanny. The same sort of horror is evoked when as a child I became lost and would, for an instance, think that I recognized one of my parents, only to realize that it was a stranger who resembled either of them.

Alfred Hitchcock has a moment like that in his classic film “The Lady Vanishes.” (1938) There is a moment when the protagonist believes that he has found the missing Ms. Froy, sitting on the train. But when the women turns around, he realizes that it is someone else, who vaguely resembles her. The viewer of the film experiences the queasiness associated with the uncanny.

The Uncanniness that Emerges from Self-Reflection

A particularly powerful experience of the uncanny can occur at a moment of self-reflection. Indeed, imagine looking into a mirror and feeling like one is viewing a stranger. The sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann suggest that that experience is not uncommon. But human beings have ways of fleeing from the import of such metaphysical terrors. The authors offer an example of how a morning train ride to work is used by many people to exorcise such uncanny perceptions.

“The individual may not know anyone on the train and may speak to no one. All the same, the crowd of fellow-commuters reaffirms the basic structure of everyday life. By their overall conduct the fellow-commuters extract the individual from the tenuous reality of early-morning grogginess and proclaim to him in no uncertain terms that the world consists of earnest men going to work, of responsibility and schedules, of the New Haven Railroad and the New York Times. The last, of course, reaffirms the widest coordinates of the individual’s reality. From the weather reports to the help-wanted ads it assures him that he is, indeed, in the most real world possible. Concomitantly, it affirms the less-than-real status of the sinister ecstasies experienced before breakfast — the alien shape of allegedly familiar objects upon waking from a disturbing dream, the shock of non-recognition of one’s own face in the bathroom mirror, the unmistakable suspicion a little latter that one’s wife and children are mysterious strangers.” (“The Social Construction of Reality.” Anchor Books: 1967, pp. 149-150)

And, as Berger and Luckmann point out, one can have the perception that one’s spouse and children are complete strangers. In a very real sense, it may be true. It’s just that one never realized it before. There was a film very aptly named “Lovers and Other Strangers.” (1970) In any case, these are powerful perceptions of the uncanny.

A Schlemiel Experiences the Uncanny

Let us consider one last example of this phenomenon. Some years ago I read a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer entitled “When Schlemiel Went to Warsaw.” (1979) It is about a foolish fellow, a schlemiel, who decides to take a trip from his home town to Warsaw Poland. As far as I can recall, about half way to Warsaw, he takes his boots off, and points them in the direction of Warsaw. Then he goes off to sleep.

If I’m not mistaken, an elf of some sort reverses the direction of Schlemiel’s boots. Consequently, when Schlemiel awakens the next morning — not realizing that his boots have been turned around — he unwittingly proceeds back to his hometown imagining that he has arrived in Warsaw.

How strange, Schlemiel foolishly thinks, that everything in Warsaw is exactly like it is in his hometown. There is even a house like his house, with a woman who claims to be his wife!

Singer’s story about Schlemiel is invariably mistaken for a humorous children’s story,  but beneath the surface of this amusing tale lie the terrors of the uncanny. Singers story resonates with his readers, for there are frightening moments when we awaken to realize that everything appears to be the same but is not at all! What, then, is the difference? It’s rather hard to get a hold of. In truth, the place is the same, but something has happened to the person, thus making the place look different to him or her.

Singer’s story illustrates what happens when we begin to awaken, not just literally as happened to Schlemiel, but in the deeper sense of the word. The world then appears to be unfamiliar; it appears as an unfathomable mystery. Furthermore, we neither recognize ourselves nor the people we’ve known for many years. (There are certain resemblances, in regard to a journey back home, to Carlos Castaneda’s “Journey to Ixtlan.”

It’s not that the world has become mysterious for the first time. It always was mysterious. Here, again, it’s just that we never realized it, that is until now. Why, then, is this so horrifying? Plato may offer us a clue.

Leaving the Cave

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, from “The Republic,” invokes the uncanny. The basic narrative is that we are, metaphorically speaking, prisoners viewing shadows on the wall of a cave, imagining that these shadows are the real thing. What is disturbing is not that Plato takes us to strange lands, but that what we ordinarily take to be true reality is seen to be unreal, or at best half-real. Films, like The Matrix, have had plot lines based on one or more characters realizing that their world is no more than an illusion.

In Plato’s Allegory, one prisoner is released from his bonds and allowed to leave the cave of illusion. But he doesn’t want to, so two guards have to drag him out of the cave and to the light while he is kicking and screaming! You can’t really blame him, for it means the end of his world, and the end of his world means the end of who he take himself to be. But isn’t it liberating? Indeed, it is, but due to what the Buddhists call “attachment,” we stubbornly cling to ourselves. Without that clinging, there would be no terrors of the uncanny. Why, then, the need to cling? That is a mystery we shall need to explore on another occasion.

Return to the Robot

What light can our previous examples throw on the uncanny and its relation to the Japanese robots? Certain qualities that we normally attribute to people — freedom and autonomy — are lacking. We don’t mean that everybody is literally a robot or a mechanical assemblage of parts. Rather, the uncanny valley evokes, in a symbolic, way, a fundamental truth: people really are mechanical, or robotic, in the metaphysical sense.

To be mechanical is to lack volition, as well as self-awareness. As P.D. Ouspensky expressed it: “Divide in yourself the mechanical from the conscious, see how little there is of the conscious, how seldom it works, and how strong is the mechanical — mechanical attitudes, mechanical intentions, mechanical thoughts, mechanical desires.”

Most people are mechanical because they are born with certain attitudes that are not challenged in college or else are given a new form of propaganda, politically correct beliefs, which are no more than shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. Inner freedom, on the other hand, is a serious accomplishment, for it requires self-knowledge, which is very rare is people.

Witnessing a lifelike robot unconsciously invites the dangerous perception that the planet is peopled by robots. So do films in which characters — believed to be human beings — are discovered to really be robots. “The Stepford Wives” (1975) and “Aliens” (1986) would be examples. It’s a dangerous perception because, on a deeper level, it is a true perception.

Here, again, I do not mean robots in the literal sense, but rather robots in the sense of people living mechanically, as Ouspensky meant it. As in all cases of the uncanny, the world that one had been familiar with and comfortable with threatens to disappear, to be replaced by the world as it really is.

To summarize, the uncanny fear that people are really robots is based on a true perception about life. But 99% of the people who have such uncanny fears  — whether all the time or just when viewing horror films or seeing robots, like the one pictured above — have no idea what it is that they really fear. They fear the truth about life.

An Antidote to the Terrors of the Uncanny

Awakenings happen, whether or not we seek them. For life is essentially about awakening, despite the fact that we arrange our lives so that we may continue to sleepwalk. Any awakening, to any degree, will evoke the terrors of the uncanny. A life devoted to self-knowledge — assuming that it is genuine and not yet another hideout from the truth of human existence — will evoke it all the more.

The remedy to life’s terrors involves balance. In one of Carlos Castaneda’s books, his teacher Don Juan Matus recommends balancing the terrors of life with the sense of wonder. There are other transcendent emotions, in addition to wonder, including: amazement, awe and, for want of a better term, cosmic laughter. This balancing act is, in its own way, as artful as anything that the tightrope walker, Philippe Petit, has attempted.

If we are to survive the rigors of the journey to self-knowledge and inner freedom, we must walk the tightrope that hangs over that abyss — known as the Uncanny Valley — at every moment of every day.

© 2010 – 2011, mdillof. All rights reserved.

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 they appear to be. We seem to be born with such metaphysical doubts. But rather then turning to philosophy to resolve their perplexities about the true reality underlying appearances, many people will instead become interested in conspiracy theories.

Giorgio-De-Chirico-Melancholy-and-Mystery-of-a-Street-1914

For example, it may appear that a lone, deranged gunman assassinated President Kennedy, in truth it was either the CIA, Castro, the Mafia, Richard Nixon, or some other group that had reason to assassinate him. This is not to deny that actual conspiracies do exist. But the interest in them involves a kind of primitive appearance/reality distinction. The fascination with the Faux brownstone belongs to that conspiratorial sense.

Buildings and the Uncanny

Let us conclude our investigation by turning to two painting that evoke the appearance/reality distinction. De Chirico’s “Mystery and Melancholy of a Street” is replete with a sense that there is a mystery lurking here. It’s simultaneously hidden — for the viewer is not clear on what’s really going on in this scene — and yet apparent, for everything is infused with by an uncanny sense of an enigma, even if it remains beyond our conceptual grasp.

Early Sunday Morning, by Edward Hopper

Now consider Edward Hopper’s painting “Early Sunday Morning,” with its row of shops and second floor apartments. Here, too, dark emotions find expression, as in De Chirico’s paintings — loneliness, an eerie and uncanny silence, a sense of foreboding and a deep longing, perhaps for the divine to shatter that unearthly silence. In a certain sense, Hopper’s painting is more unsettling than De Chirico’s, because it’s able to evoke the omnipresent enigma of everyday life without recourse to surrealism. Thus the viewer can’t easily reject it, for it’s all too familiar.

Thus if it’s mystery we crave, we need not travel to Brooklyn in search of faux brownstones. It’s always there, right before us, if we dare turn our head to gaze upon it.

© 2010 – 2011, mdillof. All rights reserved.