IS IT MORE IMPORTANT TO BE LOVED OR RESPECTED?

IS IT MORE IMPORTANT TO BE LOVED OR RESPECTED?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 5, 2009

“Accept yourself as you are, warts and all, and you cannot help but accept others as you find them. Self-acceptance is the hardest hurdle in life to negotiate. It is key to a success that otherwise could not but be imagined. Nothing is more important than to like or accept what one is and isn’t. Once achieved, you can read others as if an open book while others cannot take advantage of you. For a con artist to succeed he must have a willing accomplice, a fool who is a stranger to himself, and a perfect patsy for exploitation.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Confident Selling for the 90s” (1992), nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize, and the first part of a trilogy including “The Worker, Alone!” (1995) and “Six Silent Killers” (1998) – all three books are still in print.

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This sounds like a simple self-evident question, but it is actually quite complex. In fact, it is something of a conundrum. Love and respect are not nearly as prominent in the game of life as self-acceptance. Without a foundation in self-acceptance, the rest is academic.

Self-acceptance is knowing oneself and not denying the “other self” that should be known but more often than not is hidden from one’s nature. Self-acceptance indicates you like yourself. It does not mean you are narcissistic. Nor does it mean you like yourself because you have few blemishes. Quite the contrary. It means you like yourself blemishes and all.

You recognize you are fallible, vulnerable, fragile and dying a little bit every day. There is no time to be wasted on pettiness, revenge or hatred. It gives you a sense of proportion, a balance, a measure of yourself against the reality of your experience and what you say and think you are, or should be, or told you are by others. It is what you actually are.

It means you will not knowingly associate with people or be attracted to situations that are toxic to your self-acceptance. You will guard your mind as well as your body so as to thrive in a climate conducive to your health and well being. You will behave as a mature adult, not as a critical parent or petulant child.

This means you are aware that you are capable of good and evil; kindness and maliciousness; generosity and jealousy; happiness and misery; joy and despair; love and hate. It is part of your total chemistry of being, what Nietzsche referred to as “all too human.”

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When I came back from South Africa in 1969, I was disillusioned, confused, and I think now in retrospect, close to a nervous breakdown. My sanitarium became a home on the west coast of Florida. There I vegetated for two years reading, writing, swimming, playing tennis, and basketball with my son’s friends after school.

Like a sojourn sailor I drove about the Tampa Bay area finding refuge in bookstores and out of the way restaurants, bus stations and railroad depots where I would observe and write. On occasion, I would park by the Tampa Bay seaport where freighters would line up to deliver produce from South and Central America, imagining myself climbing aboard a freighter and disappearing from my former self, wandering the world as Herman Melville once did. What saved me were words and ideas out of books.

It was in this scenario that I started to realize the game life had played on me, and how little I had had to do with its organization, orientation, expectations and its satisfactions. That I was a willing body playing a role that was programmed into me without my being in touch with what I call in another essay, “my subtext.”

It was as if I looked at all the positives of my life, all the awards and achievements and the incredible earning power I had generated so young coming from such an impoverished background failing to see I was locked into a life designed by others, a life I had embraced eagerly only to find myself empty for the attention.

At some level, I could accept my imperfections and fallibilities but I wanted my Irish Roman Catholicism to be above reproach, or perfect, and found it wasn’t. I wanted the preamble to be manifestly true “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” and saw it wasn't. I was programmed to believe excellence rises to the top with those leading the most capable and competent, and I found they weren’t. I expected to find peace and fulfillment in marriage and found it a lie. I concluded I had carefully constructed a cage that I had willingly entered, and then thrown away the key.

More a matter of impulse than thought I escaped through my brashness and incorrigible personality by resigning from my programming as well as my job. This was called “dropping out” in the 1960s to smell the roses. But I was in agony and my olfactory ducts were not functioning. I did get off the merry-go-round, feeling somewhat dizzy for I had been on it all of my life.

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Quite by accident, I thought I had found an anchor. I had written “Confident Selling” (Prentice-Hall 1970), which was literally accepted through the transom, as I had no author credentials. I had written the initial draft in six weeks, which was accepted and published without editing, and was in print for twenty years. I thought I was an authentic author when I was simply lucky. The window of opportunity was right as we were in a similar predicament in the 1970s as we are now.

While in New York City to be interviewed by my publisher Prentice-Hall, I stumbled on a book at a newsstand by Alan W. Watts: “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” (1966). I read it and then every other book he had written. Watts created a philosophy of Zen and Christianity into a psychotherapy blend of the East and West. It had great impact on my porous mind. Like many authors of the time, he lived in a psychedelic haze and died in his 50s, his body and soul consumed in the moment, but he spoke to me as no one had before.

Looking back, I have to smile now because Watts was the darling of the Hippies and the counterculture and I couldn’t be squarer. Mainly living and working abroad during the 1960s I missed the tie-dye generation and the commune brigade. In 1964, I had a speaking engagement in San Francisco and visited Haight-Asbury where these Flower Children were out in force. Seeing them, I thought I had stumbled into another galaxy.

Early in the 1970s, I came across another writer, J. Krishnamurti at Haslam’s bookstore in St. Petersburg, Florida. Owner Charles Haslam wanted to meet me as I was scheduled to be on his PBS television show, “Book Beat.” Haslam’s, an independent bookstore, and the largest at the time in Florida, would become a regular haunt.

Like Watts’ title before, a seductive Krishnamurti title caught my eye: “You Are The World” (1972). You can imagine how this title hit someone as lost as I was at the time. Krishnamurti insisted:

“In oneself lies the whole world, and if you know how to look and learn, then the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself” (p. 158)

It was the perfect bromide for my troubled soul after South Africa’s apartheid. Krishnamurti speaks here of the power of a quiet mind, of the importance of letting go of thought where evil and dissipation reside. Obsessive thought he sees metaphorically as if walking blind over the cliff of despair. Life he insists is real not surreal. You must look to your feet to see what is under you and ahead of you, and go forward as the world.

Krishnamurti’s mysticism and meditation lifted me out of myself and into another dimension. It carried me into that Eastern calm of Zen that has now become so familiar to the West. Like Watts, he made sense to me. I found I couldn’t rest until I read everything Haslam’s had in stock, which was more than a score of books. I thought I had wandered unto a great man.

Then I read, “Lives in the Shadow with J. Krihnamurti” (1991) written by Radha Rajagopal Sloss, the daughter of his mistress, and the wife of Krishnamurti’s most trusted friend. The cuckolded husband chose for twenty years to know nothing about the affair, as they all lived together in a California Ojai retreat where the great mystic conducted many of his seminars. To be fair, Krishnamurti’s friend traveled a good deal.

The Indian teacher and mystic promoted the idea of spirituality and being above lust, and having a morality of the mind that had reverence for life and transformed the individual above the mundane, yet his mistress had more than one abortion to keep his celibacy intact. You get the sense author Sloss’s mother was something of a sex slave available on demand to pleasure the mystic. It wasn’t a shock to discover he was only a man, but that he had so little regard or acceptance of that fact.

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You could say I have been naïve putting certain individuals on pedestals only to find them all too human. That would be missing the point. To be authentic doesn’t necessitate being foolproof. It means being real in the life you live and project. My problem is with those that preach and teach one thing and live the exception.

That said I respect the strength of character of Krishnamurti. His benefactor wanted to make him a god and build a religion around him. For his resistance, he has been called “the reluctant messiah.” I think this was the major achievement of his life. The fact that he has clay feet only makes him more engaging. He was, after all, a manifestation of the Greeks four types of love: Eros (sexual love or lust), Narcissism (self-love), Agape (unconditional love) and Altruism (humanistic love).

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And so in this brief essay I’m trying to show whatever your age whatever your circumstances, it is time to get in touch with yourself. You are most likely not as good as you think you are or as bad as you fear you might be. You’re simply a human being, coping often on automatic pilot without a clear sense of what you’re about. So, welcome to the family of man which is all too human.

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