SELF-REALIZATION AND SELF-DEFEAT

SELF-REALIZATION AND SELF-DEFEAT




James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 6, 2013

REFERENCE:

This is another excerpt of the second edition of “Meet Your New Best Friend” due to be published later this year.

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We are imperfectly formed. The best minds have throbbing doubts, and play special havoc with their lives. Stephen King sublimates his terror into spine tingling novels of horror. His horror becomes our entertainment. King doesn’t deny his demons. He puts them to work. As a small child, cartoonist Gary Larson was frightened out of his wits. His impish brother locked him in the basement, turned off the lights, then taunted him with imagined horrors. Larson never forgot his trauma. It put him in touch with his Far Side comic strip. The late Irish–American actor Charles Durning confesses, “There are many secrets in the depths of our souls that we don’t want anyone to know.” A producer, noting Durning’s intensity, once remarked, “Charlie, if you hadn’t been an actor, you would probably have been a murderer. Within you is a boiler ready to explode.” Durning admits,

“There’s terror and repulsion in us, the terrible spot that no one knows about—horrifying things we keep secret. A lot of this is released through acting.”

This actor’s journey took him from poverty through the Great Depression and World War II, where he was a much-decorated combat soldier on the Western Front, unto fame and wealth. The late novelist Michael Crichton, like Somerset Maugham, a physician turned prolific author, compared his bouts of depression to the weather. “Suns out today, cloudy today, cloudy this month.” He admitted to an interviewer of contemplating suicide, but never thought to take action because “I have too much respect for depression.” The Harvard educated doctor envied the insouciance of his friend, actor Sean Connery, who admitted to having ulcers at sixteen. Connery sees Crichton’s creative standards so high that they intimidate him. Crichton, who earned more than $22 million for the successful filming of his book, Jurassic Park, admitted to having a never ending fight with himself. This was not a war to be more, or have more, but to distill from his considerable talents something meaningful. The price is high, too high for most, for it demands one to embrace suffering and constant struggle.

Metaphorically, we all have rocks in our heads, snakes in our secret gardens. Our snakes, sunning themselves on these rocks, symbolize our fantasies and wicked thoughts. To deny their presence is to throw our lives off balance, out of control, as if suddenly pierced by their deadly venom. What we do is one thing; what we think is quite another. No one is absolutely good or absolutely evil, but a combination of both. If we ignore one at the expense of the other, we are bound for trouble. To respect our wickedness gives us an advantage. Others less self–accepting may stumble on their snakes at any time, whereas we, ever alert, gingerly step around ours. We can even use them, on occasion, as creative people do, to stimulate our visionary powers. Fantasies are an important source of energy, not so much to be acted on as to add dimension to our vision, to widen our horizons.

Creative artists are well acquainted with their snakes. They call them many names—curses, blessings, demons, crosses, redeemers, gods, devils, swords, punishment, inspiration—to name only a few. Many purposely provoke their snakes to frenzy status. Painter Vincent Van Gogh, now celebrated, did this with regularity. He called it his insanity. Completely ignored in his lifetime, could insanity produce such genius? He sold but a single painting, and that to an art dealer friend of his brother’s. While he battled his snakes, he painted magnificently. You sense his anguish in his excruciating precise brush strokes, the brilliance of his soul in his bold use of color. All the while he entertained the constant torment of doubt. Yet today his paintings sell for tens of millions of dollars. They depict the agony and ecstasy of an unquiet soul, and speak to our rootlessness and unsatisfied searching, to our agonizing refusal to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt.

Consider the creative process as metaphor: The artist’s snakes stare at him with their lidless eyes, tails posed ready to strike, vibrating with the rattle of death, their swollen wedged heads and long slithering tongues, hypnotic, as they take measure of him, their vulnerable prey. Now, they strike! In a flash, meaning implodes between conflicting forces of passion and intellect, madness and reason, pain and ecstasy, doubt and conviction, as the artist and art explode into one expression.

Mystical thinker J. Krishnamurti once wrote of this in a compelling way. There was this painter who went out every day, set up his easel and canvas, organized his paints, then contemplated his subject, a solitary tree penciled against the sky on this bluff by the sea. Day after day he did this without ever touching paint to canvas. A passerby observed this strange behavior on several occasions and was finally prompted to ask,

“Sir, are you a painter?”

The painter replied, “Yes, indeed, I am a painter.”

“Pardon my boldness, sir, but I come this way several times a week. I have yet to see you place a single brush stroke to your naked canvas.”

The painter smiled. “That is also true.” Sensing the stranger’s confusion, he added, “I will paint the tree when the tree and me are one, not before.”

“Surely you jest?” quipped the stranger. “That is not possible.”

“For you, my good man, perhaps not,” countered the painter, “for the artist it is not only possible, but necessary.”

Art is created only when the artist and the subject merge. Realism is not the aim. The artist’s interest is in what he sees with his mind’s eye. Form in his painting is substance. The forces of self-realization and self–defeat melt into a common force of expression. Conflict is resolved in creation. That is the power of art. It is a difficult process, taking great patience, endurance and, yes, immense suffering. There is no art without pain. Art takes a heavy toll. Few are willing to pay the price. Ernest Hemingway paid the price, as did Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Their benediction is immortality.

Neither man ever grew up. Hemingway died at the chronological age of 61, while Mozart was but 36. They both played dangerously with their lives, the way young people do whom expect to live forever. The more pain they endured from their play the greater their art soared. They celebrated an adolescent zest for the illusory.

The creative process is a constant contest of the self with the secret self. It is not restricted to the artist. Anyone who attempts to create something instead of reacting to what others create experiences this. The process may be likened to an animal tamer trying to control a vicious predator set to devour him, with but a whip and chair as his defense. The tamer mocks the beast. He hits it viciously with his whip to bring out its anger, and then turns his back on the beast and walks away in defiance of the creature’s savage nature. Suddenly, as if struck by inspiration, the animal tamer pirouettes to face off with the beast, capturing it in a mid–air strike with the full impact of mortality in the balance. At that precise moment, when the beast is about to devour him, a thought materializes, previously hidden in the primordial recesses of his reptilian brain. Such bold and courageous persistence, more than strenuous effort, keeps the artist in touch with himself and the fact that he is always both the animal tamer and the beast at large.

Nor is living on the edge exclusive to artists. Many seek residence there because it suits them. They are bored with their lives, relationships, jobs, possessions, with their reasons for being. They are people in gilded cages often living on beautiful estates, trapped inside themselves. They have all the visual hallmarks of happiness as a marketable product: fine clothes, homes, cars, jobs and adoring friends with whom to play. They are trapped inside the mannerisms of their frigid public roles, incapable of expressing their true feelings, or what they are. They have successfully closed the gap between their public and private lives, as form becomes substance. Looking good is chosen over doing good, personality over performance, and career over family. Such people do not simply perform their corporate job. They are the jobs. This is their entire identity.

Dennis Rodman, the controversial ex-professional basketball player for the Chicago Bulls and San Antonio Spurs, embodies the torment when form wars with substance. Rodman colors his hair orange, green and other shades as his mood varies. He also sports many body tattoos and outlandish dress off the court—shiny tank top, metallic hot pants and rhinestone dog collar being common apparel. He has also dressed in flowing white of a drag queen bride. He sees this less as being risqué and more as a way to push the envelop of acceptability. An extremely gifted athlete, Rodman is however a rebel without a cause, a reluctant celebrity, who fights the system which labels him difficult.

He finds this unfair, and rightly so, because he sees himself trapped in the caricature of a one-dimensional black basketball player. No one could before or since rebound like Rodman and so there is toleration for his eccentricity. But the war goes on with–in him as he sees himself more than the job. He even dreams of suicide. “Sometimes I dream about just taking a gun and blowing my head off,” he confessed in Sports Illustrated (May 29, 1995). A multimillionaire, he lives on the edge as temperamental as any other artist fighting the continuing war between self–realization and self–defeat.

Corporate society, which has dominated our lives for more than a century, is not wicked. It is simply anachronistic. At least corporate society had the privilege of being able to say at the end of its era of influence, it made its own mistakes. Many might say it was courageous. It chose the technological path exclusively, which proved a misguided one, largely for its failure to understand and deal wisely with the social systems and the people in them.

But there you have it! Corporate society chose its fate. As for the average citizen, who went along for the corporate ride without complaint, he cannot make such a claim. He trusted corporate society to know what was best for him. He placed his confidence in its wisdom to be equal to all its challenges. For the past century, generation after generation served the corporate aims and religiously trusted corporate design to be the way to self-realization and the good life. Corporate society’s destiny became its destiny. Now, with the scandalous decline of corporate society into corpocracy, the average citizen cannot even say he made his own mistakes. He feels betrayed, but betrayed by whom? What dignity is there in that?

So what do such people do when faced with a breakdown culture? That is what we are talking about. Many embrace danger as a lark. They cannot seem to focus on anything real. Everything seems to slip out of focus, to be just beyond their grasp. They cannot feel. It is impossible for them to think for they have been stoned drones of corporate society too long.

Someone reading this who has not felt betrayed may think this extreme. The experience is frightening when the pain of discovery is in the mind, not the body; when a person realizes his corporate life was only a charade, while thinking, all the time, he was part of something real, meaningful, big. Living on the edge is but an attempt to cope with this discovery, to once more get in touch with feelings, even if it is through fear.

The artist is bent on self-realization through the painful process of creation, not comfort. There has never been a place for the artist in corporate society, so he has always been an outsider. Corporate society holds the bored artisan to its bosom, not the renegade artist. Ultimately, the corporate insider gravitates to self–defeat through adolescent self–indulgent practices. There is little sense of purpose to what he is doing. He is doing it mainly “for the hell of it,” or to escape monotony.

Compliance is the key to corporate society. Those who comply with its inanities are given comfort and made complacent. This suspends them in adolescence and insulates them from the pain of reality and therefore the need to grow up or take charge of their lives. Totally dependent, unable to focus on anything real or for very long, they are driven by excitement, danger and the unexpected. Shock is their therapy. They are captives to their fears, not driven by either their passions or convictions. They are most with themselves when they are free–falling from airplanes as parachutists, deep–diving for fauna several fathoms into the ocean’s cavity, or engaging in the madness of the triathlon.

This is because corporate executives wear the blinders of linear logic and miss most salient nuances. Unilinear people gravitate to corporations and then make it their civil religion. Corporate society never understands how working people think, feel and breathe. What is ironic is that once workers of spiritual depth and temperament are promoted into the elite ranks of corpocracy, they quickly forget their roots and become heretics to their forebears. Corporate capitalism lives in relation to this all-embracing ideology. There is no room for individualism, but this does not stop individualism from being pontificated as if a dogmatic encyclical from His Holiness, the CEO.

The executive class and its managers either believe in this civil ideology completely, or they are excommunicated, posthaste. Evidence of this captivity is free-floating anxiety and lack of identity. This description of captivity is a 20th century corporate phenomenon. In 19th century America, given a similar sense of captivity, the concern would have been expressed in terms of losing one’s immortal soul, an expression of individualism.

When Americans were individual entrepreneurs, when the home was one’s castle, when there existed ethnic and neighborhood pride, when people were poor but didn’t know it, when religion was a private thing, and one’s personal life was sacred, individuals shared a baroque spirit in their hearts and gave much room to a multifaceted eccentricity. Now, all of that is gone, replaced by corpocracy.

Americans are programmed but don’t seem to know it for rather then embracing fear and sublimating it creatively as with the artist, they are running from anxiety and depression into computer games, PlayStations, or using their mobiles as worry beads texting and tweeting most of their waking hours, which fails to allow their latent talent to bloom. Americans have become afraid of life.

A poignant example of this is the suicide of John Littig, 47, and Lynne Rosen, 45, who had a popular self-help radio show in New York City with the title “The Pursuit of Happiness.” They urged listeners to embrace spontaneity, which apparently included suicide. This happened in June 2013 and leaves the Freudian question, why fear life or something known for death, which is unknown? Freud answered his own question saying self-destruction won over self-realization.

The secret weapon of the artist is to know what he is running from and running towards. The artist is running from the sentimentality of hope and towards the reality of courage. Courage is the haven of identity hope its mirage. Courage gives the artist the capacity to find beauty by releasing his beast. Art involves far more perspiration than inspiration. Courage is the patient pursuit of a dream. The bored are on a treadmill as they run in place from courage in search of the miraculous. They deny the beast with-in, only to run into its nightmare. The self-help couple couldn’t help themselves.

The bored drive too fast, punish their bodies with too much or too little exercise, too much or too little food or drink, party until they drop, imperil relationships with meaningless affairs, anything to escape making a decision or having a heart-to-heart with themselves. What they do is not fulfilling; they are running on impulse overwhelmed by the mundane. John Littig was a motivational speaker; Lynne Rosen was a workshop facilitator and life coach, speaker and consultant. Elsewhere in this book, I have warned the reader that such people package their demons and sell them as a consumer product to others, suggesting the buyer beware!

People who put themselves on a pedestal as experts are likely to be more strangers to themselves than any member of their gullible clientele.



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