Boiled Frogs and Original Sin

Is it an urban myth/metaphor or a reality? That if you stick a frog in a pot of water and heat the water gradually the frog’s capacity to adapt will be its downfall. Not realizing it’s in danger, it will be boiled to death. Leaving aside the gruesome possibility of this ever having been a real life experiment, it’s not a bad metaphor for adult behaviour. We get stuck in a comfort zone that starts out looking and feeling just fine, and keeps us materially provided for. It requires a whole lot of compromises but they seem small at first and perfectly manageable.  

Some part of us is in protest but we don't hear it. Or if we do, there’s always the future. I’ll just do this for a while then I’ll change and do something really worthwhile. 

The days, weeks, months and years pass. At some level the compromises become increasingly painful and unbearable but instead of listening to the pain and taking it seriously, we say things like It’s not so bad. I shouldn’t complain. I can’t complain. I should be grateful. Don’t worry be happy. Be positive. We feel quite heroic when we do that. Responsible. Accountable. Unselfish. Healthy members of society. 

Healthy? I'm not so sure. Afraid, maybe. Still so controlled by an atavistic fear of having no food and shelter that we can't embrace that our survival requires more than that now. It requires nurturing the heart and soul.  

Growing up Catholic, I rebelled strongly against the idea of original sin. Nobody could explain in any way that sounded remotely intelligent to me. I've come to see that probably our capacity to not listen to the most important part of us is what it's about if you strip it of the moralism. Sin is an archery term, meaning to miss the mark. Original sin is our capacity to miss the mark – which is pretty much what languishing in a comfort zone that doesn’t feed your heart and soul and mind in a balanced way is. Alongside judging those who are least trying to not die the slow crucifying death.

I can’t imagine that boiling frogs was ever a real experiment. Even if some psychopath did decide it would further the understanding of human nature, they would have had to slow-boil hundreds of thousands of frogs to be able to reach any kind of significant conclusion, since one frog doesn’t equal every frog. Just as in a tank of fish the majority will swim round and round in the same direction but a few will swim in the opposite direction, it’s probable that most frogs would boil to death but some would leap out as soon as the water started getting warm.

I doubt there’s a human being who wouldn’t look at those few and believe they were at the forefront of frog-evolution. But when people behave in the same ways as those clever, evolved frogs would if the experiment really happened, our reactions aren’t so simple. 

Some humans are a whole lot more finely tuned than others. They feel what’s happening within themselves, they see what’s happening in others. They register emotions and discomfort far more quickly than many others do. A whole world is visible to them that others are oblivious to. The kind of compromise that others will feel comfortable with for a while - and regret most horribly later on - is like torture to them immediately. They instinctively understand the danger. They make different choices in life which we often see as risky. But that’s only if we don’t see what they’re protecting. If we don’t see that they’re like those frogs that jump when the water is just getting warm. We don’t even consider whether in fact they’re taking less of a risk than we are. 

If they find a way to be materially safe in the world and even materially wealthy, we make heroes out of them. We look up to them as leading the way, following their heart, inspiring us. We write books and make movies about them; we make them our role models and aspire to be just like them. Or we tell ourselves we’d like to. We hold on at least to the fact that it is a humanly possible thing to follow your heart and succeed. We hold onto that light in our darkest hour.

What if they don’t do so well? Do we still recognize that at least they’re following their heart, or trying to? Do we look to them for inspiration?

It’s a rhetorical question. We’re more likely to criticize them for being irresponsible, selfish, freeloaders. We turn our backs on them; judge them for not being more like us, for not being willing to make the sacrifices we make. We do it especially if we’re slowly boiling away in boiling frogland. Even more especially if we don’t have the courage and honesty to acknowledge it.  

Or else if we help them we do it believing ourselves to be the heroes. We seldom let them forget how magnanimous we are and how much they're in our debt. Whatever we do with it, we hold onto the idea that we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys. We're at the forefront of evolution and they're trailing behind us. Even though our choices are eroding our lives faster than the speed of light. Yet imagine if we recognized that in many ways they’re ahead of us. Imagine if we embraced them, not from the perspective of how much we can do for them, but of how much we can learn from them about how not to slow-boil yourself to death. Imagine that.

Of Buddha, Oprah, Spirituality and Letting Go

I got an email from Oprah the other day telling me about the seven books that very spiritual people read. I opened the email, not because I have any aspirations to be more spiritual, but out of curiosity. The link took me to a book written by an Eastern guru type author. 

I forget the title but the blurb didn’t tell me anything I haven’t read or heard somewhere else. No aha moments for me. So I didn’t read any further.  

That word spiritual has slowly but steadily climbed the list of status definitions in the past 20 years, and as it has, it’s become more and more of a glittery currency that has no real reserves. Paper money with no gold in the bank to back it. Because the truth is that spiritual is an absolute. We’re all spiritual. We’re spirit housed in physical form. It’s impossible to be more or less of what we inherently are.  It’s possible to be more conscious of the fact that although the physical impacts so powerfully on us through our senses it’s not the most powerful part of us. But that’s just about education; it’s hardly something we can use to elevate our ego status.

It’s only the things we don’t fully understand that we think are phenomenal. So I guess if we were all a bit more educated, about the truth that we’re as much spirit as we are matter, and that at least whilst we’re on this plane, we can’t detach ourselves from either, we wouldn’t attach such significance to this wretched word spiritual.

Where did it start, this craze? Perhaps it began in earnest in the West when hippies travelled to the East in search of a more meaningful life and mind-altering substances. They learned about Buddhism and they liked what they saw. They came back home and brought it – or their interpretation of it - with them. Along with the mind-altering substances.

These days, in the West, it’s not unusual for Westerners to consider Buddhism the most elevated religion or philosophy, whatever you want to call it, in the whole world. How did that happen? Either because it is the most elevated - or because Buddhists are great at PR, perhaps. Or because in the West we latch onto religions or philosophies that let us off the hook of grappling with our physical experience and with our very very uncomfortable emotions. Religions that promise us a life of freedom from inner conflict. 

  

Letting go is the term that I hear the most often in connection to Buddhism. Can’t get your life together? Just let go. Detach. Attachment is where all the trouble lies and it’s the least spiritual thing you can do.

They tell you that all suffering is a consequence of being attached to something. If you let go, abracadabra! no more pain. It sounds good. But is it even possible? We seem particularly fixated on letting go of emotional baggage. It’s in the past, they tell you, there’s nothing you can do about it. You need to move on. Whether that’s real Buddhism or not is questionable, to my mind. What isn’t questionable is that in reality, until we process whatever binds us to our emotional baggage it will stick like superglue. We can repress it for a while, or anaesthetise it, but it will drive our lives and our relationships and we won’t be able to understand when things go wrong. Nor will we be able to fix them.

Emotional baggage is a symptom of something that’s unresolved within. It’s there because we still need something that we didn’t get when it was first created. Emotions are uncomfortable because if they weren’t we’d ignore them. Stick your hand into a fire and it hurts. It’s supposed to hurt. The pain tells you what to do. If you didn’t have the pain you wouldn’t know.

So, maybe we’re not supposed to let go of anything. Maybe we’re supposed to actually pay attention to what we’re experiencing. Lean into it. Feel the feeling until we understand what it’s trying to tell us about what we need. Maybe trying to detach is just another form of escapism. The way we perceive letting go in the West, is it really letting go, or is it just another kind of anaesthetic? Do we want to reach a state of serenity because it’s the height of spirituality or because it’s very comfortable? If it’s the former, we’re addicted, attached, to spirituality. And the truth is that there’s no height to anything that involves knowledge and understanding, because the more you know the more you realize there is to know.

If we’re just looking for serenity because it’s comfortable and relieves us from the burden of dealing with emotions, then we’re attached to fear of feeling, and letting it drive us. I don’t see how that can be spiritual. 

Is it really Buddhism? Surely not. The thing that I wonder about is, do we in West have any real understanding of what the original Buddhists meant when they let go? Can we even get anywhere close to knowing, given that we look at everything through our own Western filters? It seems more probable to me that what we know as Buddhism in the West is more likely to be a loose translation, with all the difficult parts left out, than an absolutely accurate one.

One thing seems pretty obvious. We in the West use spirituality to ego-aggrandize and we're attached to letting go. Couple of oxymorons there. So, thanks Oprah but no thanks. 

Truth - We're Still Burning Witches at the Stake to Avoid It

A wise man once told me that if a person is angry with somebody and they won’t deal with it they will create stories in their head about that person, turning them into a monster of some sort. They’ll judge, hang, draw and quarter the person. They’ll even spread malicious gossip about them and feel justified in it. The one thing they won’t do is give the object of their judgment a chance to tell their side of the story. They don’t want the truth.

They’re usually not aware of what they’re doing, and to them their own actions will seem very logical, their judgments rational. And thus a myth begins that gathers a lot of weight over time. It eventually comes to be regarded as absolute truth. It can ruin a life.

It happens all the time in a family, community or society that doesn’t value personal truth or the expression of emotion and is afraid of both. The person who started the stories often has an outward demeanor of kindness, generosity and sociability. Because they never show their anger. Except to the one they vilify. They gain credibility and their victim becomes a scapegoat for everybody’s unresolved anger.

Once that starts happening, the person being vilified doesn’t stand a chance. If they're more emotionally truthful they’ll express their anger at the injustice of being judged without being allowed a chance to tell their side of whatever story has been passed around. The more they do that, they more they’re seen as imbalanced. 

They will be judged, hung, drawn and quartered, stoned to death, burned at the stake, choose your metaphor. Which is probably what happened to women accused of being witches in the Middle Ages.
We’re kidding ourselves if we think those days are over. They’re not really. We maybe don’t actively cause physical death but we contribute to myths that create depression, isolation, massive self doubt, and can lead to a person committing suicide. Either we actively participate in furthering the myth or we stand aside and do nothing. 

For the victim, that is. We’ll do a lot for everybody else, to reinforce the idea that we’re wonderful. Got to keep that credibility up.

Truth? We don’t value it nearly as much as we value our own fictions. We’d much rather build stories that rescue us from having to face our own anger and vulnerability and be accountable for our own actions, our own unresolvedness. I suppose it’s because societies still run on quite a primitive concept of right and wrong. And if we let ourselves see the truth of our anger, our very not-niceness, we would vilify ourselves as much as we do the victims of our stories. I guess for all that we like to think we’re civilized it boils down to this: it’s easier to hurt somebody else than to hurt yourself.

Obamaphobia, Latinophobia, Homophobia, Zenophobia…

In a past episode of Private Practice one of the characters was dying of cancer and gave herself permission to speak her truth. No lying, no rescuing, no Mr. Nice Guy. It was incredibly refreshing. One of the other characters said of her when they met “ooh, she doesn’t filter. I like her.”

In real life, people who don't filter are quite rare, at least in western society; I can’t speak for any other. It's not unusual for them to be seen as having something wrong with them. We’ve developed a veil of politeness behind which we hide the reality of what we think and feel. I’ve never really understood it and it sure makes life complicated if you register the underlying emotions, because you’re constantly seeing two opposing aspects of people.

It’s especially confusing if they don’t register their own underlying emotions. Like phobics. Some are aware of their phobias. It’s kind of difficult not to know you’re scared of spiders or open spaces for example.

When it comes to Obama, Latinos, gays and foreigners, phobics usually aren’t aware that what they see as rational justification for attack and exclusion is just fear. To mix metaphors horribly, they’re like empty drums making a lot of noise but coated in dung, rolling downhill, gathering more dung unto themselves.

Mind you, that metaphor doesn’t work at all, because the more they roll and gather like-minded phobics to themselves, the noisier they become. The noise makes for great headlines so the media grabs onto it and blows it up as big as possible. Because we give such weight to whatever impacts the strongest on our immediate senses, before long it can seem as if the phobics are the majority. That can make a person very disillusioned about society. Disheartened and disinterested in speaking out, because what’s the use when you’re a lone voice in the crowd?

But it’s important to remember that the people filled with rage and fear and prejudice against immigrants, homosexuals, Latinos and Barack Obama, aren’t necessarily the majority; they just make the most noise. People who’ve got nothing of any value to say always do.