“Know Thyself” is one of the Delphic Maxims, inscribed in
the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Like much of ancient wisdom, the meaning of
this admonition is open to interpretation.
According to the Suda, a 10th Century encyclopedia of ancient
Greek knowledge, “the proverb is applied to those whose boasts exceed what they
are” and is “a warning to pay no
attention to the opinion of the multitude.” I guess that the message is that nobody’s
opinion of you is any good, including your own.
So how do you know who you are?
What’s the song say? “I’d like to get to know you… if I could.” Popular
music can be cryptic, too.
Nelson Mandela once said that “[o]ur deepest fear is not
that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear
is that we are powerful beyond measure.”
Wonder why you get a little chill as those words sink in? Because Nelson Mandela is right. Some people become very uncomfortable around
mirrors, you know. Maybe they don’t
really want to know themselves, because if they did they would have to assume
responsibility for their thoughts, words and deeds.
These days, people seem to spend most of their time coming
up with excuses (or, more euphemistically, “explanations”) as to why their
lives are screwed up. They blame their
parents. They blame the economy. They blame their luck. They blame their “addictions.” Rarely do they blame themselves, because that
would inevitably lead to questions like, “Well, if you think you’re on the
wrong path, why don’t you simply try a different one?” In other words, if you’re fat—lose
weight. If you’re poor—figure out a way
to earn more money. If you’re
unhappy—find something you like to do, and go do it. And so on.
For obvious reasons, people for the most part don’t want to go the “get
a life” route: taking personal responsibility can be a lot of work.
Kids sometimes sit around the house moaning that “there’s
nothing to do.” If it’s a rainy day,
it’s because they can’t go outside. If
it’s a sunny day, it’s because “there’s nobody around.” Adults often spend a
lot of time moaning about all of the things that they “have to do,” including
go to work every day to support those brats sitting around the house. Yet when somebody wins the lottery, and with
it ostensible freedom from the toiling part of their daily lives, like as not
the inevitable “human interest” story about them in the local paper will report
that they slogged back to their job as a toll-taker on the expressway the
Monday after winning and have no plans in the immediate future to quit.
People complain that they are “stuck” in jobs they don’t like,
find excuses to stay married to people they don’t love, go to hear sermons they don’t believe, vote for candidates they
don’t trust, and watch television programs they acknowledge are “dumb.” You’ve got to ask why.
Psychologists tell us that everything we do is the product
of conscious or unconscious choices.
And there’s a logic behind each choice, too, a logic grounded in fear. If the range of possible alternative
realities seems too unpleasant… or too unknown… people have a tendency to stay
put. Yup. The old “fight, flight or freeze” again. So if one is afraid of change, they fight it;
afraid of bad consequences that might result from changes in their life, they
fly away from them; and if they’re generally unhappy because they’re in a
predictable rut, they dig in a little deeper rut and freeze until they’re numb
to the pain.
Now, it goes without saying that one can’t adapt to life in
a prison cell (or a self-dug rut) and retain even a semblance of sanity if one
is going to insist on being hyper-aware of one’s circumstances. Prisoners daydream and fantasize and zone out
a lot to pass the time… except when they’re out in the general population where
they might get killed, of course. Then
the Law of the Jungle kicks in again.
Outside prison walls, the rest of us are able to deny reality with fewer
restrictions—look at those idiots texting as they hurtle down the freeway. People spend a lot of their time imagining
what it would be like if they were fit, or rich, or educated, or married to
someone they actually liked, or divorced from somebody that they actually can’t
stand, or living in the country, or traveling around the world. But very few of them do anything much about
it. And when they do think about their
unsatisfactory situations-- usually because they have to, for some reason—they
will declare either that they’re “grateful” for all the non-crappy parts of
their lives (by implication having concluded that their lives, however crappy,
are as good as they can expect them to get) or that there’s “nothing to be
done” about the crappiness. “No Exit,”
as Jean-Paul Sartre might say.
Existentialists have one thing going for them. Their denial is not complete. They acknowledge the futility and absurdity
of their existence. Heck, they even
revel in it. They have no responsibility
for trying to “improve” their situation, because they believe that their
situation cannot be improved, and they can churn out volumes of well-supported
reasons for this belief.
Another avenue to acceptance of one’s miserable lot is
adherence to a religion, Catholicism and its offshoots being the obvious case
in point. During the Middle Ages, the
lot of the common individual was pretty shitty, indeed. People lived in squalor, misery, ignorance
and filth. They were plagued by wars,
starvation, witches and, yes,
plague. To keep them from going ape and
threatening the (relatively) better situations enjoyed by the “nobility” of
Europe and the clergy, somebody had to come up with a mythology to explain to
the peasants why it was worth enduring all the squalor and misery and filth,
and the theologians came up with a pretty good story. “We’re living in squalor and misery and
filth,” they said, “because Man sinned against God (by being disobedient and
seeking after knowledge) back in the Garden of Eden and so we’ve got to endure
this crap until we die… but it’s only temporary, because if we’ve been really
good while enduring the squalor and misery and filth, then we’ll go to Heaven
and live forever without any squalor or misery or filth.”
That was the “carrot” dangled before the disease-ridden,
oppressed and ignorant populace back then, but the Church concluded (rightly
enough) that it wouldn’t be sufficient by itself to ensure compliance or
complacency. So they added a
“stick”: “Oh, and by the way, if you’re
not good at enduring the squalor and misery and filth, and you don’t ‘render
unto Caesar’ and follow the dictates of the Church, our loving God will cast
your damned soul for eternity into a lake of burning fire, and you’ll be poked
in the ass by devils with pitchforks while you labor in squalor and misery and
filth. Amen.”
They didn’t get 100% compliance, of course, but the one-two
combination of salvation and damnation
worked pretty well. And besides, they
needed some non-compliant people to hang and burn at the stake now and then in
order to maintain the urgency of the message.
Anyway, the fatalism of the Existentialists and the hope of
the Medieval peasantry give you two ways, at least, of rationalizing a
miserable existence until you’re dead.
There’s another way, the concept
of Tao, primarily promoted by Eastern religions such as Confucianism and Zen
Buddhism, which is, conveniently enough, roughly translated as “The Way.” I mention this as sort of an afterthought,
because it’s not really practical for most Twenty-First Century Americans. The object is to harmonize one’s will with Nature
in order to achieve what has been termed “effortless action”. It requires meditation and moral practices
that aren’t really in sync with our smartphone-driven, Nature-bending, “busy”
lives here in the good ol’ USA. So
unless you’re now living on one of the four or five Colorado mountaintops that
isn’t adjacent to a subdivision, or on a private island, or something like
that, the Tao is going to be a tough path for you to conceptualize, much less
follow. More power to you if you decide
to make the attempt, but I’m going to have to turn my attention now back to the mass of un-Enlightened readers.
Here is the step-by-step, color-by-numbers, Rachael Ray
quick, easy way to gain mastery over your life:
1.
Acknowledge that
your life is less than perfect, and that whatever combination of bad
circumstances and bad people brought you to whatever pit you’re residing in
presently, it’s your fault if you stay there.
2.
Acknowledge that you are not as good as you
could be, and that there are any number of things you could do to try to
improve yourself.
3.
Acknowledge that other people, whatever their
circumstances, are plagued with the same doubts, fears and inadequacies that
you are.
4.
Work at improving yourself.
5.
Work at improving your life.
6.
Stop worrying about why you’re here. Go about the above-listed activities serene
in the knowledge that, although you will never achieve perfection, eventually
it will all stop… or change…or something… when you die. And there you have it, How to Live Your Life.
