Vicariousness 4

Escape

Immersion in the experience of another
Stuck states
The nature of reality
Using radical empathy to move beyond stuck states

James Cameron’s Avatar was on the screen, and I was in the theater. It was an iMax screen and it was 3D. I’d gone there with my friends, and from all the buzz I’d heard about the film, I expected the world. I got it.

The staggering clarity of an alien planet and the narrative, and tall, blue aliens captured my fancy for a few hours, and my fellow movie watchers and I were sucked into the world of Pandora and all its intricacies and the fight between invaders and the invaded, between cultures, between human technology and nature. What really gripped my imagination though was the quality that it took to suck my mind in completely, so that no trace of my own life, or reality existed in my subjective experience for those few hours.

Why do we go to the movies? Is it because we want to forget our own lives? Perhaps. Is it because we want to experience another life vicariously? Perhaps. Is it because we want to learn something? Perhaps. We all have our reasons, but it is some form of one of these three, or a combination. The quality that really grips us though is narrative that we emotionally resonate with, and visuals and audio that simply compel our senses. They haven’t figured out a way to include smell and taste in the entertainment experience yet, but the entertainment industry appears to be working on the sense of touch. An example of this is any of these newfangled devices that give you kinesthetic feedback while using them.

The key though is that our own lives contain all of the senses and the mind. Our own conceptual universe along with full dimensional sensory display. What could compete with this? A more important question to ask though is this: why would I want to find something that would compete with my everyday, waking, walking, talking reality?

I think the answer is clear enough. As human beings we hunger for growth all the time. Some of us are okay with a certain modicum of growth, and some of us want rapid growth that almost gives a feeling of constant motion. To each his or her own, but growth is an absolute psychological necessity for the human organism. One starts feeling all manner of sicknesses when one does not grow. There is nothing as utterly fallow as a life where growth is actively resisted. In fact, whether we know this or not as people, we tend to look askance at a person when one or another area of their lives is not growing at least according to a minimum standard.

We all know such people. These are the people who prefer not reaching out to others, or prefer isolating themselves, not because they are going to introspect or train themselves in solitude the way a monk might, but because they are mortally afraid for the well being of their egos. At some point in life, such people experienced intense psychological anguish when their egos were bruised, and instead of realizing that the bruising was a pointer to growth, they took up a stance in defense of that limited set of thoughts that they labeled themselves as.

This is a sad state of affairs to see in anyone’s life. It is entirely possible that we have even gone through such a phase ourselves. I can state for the record that I have. I have been that slinking coward who is mortally afraid that this or that person would somehow shatter my fragile worldview. Growth is an absolute requirement for life to thrive, so when I was that slinking coward, I was miserable beyond all belief. To get over my fallow period, I did what is fairly terrifying. I faced my fear as it showed up, after resisting it for years.

I don’t mean that the thought of being inadequate, or the thought of being this or that was somehow reasoned out mentally. I did not do that. In my case I simply felt and emoted the raw state of groundlessness that is experienced when one’s very ego is threatened, and stayed with it. I was present while that raw state persisted, and it was terrifying as long as I allowed my thoughts to consume me. The moment I became somewhat adept at being a witness to this state of groundlessness, something magical happened. It started to almost heal itself. It subsided, and it wasn’t a big deal any longer, as I simply played witness to it.

You see there is a great secret in what I did back then, which is perhaps one of the last things that most of us are moved to do. This secret is: if we leave things alone, they simply go back to their natural state, which is healthy, happy, and full of this indescribable and ineffable something that makes all things possible. To be entirely honest, descriptions of this ineffable truth behind all the appearances of the world has filled tomes of religious and spiritual texts, but the bald fact of the matter is that it is indeed simply impossible to describe it. Language, images, concepts or anything that is a form of any sort is utterly inadequate in encapsulating that which is being discussed here. So, people have come up with all manner of pointers to it. Some of them have realized that it is futile to describe that which is beyond description, and yet it is very compassionate to point people in its direction. Others have somehow taken the sacredness of that which is description and somehow mistaken it for some form that led them to it, and created this or that ideology around it. Again, to be perfectly clear though, all one can ultimately do is to point in its direction. Words, thoughts, concepts, images can never really encapsulate this ineffable truth at the heart of reality.

In short, reality is, and all else is conjecture. Now this means that our ideas about reality are just as mistaken as the next person’s, qualitatively. Quantitatively, perhaps you have a more reasonable fantasy of what reality is than the next person, that is okay. But when speaking about absolute reality, there can be no concept of it. Then, one way to poke holes in the fabric of our own private fantasy of reality is simply to visit the fantasy of someone who is so very unlike us. In fact, it may be worthwhile to visit the shoes of someone whom we think of as our enemy, or as a sick freak, or a weirdo.

Sociologist Sam Richards suggests a radical empathy exercise where we place ourselves in the shoes of a terrorist, and imagine how it is to have grown up in an atmosphere where the West, particularly the USA, was vilified constantly, and was seen as the source of all evil. Viewed through the eyes of such a context, every American may be thought to be evil and driven to destroy what is familiar in the context of that terrorist. It may not be a very long step to strapping bombs around your body in a state of deep unconsciousness, from there.

I am going to suggest that such an exercise in radical empathy is absolutely essential to fully embracing growth in our lives. Particularly at those times when we are treading water in life, and we find that our own limited sets of perspectives really keep us stuck in a rut, we can infuse new life into ourselves by simply adopting the life view of someone who is utterly different from us, in order to get some growth going. In psychology and in sports psychology, there is this idea of modeling excellence. You find someone who is excellent at the skill that you would like to improve in, and then you consistently observe and imitate and then adapt this person’s actions in the demonstration of that skill, in order to become more skilled yourself.Let me suggest that choosing radical empathy with someone who has character traits that you would like to emulate will indeed lead you into such a place. Also, it doesn’t even matter if the person you’re empathizing with isn’t even real. A fictional character will do just fine. The real key is that you are able to master empathy with any idea or motif that inspires you and makes you want to be better and do better.