I’m old now. If a young person said to me, “What have you learned during the course of your life that might be helpful to me?”, here’s what I would answer.
Recognize your shortcomings and failings. Don’t give in to the temptation to avoid seeing them. Don’t give in to the temptation to blame them on other people. See them clearly as they are, accurately.
Many famous people of the past said the same thing. This is what Jesus meant when he said “don’t be a hypocrite” which was a main point of his teaching. Marcus Aurelius and Michel de Montaigne are other famous examples. But I’m not sure their reasons were the same as mine.
My reasons are that you’ll be happier and kinder.
- Happier: The habit of recognizing without cringing that you are flawed will take the sting out of that recognition. Once that happens you will be happier because you’ll be free of the pain and burden of hiding from plain facts.
- Kinder: You’ll treat other people better because you’ll stop blaming them for their inadequacies, because you will have stopped blaming yourself for your inadequacies.
I think there’s an additional reason, but I’m not sure it resonates with other people the way it does with me. All my life I wanted to know the truth whatever the truth happens to be. This desire or urge has always been a very powerful drive in me like the drive to love and be loved or the drive to avoid dying. If I were still religious like I was for many years I would call it one of holy aspects of the human mind, one of the pointers we can find there that tells us about God.
There’s a complication I should mention. Some people lacerate themselves mercilessly. They don’t only recognize their failings but focus on them almost to the exclusion of everything else, yet they get no benefit. Tolstoy is a famous example. I think there is a difference between those people and what I’m recommending here but I’m not sure what it is exactly. I think it has something to do with blame. I’ll leave this question open for the moment.
I’ve been thinking about this advice lately because I’m now the full-time caretaker of my girlfriend Julia, who I’ve written about here many times over the years, who has dementia. The word girlfriend is probably misleading because we’re in our 70s, but I use it because she never agreed to marry me. (It turns out to be a good thing for financial reasons that we’re not married due to the way the US medical system works.)
Julia has always found it difficult to recognize her mistakes and shortcomings. She avoids thinking about them. Self-blame seems to be at the heart of this characteristic.
Now with dementia she gets terribly distressed when she does something dumb like feeding non-medical food to our sick cat or throwing her drivers license and credit cards away.
Partly her distress is due simply to the fact, the tragedy, that she is losing her intelligence and memory. Of course this is a grievous loss.
But partly her distress is due to the fact that she blames herself for her mistakes.
I find myself wondering whether I’ll be the same if I become as demented as she is. I don’t think so because one of the good things that happened to me as a result of the spiritual stuff I write about here is that nowadays I see my own failings without resistance. I feel intuitively that if I become demented in the same way Julia is, this attitude will stay with me for a long time. But maybe the parts of my brain that deteriorate fastest will be different from hers and I’ll revert to the usual human pattern quickly. I can’t know.
This advice is related to the great discovery by ancient Indian philosophers that we are not our minds. This is a very, very, very difficult thing to see but it’s true. Once you realize that you’re not your mind how can you blame yourself for your mind’s failings? The mind may continue to regret or wish that it were different but that’s not the same thing as blame.
This question of blame is one of the things I had in mind when I said earlier that I’m not sure my reasons for offering the advice on this page are the same as Jesus’s reasons or Marcus Aurelius’s reasons.
I’m 77 years old and yes, I too have become very aware of my weaknesses – those aspects of my behavior which are destructive (or less than positive) in some way . . . . but, like you, I am becoming increasingly centered not in my ego/identity/life’s story etc., but in my real Self – that which is the substratum of everything. Taking time daily to sink/subside into that Self/Source/Ground of Being is my daily delight. And yes, it is a place where blame has no place. It is a place where peace is found . . . peace, peace, peace.
One additional insight – my younger sister in Australia is experiencing the onset of dementia and has to live at 75 in a memory care facility alone with others experiencing that same apparent diminishment. I FaceTime with her every day. The conversations are characteristically short but smiles and loving acknowledgments.
As I think about her every day I find a source of deep comfort in the recognition that she is not her mind. . . she is something altogether different . . . she is, like me, an arising in the dream of Awareness where only pure bliss and pure peace pervade. Amen and Amen.
Hi Robert. Does your sister have any sense of that? Julia used to have some sense of that but since her dementia worsened she seems to have forgotten all about it, so I don’t think she takes any solace from it.
But like you say about yourself, I know it, and it has a big effect on me — I rarely become sad about her cognitive decline because it’s only her mind. In the beginning I was a little disturbed by my indifference to her dementia — it seemed almost sociopathic that it wasn’t making me sad — but then I realized what was going on.
I still care a lot about her mood, though. If she’s unhappy I do things to cheer her up.
And I still work hard to get her medical care, make sure she eats properly, has clean clothes, takes her medicine, etc.
With regard to your comments about dementia and our reactions to it. Frankly I’m still working through my response to my sister’s slipping away as dementia has it’s way. This is where I am currently – we are not our bodies nor are we our minds . . . but it’s what “we” mean by “we” that is pivotal. I am her brother . . . I have memories of her as a young girl and then a stunning teenager and so on . . . those memories can haunt me today as I FaceTime with her daily and witness her stumbling conversation and her all too often confabulations in our conversations. My comfort comes with the certain knowledge that what I see when I look at her is not her ultimate identity nor her ultimate destiny. Multiplicity and limitation are simply not ultimate. What is ultimate is ONENESS – infinite Bliss. This is who “we” actually are . . . and always have been.
Every few weeks I remember something Julia used to do and it feels like a giant shard of glass is ripping through my heart. The sensation is really that physical. I didn’t know till now what “heart rending” really means. But it only happens every few weeks because, I guess, I don’t think about the past very much. Or more exactly I don’t think about what has been lost. If I thought about what has been lost more I guess I would feel shards of glass more often.
I’m not saying this as a prescription, I’m just describing what’s happening for me. I didn’t even realize it until now.
She’s here with me, she’s alive, every day is filled with experiences just as past days were filled with experiences, and my attention is on that.
She’s so different now from how she used to be, the old Julia doesn’t seem that relevant now anyway.
I pay a lot of attention to what makes her unhappy but those things are different from the things that give me the heart-rending feeling.
P.S. I just realized that I didn’t reply to what you said about the ultimate. Sorry if that seemed rude. It’s not because I ignored what you said but because anything I say here on that topic will be the tip of an iceberg 10,000 words deep. (1) Just as your sister and Julia aren’t or weren’t the people whose appearance and behavior we remember, so too you and I aren’t the people who are hurt by remembering. The second half of the preceding sentence, it seems to me, is likely to be the more fruitful half. (2) What they really are is no more them than it’s anyone else. We think we love the people we love for their individual characteristics, and if that’s true, there’s no defense against the pain brought by dementia. But it’s not true. 🙂 Just as we mistake our individual characteristics for ourselves, we mistake the object of the love we feel for the individual characteristics of people (and animals) we love. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 2.4.5.
I suggest that recognizing that love is like this is the real solution. What we actually love in these women, or in anyone, isn’t any of the things we fear to lose or whose memories are painful. There’s no “should” in the previous sentence. I suggest it’s a fact.
Yes and Amen.
Well said, and as a youngish person in my 30s, I take it to heart. Thank you for your continued writing here and for all that you share!
I think Ramesh’s pointers on non-doership are probably relevant here. His point that peace of mind in daily living is largely a result of seeing that we are not the doer or controller, and thus not arguing with what is. Blame, pride, and shame all fade away as the basis for them is always the idea that someone could’ve acted differently, things could have been otherwise, etc.
A testament to the truth of this is that in my experience, the healthy awareness of one’s shortcomings that you mention is a natural part of this understanding, whereas the shame, pride, hatred etc is seen to have no basis.
– Ben
Hi Ben. I agree about non-doership. I think I was describing the same thing, although only very briefly, in the paragraph that begins, “This advice is related to the great discovery by ancient Indian philosophers that we are not our minds.” The word “minds” here includes doership.
As always thanks for adding your personal testimony.