An incredible tragedy of our time, this epoch of self-righteousness, is the zeal with which individuals would somewhat really feel proper than perceive — the scenario, the context, the motives and vulnerabilities behind the actions, the essential truth of the opposite.
Growling beneath all of it is an aversion to our personal imperfections — we’d somewhat look away and towards the faults of others than absolutely step into our personal shadow and embrace it with mild. In so segregating our personal nature, we abdicate our wholeness and stop being absolutely human.
Methods to rehumanize ourselves by proudly owning our shadow is what Alan Watts (January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973) examines in some great passages from Tao: The Watercourse Way (public library) — his closing guide, which he by no means absolutely completed earlier than loss of life took him one late-autumn day; it was posthumously printed with the assistance of his pal Al Chung-liang Huang.
Watts writes:
On the head of all virtues Confucius put not righteousness (i), however human-heartedness (jen), which isn’t a lot benevolence, as usually translated, however being absolutely and truthfully human.
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A real human isn’t a mannequin of righteousness, a prig or a prude, however acknowledges that some failings are as essential to real human nature as salt to stew.
A era earlier than Parker Palmer urged in his magnificent commencement address that you just “take all the things that’s vibrant and exquisite in you and introduce it to the shadow aspect of your self” in order that “the shadow’s energy is put in service of the nice,” Watts provides:
Merely righteous individuals are not possible to reside with as a result of they don’t have any humor, don’t enable the true human nature to be, and are dangerously unconscious of their very own shadows. Like all legalists and busybodies, they’re attempting to place the world on a Procrustean mattress of linear laws in order that they’re unable to make cheap compromises.
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Belief in human nature is acceptance of the good-and-bad of it, and it’s onerous to belief those that don’t admit their very own weak spot.
(It’s value nothing that Tao: The Watercourse Way was itself a method of admitting, and remedying, a human weak spot on the size of society — a decade earlier than Ursula Okay. Le Guin so brilliantly unsexed the universal pronoun, Watts turns into the primary to suggest, in a footnote, that the Confucian phrase jen, which is ungendered in Chinese language however has historically been translated into English as “man-heartedness,” as a substitute be translated as “human-heartedness” and that every one cases of “man” because the common pronoun get replaced with “human.”)
Complement with Joan Didion on learning not to mistake self-righteousness for morality and the psychologist turned pioneering artist Anne Truitt on the cure for our chronic self-righteousness, then revisit Watts on love and the only read antidote to fear, happiness and how to live with presence, the art of learning not to think in terms of gain or loss, and the salve for our existential loneliness.
