You Have Spinach Between Your Teeth

This is one of the first lessons that Arthur taught me: a true friend will tell you when you have spinach caught in your teeth. It may not always be a pleasant thing to do, to let someone know, say, that their fly is unzipped—in fact our culture programs us to believe that it is actually impolite to do so. But when you think about it, that’s quite insane! If I ever have spinach stuck between my teeth when I’m out and about, I hope I have a friend nearby who cares about me enough to tell me.

A true friend will do even more; they will find a way to let you know when you are erring in life: when you’re hurting yourself by the way you present yourself, or by the way you talk about other people, or by the way you’re not taking care of your body.

I thought of this while reading Anam Cara, by John O’Donoghue. He wrote:

No one can see his life totally. As there is a blind spot in the retina of the human eye, there is also in the soul a blind spot where you are not able to see. Therefore you must depend on the one you love to see for you what you cannot see for yourself. Your ‘Kalyana-mitra,’ [a Buddhist concept of ‘noble friend’] complements your vision in a kind and critical way. Such friendship is creative and critical; it is willing to negotiate awkward and uneven territories of contradiction and woundedness.

Anam Cara means ‘soul friend’ in Gaelic. Mr. O’Donoghue’s book is a lovely, extended meditation on a spiritual path of heart: friendship, work, sensuality, solitude, aging, and death.

Making Friends with my Emotions

‘Inside Out’ is a remarkable film that animates a model of the human mind in a very entertaining fashion.

The main human character is an 11-year-old girl named Riley, but the majority of the action in the film takes place in her mind. The conscious mind is portrayed as a control room staffed by five emotions: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. The emotions interpret and react to events in Riley’s life, and the emotional response puts a stamp on experiences as they are saved to long-term memory. (The filmmaker acknowledges that he had to simplify the emotional composition of the human mind to keep the film from being overwhelmed with characters. I think he did a good job at picking the most important ones.)

In the beginning of the film, Joy rules the control room. The other emotions have their place, but most of Riley’s memories have Joy’s emotional imprint.

A catastrophe knocks Joy and Sadness out of the control room and they are forced to find their way back. They traverse the vast maze of Long-Term Memory; the cavernous, scary Unconscious; the funny Dream Factory and Imagination Playhouse; and the abyss of the Memory Dump.

If you haven’t seen the film, I’d encourage you to stop now and read this after you’ve seen it.

What the film illustrates beautifully is that all of our emotions have their place. We may dream of a life with no sadness, no anger, no fear. Many of our spiritual pursuits are about getting to a place where there is no suffering; where only joy—bliss—remains. But I have found myself increasingly wondering: is that pursuit compatible with the nature of existence? Is the pursuit of ‘no suffering’ in fact anti-life?

Destroy My Enemy by Making him My Friend

When Homo sapiens evolved tens of thousands of years ago, we acquired the powerful skill of cooperation within our group. But a side effect was the belief that our group was special. We were The People (a common translation of group’s names for themselves all across the globe).  Other groups were The Other, and, by definition, less than/and or a threat to The People.  As a result we demonized all other groups and fought them when necessary. Over the millennia we have gotten extremely sophisticated in the arts of demonizing The Other as The Enemy. In addition we believe that our survival and, often, the future of the human race, depends on our vanquishing The Enemy.

As a modern example, what is the purpose of the U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen if not to eliminate every single member of Al Qaeda?

Abraham Lincoln, perhaps our wisest president, had an enlightened view on the idea of “enemy.” Dr. Scott Atran, an anthropologist who wrote a book called Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists in 2010, told this story to Krista Tippett on her show “On Being”:

You know, Abraham Lincoln is making a speech during the latter stages of the Civil War where he's describing the Southern rebels as human beings like anyone else.

An elderly woman, a staunch Unionist, abrades him for speaking kindly of his enemies when he should only be thinking of destroying them. Lincoln says to the woman, "Madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?" If you think about it, wars are truly won only in two ways. You either exterminate your enemy or you make them your friends. I think that we have not thought very deeply about the latter alternative, especially when I see how we're reacting to these young [potential Islamic terrorists] around the world.

Dr. Atran went on to discuss the transformative power of the Internet; how it is breaking down those ancient barriers of group and forging a new global identity.

I see the vast possibilities of this world, of a social brain. Just think about the networking possibilities of knowledge and access to knowledge that people have now. I mean, again, people now in New Guinea can link up with what people in New York are doing and work together with their different experiences and come up with new possibilities for human life. And this is happening at an incredibly fast rate and it's something that I don't think our traditional political establishments are at all capable of dealing with and I think there will be huge upheavals as a result, economic and social.

My favorite example of this transformation: watching a cat video on YouTube and realizing the language being spoken isn’t English…the Iranians and Japanese play with their cats just like we do. We are all members of one family, the human family.

[Krista Tippett, "On Being," “Demonstrations, Hopes and Dreams,” Feb 10, 2011.]