Like a porcupine’s quills, our opinions about things and people can be pointed and dangerous. At least for a porcupine, the quills are are only pointed outwards to defend them from predators. Our opinions, however, may be directed outwards, but they are double ended, so as they point out, they jab in. Those things we think about other people, about their shortcomings and personal defects, will sometimes hurt others, but always hurt us. Unchecked opinions about ourselves or others can tear our self-esteem to shreds.
Fortunately, as porcupine quills come out easily and grow back quickly, our opinions can be dropped and reformed in ways that help us instead of hurting us. Like our negative opinions bring us down, our positive opinions lift us up. The sweet spot though is in the middle, where we can see positive and negative attributes all around us without them reflecting back on us at all. In order to find that sweet spot, we have to pay attention to all the thousands of opinions that cross our minds each day.
On the surface, it may seem like recognizing immorality and stupidity in others may lift us up by making us feel morally secure and intelligent. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. When we see people lying, cheating, and stealing, we generate a quick, easy judgement about how wrong those people are. Our faith in humanity takes a blow. Once again we are confronted with evidence that there are liars, thieves and cheaters in the world. We may become angry at the nature of the lie or the magnitude of the theft. We may be hurt and grieving that the lies were to us, or something was taken from us. It may seem like the lies and theft is what hurts us, but it is our reactions, and the opinions that spring up in response, that do all the damage.
In the story of Les Miserables, set in France in a time of oppression and revolution, the main character, Jean Valjean, gets out of prison where he spent 20 years of hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s children. In his first days of freedom, he wanders the French countryside as a vagrant. A kindly bishop takes him in and gives him a meal and a place to sleep. In the night, Jean Valjean steals his silver and runs off. The police quickly catch him and he tells them that the the silver was not stolen, but a gift. When the police check his story with the bishop, the bishop says that Valjean’s lie was the truth and then he offers set of silver candlesticks on top of the loot that was already taken. That was a moment of salvation for Jean Valjean. The bishop’s kindness and generosity saved him from spending the rest of his life in prison and set him up for a life of virtue. The rest of the story is about him trying to live up to his virtuous identity, despite the fact that his whole virtuous identity was based on a lie.
In our daily lives, even without the drama of the French Revolution, we play out those dramas of virtue and vice. We mostly try to imagine ourselves on the side of virtue (or maybe a qualified virtue). As long as we entertain that kind of drama, forming opinions of our worth, and those opinions forming our identities, we set ourselves up for misery. The misery comes in protecting false identities. When our identity can encompass every little detail of our lives, all the rights and wrongs that we have done, all the successes and failures that we have experienced, all of the kindness and cruelty that we have done and has been done to us, we realize that we don’t fit neatly into any preconceived box of what a person should be. For us to become an enlightened character, like the bishop, we have to be able to embrace cold, hungry thieves, tolerate material loss, and be willing to lie for a higher truth. Our opinions that condemn and reject ourselves and others, invariably stab us directly in the heart.
When we suffer from poor self-esteem, those cutting negative opinions are as much about ourselves as others. When we entertain negative opinions about ourselves, those quills attack us with both ends. Whether we are aiming our far fetched opinions at ourselves or others, the first step in healing the damage is to notice it happening. All those opinions happen, in real time, right in our minds. When we practice noticing them, we have the opportunity to soften the blow. We can notice our habitual response and remember to engage our compassion. We can see a thought and recognize it as an opinion. If it is good and makes us feel good, then we can appreciate it, then let it go. If it is bad, and makes us feel bad, we can notice the feeling and let it go. The consistent practice of noticing our opinions about this and that, us and them, right and wrong, can help us find our middle ground. Good people still suffer from bad thoughts.
If you notice a pig, think “pork”, when you notice an opinion, think, “opine”, then let those thoughts go. You don’t need to double down on good and bad, right or wrong, but only notice the thought and let it go. You have a vast open mind, there’s no need to clutter it with painful and pointless opinions. When all the opinions fall away, you won’t worry anymore about any false identities, what’s left is your true identity.
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