As a nine year-old in fourth grade, my teacher Mr. Warfield -- a classic early 70's liberal with alternate ideas -- took me aside during recess and told me personally and privately that he knew I was brighter than him. I guess I liked hearing that, though I thought "Wofo" as called him, was much cooler than me. He looked the part of fringe radical educator. He had dark hair down over his ears, parted on side and combed over, and sideburns like Peter Fonda's in Easy Rider. Anyway, after telling me I was smarter, he added, "But you're quite gullible". I thought he was referring to Gulliver, the hero of a Jonathan Swift novel. Wofo replied, "No, not Gulliver, gullible, g-u-l-l-i-b-l-e. Gullible mens people tell you things, you Tend to believe. You are too suggestible. And then people will take advantage of you." In other words Wofo was gently telling me, you're plenty bright I admit, but as a friend, I'm telling you, you're also pretty dumb. Even while receiving the teacher's humble compliment, I felt I was being shown my place, or at least made aware of my weakness.
To remedy the immature naivete of my social persona, Mr. Warfield gave me good books to read, books that dwell at length on the darker side of human psyche and behavior: The Hobbit, Papillon, The Godfather, and Huckleberry Finn, which I had read already at home. I devoured all this adult (or, in the case of The Hobbit, semi-adult) fiction. Meanwhile a classmate had found a copy of The Happy Hooker in a The Hobbitparent's dresser drawer, which he brought to school where swiftly made the rounds of eager, secretive ninja-readers. From the fourth grade until sixth grade, The Happy Hooker plus occasional stolen copies of Penthouse or Playboy which were shared in secrecy and with fanfare outside of school, these and exotic rumors spread on the playground, a prurient game of telephone where rumor was made into infantile conspiracy. One day a classmate announced that he had it on good authority that a golden shower and urophagia were the actual method of human procreation. From age nine until 11 1/2, pilfered print-porn and creative pseudo-scientific rumos, were the sex-education my school mates and I got.
What Wofo was saying, when he told me I was gullible, was in fact, saying that I was excessively _literal_. What does it mean when you can't take a joke or recognize a manipulation because you take social communication at literal face value? It means you are potentially gullible. From that moment when I learned the meaning of the word "gullible" until now, my life has been an odyssey to discover and understand the metaphors that make life meaningful. That means first of all, understanding that words contain infinite layers of meaning. The literal value of spoken words, in particular, depends on the context of speech. When, how and by whom were the words spoken? What is the relation of that person to oneself? and so on.
Most people just intuitively understand the physical and verbal cues of others, so they do not literally misinterpret verbal communication. Those of us who do fail to grasp the the context of verbal communication -- and thus risk social isolation, or disadvantage -- might also become experts on the special karma of words, or the magic of words. In the words themselves is the key to all understanding, even the key to understanding the non-verbal aspect of social communication. Moreover, the power of speech is mysterious. The more human speech is refined, sublimated and empowered by spiritual or contemplative exercises, the more powerful it becomes. Our prayers and wishes will come true, or if we're careless, our negative thoughts or curses might harm others as well as ourselves. Language and speech are a powerful engine to shape our reality, if we can master them and use them.
As a working hypothesis I assume that what people say in writing is an unreliable indicator of their real intentions; what people say in person can be chock full of manipulation. I admit, human social behavior is rough water for me to navigate in full confidence, given the pervasive atmosphere of competition, the various games of one-upsmanship with the allied strategies of undermining the competition and claiming oneself, exaggeratedly, as the greater player in human affairs. The current president reminds us constantly of how utterly special and gifted he is ... Like listening to a soothing mantra, one almost wants to believe him because the sound of it, the uncanny hopefulness of a high-functioning "genius" for a president, uniquely gifted and predestined, is comforting many people in times of chaos.
Most social interaction involve some kind of acting; in professional life, we act a part by dressing to code, and showing up for an interview. We make ourselves special by spin-doctoring (or even fabricating) citations of credentials in our curriculum vitae. On our C.V.'s, we craft job descriptions for previous employment that emphasize only the most prestigious possibilities of the job, not the reality. For example, the reality was, you were sorting mail and paper documents into two piles: to be filed by someone else, or to be disposed of. But on your C.V. you craft a job title like " Line Manager of Archival Data Acquisition and Deployment". In reality, your job title might have Underpaid Nobody or Intern; but also in reality, you were the first link in a chain leading to scanning, optical character recognition, and electronic document creation, hence the term "Data Acquisition". You were a manager of precisely one person, yourself, alone in a room full of document bins, the first link in a data-aquisition assembly line, hence "Line Manager" of yourself, at the head of the line. And because you stacked and delivered archival documents to the next node (the scanning department), and threw throwaways down a recycling chute, you were directly involved in "Deployment" of those materials. This is an example of how one might want to self-represent in a creative or exaggerated way, in order to succeed in a world of competing marketing strategies, especially the marketing of oneself.
Do I want to be that person, who turns himself into a business or brand? Absolutely not... But sometimes it's inevitable. We are "branded", well or badly, by the opinions of others. "Kleenex" is a brand that profits and thrives on consumer opinion. In itself, Kleenex is just a flimsy sheet of disposable paper. Similarly, individuals in society are all-too-human, even the greatest or most famous individuals have their failings, their flaws. But if they are really great, they have duty to humanity and the dignity of accepting responsibility to care for others.
Suppose a famous, flawed individual -- let us say, for example, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche -- admits his flaws, displays his humanity but just as much he tries to fulfil his duty as a teacher, as leader of Buddhism. What could we say, generally, about that person? Perhaps, we could say they are honest, humble, and dedicated. DJKR accepts his role and implicitly embraces his personal legend, that is based his recognition as rebirth of the previous Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche (d. 1960), and of Khyentse the Great (d. 1892). But how much Rinpoche believes in the legend, or how much he needs to believe in it, are questions. I think he must believe it somehow, because his own teachers, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche in particular, believed it strongly. But I also note that DJKR at least once, publically, has spoken emphatically, to the point that he has no idea if his tulku status really true or not which meaning, he doesn't remember. So DJKR represents a famous, notable case of someone that earnestly and publically leaves open the question of whether his tulku title--that is, the basis of his persona "legend"--is literally true or not, Nevertheless, he embraces his religious title, position, and traditional roles, because other people need him to do so. Without the huge popular demand for him as a teacher, I can only imagine how much more his career making movies might have developed.
When people like us, and praise us, we don't have to believe it. But if those people expect us to do something worthy of our supposedly good character, then have to do something worthy a good character, even if our character is rather bad -- because that is how character improves. So the public persona of an individual should be accepted as a responsibility to live up to the moral expectations of others. Likewise the family persona imposed on the individual, or the solitary persona of someone who avoids society.
No such people with roles or personas to maintain can mature and thrive without also trying and learning to become, in greater or lesser degree, the person that others--especially those who love them the most like family and spiritual teachers--wish them to become. This can be a painful and destructive process, due to false or deluded expectations, or it can be a challenging process that ultimately liberates us, for example if we take refuge in the Triple Gem and use study and practice to become more and more attuned, in harmony with the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.
Assimilating and integrating with society is largely a process of becoming, or pretending to be, the person that others require us to be. It's not such a bad thing, if we see it for what is, which is arbitrary and temporary collaboration. Being successful in navigating the arbitrary, temporary roles assumed at work, at home and at play, while not becoming psychologically bound by any particular assumption or expectation on the part of others, is basic emotional intelligence. Without being intimidated by other people's judgment or petty authority, to fearlessly be a light unto oneself, to exceed expectations without being oppressed by them, is the spirit of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of Mind Training (Lojong). We have to deal with other people's bullshit, which means not playing blame games or evading the responsibility of cleaning up a mess that not our fault. We go the extra mile, when possible, to make things right and beautiful. And if that fails to make things better for everyone, we accept the limited result of our efforts without beating ourselves up or continuing to entertain people that won't help themselves.
In other words, spiritual practice and social maturity are part of an overarching process termed "individuation" by psychologist Carl Jung. We temper our individualism with training of the emotions, using meditation and contemplation exercises, such that enable us to adapt gracefully to the world we live in. When adaptation fails, we use the same discipline to fearlessly shift our ordinary identities and expectations into unknown possibilities, thus becoming a richer version of the old self. For some of us this means means living as a nomad, a wandering poet, yogi or philosopher. It's one time-honored style of Dharma practice, homeless but also at home in many places, emotionally attached by none, captive of no one.
One might argue that clinical psychology and psychiatry is an historical accretion of keenly observations by high-functioning spectrum individuals (e.g my shrink grandfather), that "nerdy" scientific methods brought to the management of the mental health of the masses is, essentially, an autistically biased theoretical abstraction as well as a technological appropriation of the human psyche for the purpose of recording and mastering its metadata profile. Otherwise put, we are all LLM's from the moment of conception until death ... but most are unaware of this. The interdependence of the psyche is known by its fruits but not by knowing all its shadowy parts...similarly the structure and function of an LLM cannot be fathomed by a single human being, but only (in theory) by a much more capable AI that is powerful enough to debug and analyse the functioning of that LLM. Arguably, to track every operation of the human brain at the biological level and simultaneously parse the semantic dimension of the brain's neurological events would require a computer with a capacity proportional to the total information and processing potential in the entire (visible) universe.. This is one possible bit of evidence for advocates of "intelligent design". The suggested likelihood this universe being an intelligent simulation (quite apart from another touted theory, that of its being a hologram) is yet another version of "intelligent design".
That assumption -- of the existence of a primordial intelligence which self-expresses as the natural universe and in the minds of sentient beings, particularly the human psyche -- is a natural conclusion of scientific investigation, philosophical endeavor, or of inner contemplative explorations. Just what that would be
