Steve Andreas > Articles > Transforming an Uncertain/Ambiguous Quality

Discussion

Do you have any questions or comments?

Frank: I'd like to report what mine was like. My positive template is represented here in front of me at eye level, and a little to my left, about a foot away. There's a big picture here, almost in front of me, and then a couple of small ones to the left of that one, that are sort of “backups,” ready to take the place of the big one whenever I need it. The rest of my database is in a vertical arc that passes between the big one and the two smaller ones. When I focus on any image in the database, it moves up here where the big image is, and then when I'm done with it, it moves back, and then one of the smaller ones moves over to take its place. My ambiguous quality had the same kind of structure, but the two backup images were blank, and when I searched for examples in the database, there were also a lot of blanks. There were a few positive examples, and a few negatives, but mostly it was just a lot of empty frames where examples ought to be. So I just searched for positive examples and put them into those empty frames until they were all full, and then transformed the counterexamples.

Great. So that was actually very similar to building a quality—assembling positive examples in the form of the positive template.

Demie: My positive template is a collage of slides, about a foot away, about six rows and six columns, with bright light behind, and they are all positive examples. If I bring in a counterexample, it always goes right into the middle, where it's surrounded by positives. The slides go out of the display on my left side, and circle around behind me into a storage bank, and then they come in again on my right side when I need them. But in my ambiguous quality, all the slides in the three rows on my left side were negative, and all the ones on the right were positive. I felt so awful looking at it, I didn't have a clue what to do. My partner looked at the way the slides in my positive template rotated around behind me, and suggested that I move the whole collage to my left, so that all the negatives could go into storage, while more positives could come in on the right. I couldn't believe how simple that was, and how relieved I felt. Then I could bring one negative at a time into the center and transform it. When I was done with that, I was crying, because it was so nice to know that I had that quality.

In these two examples the ambiguous quality was organized in a way that was very similar to the positive template, and that made it much easier to transform it into a positive quality. It's not always that easy, but sometimes it is. What you can say about the experience of having had an ambiguous quality from this new perspective.

Demie: It's like looking at a stranger. I don't know how I could have felt so bad.

Frank: The main thing I noticed was very similar to what Bruce said. I feel much more comfortable now that the ambiguity is resolved, because I don't have that back-and-forth doubt. I don't feel any need to tell anyone about the positive side of it, whereas before I did. And because I wanted to cover up my own uncertainty, I came across too strong.

I talked about this before, but it is so important that I want to say even more about it. When I described the criteria for an effective self-concept earlier, one of them was that it be free of the self-importance, egotism, and superiority that results from consciously comparing yourself with others.

I want you all to think of some situation in which you felt uncertain about your ability to meet some important challenge, like a job interview, or a date with an awesome person. Most of us tend to tense up, and struggle to look more confident and capable than we actually feel, and our behavior is likely to have this too much quality.

It takes a lot of time and effort to maintain a false self, particularly when you include all it takes to buy and maintain the fancy car, big house, etc. that someone needs to have to support their self-importance, even when they weren't inherently enjoyable. And this is often true of social “rebels” as well. I knew one guru “wanna be” who spent hours making sure that his hair had the Baba Ram Dass look, and a punker once told me that it took a couple of hours to color and set his spiked hair each day. If someone truly enjoys any of those activities, I have no argument, but if it is primarily to announce their identity to the world, I think that they could probably spend that time in ways that they enjoy more.

A false self is usually created in response to accepting some sort of social demand or ideal. Thinking that you “should” be a certain way, rather than how you are, is a good way to make your life “Shoulddy.” Some people create a false self out of social expedience, while retaining a strong sense of who they really are. Others may get so involved in maintaining their false self that they lose awareness of who they are, and it's all too easy to slip from expedience to denial.

Curiously, many spiritual paths or self-improvement programs often become yet another set of “shoulds” to be imitated in the competition for status within those groups. Back in the '60's, with its emphasis on being in the “here and now,” there was a syndrome that could be described as “Nower than thou,” which actually put people clearly in the “there and then,” of self-importance. Social and political groups are often led by egotists who bolster their own uncertainty by by becoming expert leaders or gurus, and many of their followers do the same by identifying with the guru's charisma and success.

At some level, someone with a false self—and we all have some of it—realizes that it isn't real, and that creates yet another trap. When someone responds to a false self, that means that the response isn't really to the person, but only to the false image, so you can't enjoy it. That is the source of a lot of loneliness, which is most obvious in movie stars, politicians, or other famous people who work at creating an image, and then find it hard to believe that anyone could love the person behind the image.

Many people think pride is a good thing, despite what the Bible and many other spiritual sources clearly say. Like its opposite, shame, pride always involves comparing yourself to someone else, and being either better than, or worse than them. Pride and self-importance are signs of a shaky self-concept, one that can easily flip to its opposite, shame and unimportance. When things go well, an egotist is glad to take responsibility for it, but when things go badly, suddenly it's someone else's fault. “Scratch a braggart and find a complainer.” Curiously, even humility can be a source of pride, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge pointed out a couple of hundred years ago:

“... the devil did grin, for his darling sin
Is pride that apes humility.”

When someone feels insecure about a quality, they take any challenge to it very seriously, and will respond defensively and do almost anything to restore their sense of importance. One example of this is a “macho” male who struts and brags about his manhood, and who will take offense at the slightest word or action that appears to challenge it, and has to respond, often with violence, sometimes even to the point of killing the offender. What a trap!

Men in trouble with the law are often in this situation, though not many are willing to admit to it, since admitting to it would also be a challenge to their image or status. Many prisoners have such an inflated and unrealistic way of thinking about themselves that they completely believe that the only reason they are in prison is that someone made a clerical error. “It's all a terrible mistake.” It's no accident that pride and envy are among the seven deadly sins in Christianity. In the old Greek version they were understood to be the worst, and the ones from which all the others spring.. Anger, another of the deadly sins, is seldom in response to actual physical harm or danger. Most anger and violence is in response to criticism, insult, disrespect, or some other challenge to someone's self-importance, or what is often called ego.

Many people believe that anger is in response to hurt, and at one level, that's true. But hurt is usually in response to some kind of disrespect, an injury to how someone thinks of themselves. In the 60's movie The Russians are coming, as Alan Arkin (a Russian) climbs out of a bullet-riddled Volkswagen, he says, “My dignity only is injured.”

When our expectations are not met, there is always a loss, and the first response to loss is disappointment and sadness. This feeling is often so immediately and completely overshadowed by anger and other attempts to avenge or repair the pride of the damaged ego, that the sadness is not noticed. Sir Walter Scott said it well over 200 years ago:

“Vengeance, deep brooding o'er the slain,
Had lock'd the source of softer woe;
And burning pride and high disdain
Forbade the rising tear to flow.”

When something terrible happens, sadness is a more basic feeling, and usually a much better place to start problem solving than pride, anger, and vengeance.

There are many other much subtler signs of self-importance and egotism. A friend of mine often used to comment on food by saying things like, “That was such a good steak.” It took me a while to realize that she was not really talking about the steak! The steak was just a convenient way to brag about herself and her exquisitely superior taste discrimination. Often people are talking much more about themselves than they are about the apparent topic of conversation, so you can gather a lot of useful information without asking any questions.

Whenever you observe pride or self-importance, that is an opportunity to resolve an ambiguity using this process. A stable self-concept can only be based on who you are, and the satisfactions of living a life that exemplifies your values, without comparing yourself to others. When your self-concept is solidly based on your own experience, then no one can take it away, and you are safe from disrespect, humiliation, anger and hurt—and all the turmoil and suffering that results from it. When Buddhism and many other spiritual traditions advocate eliminating the self, I think what they really mean is eliminating the egotism that results from ambiguity. By transforming an ambiguous quality into a positive one, this egotism is eliminated.

Sarah: When you talk about the macho male, and others who aren't willing to acknowledge tenderness and tears, etc., I think of the approaches that advocate accepting your “dark side” or “shadow” self, as a way to become a more whole and complete human being.

Yes, when someone consciously identifies with one side of an ambiguity, often because of rigid and absolute social or religious beliefs, they often disidentify with the opposite, which becomes a kind of hidden “shadow”self. Because of our society's sex-role stereotypes, the shadow self for a male in our society is likely to include the things that you mention, while for a woman it is likely to be things like assertiveness, anger, power, etc. Some people think of the shadow self as being evil or dangerous, and it does often include unacknowledged anger, aggression, and other natural, though troublesome, responses. But often it also includes very wonderful and valuable qualities that are unacknowledged because they don't fit the social stereotypes. I will have more to say about the shadow self soon, but I want to wait until some other understandings are in place.