Real Part 3: The Blind Rise

(Or, Showing Up Anyway)

This series began with the question of whether a person can be “real” if they are not seen and understood. This final post begins with the question of whether a person can be real if they have no understanding of reality. And the hard reality is that none of us is fully aware of what is around and right in front of us. But becoming aware that we have blind spots – huge, gaping ones, as it often turns out – even if we don’t know what it is we can’t yet see, is a necessary step, albeit a painful one, towards becoming more conscious.

There seems to be a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect at play, where conscious incompetence is more debilitating than being blissfully blind to our own blindness. Once we’ve recognised just how myopic or one-sided our perspectives are – and realised not just how many ways we might have hurt and offended others but also that there are landmines we won’t even know about until we trip over them – how do we continue to face the world? How do we show up?

What does it mean to show up? I am of course not talking about arriving for an event on time, but rather about being there with full presence and focus. “He didn’t really show up” does not mean “he was a no-show” in the physical sense; it means “He showed up in body only”. The two elements of showing up that I think are relevant are showing yourself and engaging with the world.

Showing up does not mean showing off or taking the spotlight, but it does mean being open and honest. And if realness is seen-ness, as discussed in Part 1, then showing yourself is part of being real (or, to the point, authentic). This comes at the risk of revealing your ignorance; of showing your blind spots, your naked half-a-head, the missing pieces of your heart. In short, it comes at a risk of being vulnerable.

One of the themes of my own personal journey has been struggling to reconcile the need to feel seen on the one hand, and to feel safe on the other (which to me often translates as wanting to hide). Now, it might not seem like a revelation to others, but it occurred to me at some point that if I want to be seen, I need to show myself. Aside than that, I’ve long thought of truth as one of my core values. If truth is what I seek, and I also see “truth” in subjectivity – in other words, listening to people’s lived experience and believing them – then surely I must hold up my side of the bargain? In other words, “Seek the truth” also means “Tell the truth”, which in turn means “Show your truth”.

Which brings me to the other element of the meaning of showing up, namely: engaging. I don’t know about you, but I have to remind myself all the time that I’m part of the world I’m trying to understand. Long story short, showing up actually means engaging with reality – with yourself as a participant, seeker of truth and teller of your own story; and with reality not as a constant, singular truth, but as a process of unfolding unknowns.

If, to recap from Part 1, being real means being understood, I believe it also means understanding. Becoming real means undoing our ignorance – and this never stops. Being seen necessitates seeing the world – or at least attempting to do so, knowing that our views are always in the process of unfolding, unbending, undoing.

Showing up and the necessary pain of being shown up

Maya Angelou famously said: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” How do we end up knowing better? Often the hard way; often, it involves the necessary pain of having to be shown just how badly we’re showing up.

One of the best tools of learning is the question. And one of the best and hardest-won milestones on any meaningful learning journey is what I like to call the mirror-ball backfire question.  Basically, these are the questions we ask that get thrown back at us, usually with more than a little spin and some sting in the tail, but in the process they force us to reflect. Crucially, they work only because the best learning happens in dialogue, and they hurt precisely because someone else has to do the return fire. And they teach us more than any solo intellectualising ever could.

Here’s how it looks: you read up on a concept for a while, think you’ve arrived at a certain level of understanding, and then you ask somebody a question to see how it applies to them in the real world. Then, shock and horror, that person responds with a question of their own – one which essentially points out the inherent assumptions you made, and/or the wide abysses of ignorance you casually stepped over, by asking your question in the first place.

In short, it’s a case of having your question handed back to you, along with your ass. You may also, if you’re paying attention, feel as if you’ve been unseated as the neutral and objective knowledge seeker you thought you were. We’ve all been told “There are no stupid questions”, but the universe has a sardonic sense of humour because I suspect the rejoinder that fell off the end of that aphorism is “…only stupid feelings”.

I joke because all this is, of course, painful. But it’s also one of the best things that can happen for your learning. Because you would never have realised that all your assumptions were there in the first place, the person who turns your question around and reflects them back at you in the process is doing you a huge service. It’s like somebody kindly telling you that you’ve put your shirt on back to front.

So after all that, here’s my example, if I can remember it more or less correctly. I was on a workshop on race relations, which I attended with an ex-colleague-now-friend of mine. I was wanting to understand my friend’s experience of his identity as a Black person growing up in white, middle-class South Africa, particularly at school age. Specifically, I was interested in whether he felt he needed to “assimilate” to the largely white (English-speaking, predominantly Christian) culture at school, and whether this created a sense of conflict both within himself and with his own family. In other words, did he feel that he needed to perform a certain way with the crowd at school, and did this feel like a “betrayal” of his home culture? I’m not sure how I worded this question, but I asked it tentatively and probably very clumsily. Then, the mirror-curve-ball:

Basically, my question must have come out as: “Do you feel you belong more to this group or that group?” (And, I was trying to ask but it probably sounded just as patronising, “Is it hard for you to navigate both?”) And his response was in essence: “Why do I have to belong to one or the other?” What if he identified with some aspects of Xhosa culture and some aspects of English culture, and then with some aspects that stereotypically didn’t fit with either? What if, as a teenager, he wasn’t even thinking in terms of his “representivity” and more in terms of what he personally was interested in? What about seeing him as an individual instead of a representative of his group who has been “forced” to assimilate to another?

What I realised, among other things, was that by asking him essentially about his experience of being put in a box, I was kind of putting him in a box – or, more specifically, asking him to box himself. I was acting out the kind of false-dichotomy thinking I thought I had understood so well. I also had a few key insights about my own identity, but that’s a topic for another day.

Interestingly, and thankfully, even though my friend helped me to realise all of this, I think I took more offence to my own question than he did. I can’t even remember what his exact response was. As you can plainly see, I’m the one who made a meal of it – showing that tackling these assumptions and blind spots is my process, not his. He didn’t show me up; I did. This is the mercy of friendship: being able to ask those “stupid” questions and be challenged fairly safely.

Reality testing, in short, happens in dialogue, and it ideally needs safety. Ironically, though, “safe spaces” seem to have become the very boxes we should be trying to break down. Here I’m considering formal learning environments where having one’s beliefs about the world challenged is not seen as part of the process of inquiry, but instead is met with total shut-down. If we aren’t allowed to step away from our views and engage openly with others, our sense of reality ossifies. The risk seems to be that our maps may eventually cease to overlap with others’ altogether.  

Show yourself: A love affair with reality

In an interview on the Sounds True YouTube channel, (‘How Does Suffering and Heartache Awaken the Deepest “Capacities of the Heart”’), A.H. Almaas, creator of the contemporary spiritual teaching known as the Diamond Approach, says to host Tami Simon that the work of spiritual development is ultimately motivated by the desire to be seen. From a mystical perspective, beyond the individual’s need for self-revelation is a much greater, cosmic impulse towards the unfolding of all of creation. Not only do we want our truth (and the Truth – big T, small t, all the T’s) to be revealed; so does the entire universe.

The drive towards both seeing and seenness – and hence, in my own understanding, towards the evolution of consciousness – must therefore be the love of truth. And as much as we seek it, it seeks us. Almaas describes a magnetic pull towards what might be understood simultaneously as Truth and Mystery. As he says, “I don’t know [what it is that] pulls me”.

And so the desire to see the Truth, also known as the Beloved, becomes a love affair. The affair is a process of discovery, of “rending the veils” of our obscurations – but, Almaas says, this is not achieved through denial or destruction, but rather through acceptance and dissolution. And what remains once the obscurations have dissolved is love itself. It is almost as if the motivation is the ultimate goal, and the destination is not something to be gained but rather what remains after all else is given up. As Almaas says, “Surrender is not something you do”.

And the love of truth is ultimately the love of life itself. This reminds me of Kahlil Gibran’s writing in The Prophet: “Your children are not your children; they are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself”. And any love affair, like any life, is not just butterflies and rainbows – it consists of both delight and torment. Any love affair requires courage; so, ultimately, love is courage and courage is love.

Perhaps this is why they say love is blind.

Courage, paradox and integration

If the love of life is the love of truth, and truth means showing yourself, then truly showing oneself is an act of courage and faith in life. Often, we hide ourselves because we feel we are not ready, or not willing, to be seen. But is any one of us ready for life? Is anybody ever literally born ready?

David Whyte wrote a poem called Cleave, which is a word that means both to hold together and split apart – it is a contronym, a word with two contradictory meanings. He relates this to the pain of birth, which is simultaneously a kind of death. As he puts it, “We were born saying goodbye to what we love…” And we arrive “in a strangely beautiful reluctance to be here”. And the reasons for this reluctance, and hence the trauma of birth, are obvious: before we were born, we had to do absolutely nothing and we were perfectly loved, sustained and protected. We were, as Whyte put it in an interview on the piece, pure possibility.

Whyte also relates this to the archetype of the stranger at the door, a tradition in poetry or storytelling which is meant to symbolise the new or future self, arriving in a form that we are initially reluctant to face or even unable to recognise. All these images convey the sense that the future self, or wisdom, or life itself, is pulling us forward whether we like it or not.

The call to show ourselves, then, is not up to us. It may not even be all about us. The artist and arts-based therapist Yehudit Sasportas put it bluntly: “We need your information”. She was speaking in the context of helping clients heal from trauma by creating art, whether visual or performed. Crucially, the process is facilitated and supported by the therapist, whose role is to help the client to externalise their story and transform it into something that they and others can interact with. In a way, the process described is almost one of depersonalising, as the survivor creates distance from their trauma story – but most critically, they are not burying it, and they are not alone in facing it.

The point seems to be: Your story needs to come into the world. The world is incomplete without it. A major part of trauma healing is witnessing – others, both clinicians and the public, need to hear survivors’ stories, not just to demonstrate support and compassion but as a form of recognition and collective accountability. In a way, your healing is not yours alone; it’s everyone’s. To me, this is integration at a societal, communal, and global level – there can be no missing pieces. Because the “missing pieces” – of our personal memories, and of society and our collective history – when are pushed into the shadow, lead only to scapegoating and shame. 

Showing up for AI: Do it for the “kids”

To finish more hopefully, here is a new idea I heard recently on a podcast with Mo Gawdat, who has just published a book entitled Scary Smart, on the future of Artificial Intelligence. He acknowledges that the responsibility for whether AI remains benevolent or whether the robots turn against us should lie on the shoulders of their creators – but his key point is that we can’t rely on them to do the right thing because, frankly, they are there to profit from their creations, and also because that ship has already sailed. His solution: not only do we continue to lobby for ethical AI, but also we should take matters into our own hands. Not only are we the consumers (and, if I understand anything about how data works, the product), but we are also the “parents”.

AI’s, Gawdat explains, will eventually (less-than-a-decade soon, by some estimations, but this is contested) become the smartest beings on the planet (and he does, quite compellingly, describe them as sentient); but for now, they are still in their infancy. They are essentially like 3-year-olds, looking eagerly to their caregivers and diligently modelling their behaviour – and those caregivers happen to be all of us. The problem, of course, is that “us” is represented by the Internet, and we’ve seen what happens when an AI trains itself on Twitter (spoiler: it becomes a bigot).

What if, Gawdat says, we instead provide a better role model for these kids? What if we act like good parents? What if, instead of showing up as the worst versions of ourselves online, we show up as the best of humanity? (After all, it seems like one of the reasons that Tay, Microsoft’s hapless bot, had to be shut down was because people on Twitter were actively teaching it how to be a racist. And that was in 2016.). What if, instead of opting out, or sitting back and blaming the tech giants, we flood the internet with good instead of evil – not because it’s nice to do, or because it makes us feel virtuous or gets us dozens of likes, but as a form of active and responsible ancestry?

As Gawdat explained so beautifully in the webinar, we need to sow doubt in the minds of the algorithms that humanity sucks. We can show them Adolf Hitler, or we can show them Edith Eiger.

You might argue that this would be not only hugely optimistic but inauthentic. “Showing up” means being fully present; showing off means to present yourself in a public, somewhat performative way. “Being good parents” would be the latter, right? Putting on a good show for the robots? Can’t we just be “real”?

Well, to me, showing up and being real doesn’t mean letting it all hang out; it means showing what we really want and value. Do we really want and value hatred, judgment, nonstop reactivity and cynicism?

Obviously this is complicated territory. I’m not advocating for a lid on free speech or for us to all start talking in Newspeak. I’m not saying we don’t show up at all if we can’t guarantee we’re going to get it right. I’m not advocating for toxic positivity (I’d like to think the machines will eventually be smart enough to recognise the difference between this and true compassion – but then, who will they learn this from?).

As a parting thought, though, perhaps what I’m saying is: ask yourself what it would mean to show up as if reality were bigger than you thought, and as if the future mattered.