Post #79: Taking Things Too Personally

25 Nov. 2023

“If your body were turned over to just anyone, you would surely take offense. So why are you not ashamed that you have made your mind so vulnerable to anyone who happens to come along that it automatically becomes confused and upset whenever someone criticizes you?”

—Epictetus, Enchiridion, chapter 28

Say someone has spread vicious rumors about you, or insulted you, or done some other foolish thing to damage your pride or your reputation, all without basis in fact. How on earth could anyone not take that kind of thing personally? Going by “on earth” in the strict sense—from the frog-perspective of the self, so to speak—it is hard to see how it would ever be possible not to start burning right away, and blowing up not long after, try to hold it in as you may.

But think about it for a minute. Perhaps this someone got the wrong impression and really believed what he (or she) then fed to the gossip mill; perhaps he now regrets it but cannot admit it to you; perhaps he just can’t help himself when it comes to gossiping. What do you really know? Are you not equally quick to judge, and just as mistakenly?

Maybe someone else was too ready, you think, to credit the slanders and assume the worst about you (or so you imagine) without making any effort to ascertain whether there was anything to them. But look what you have just done yourself as soon as there was questionable evidence making it look as if someone had crossed you some way or other, whether true or not. Maybe a third somebody took the rumors as proof that you are out to get him, even if in fact you were trying to help or otherwise do the right thing. Could you vouch for the purity of your motives when your own vital interests are at stake and the picture is murky?

Such everyday human troubles are not usually manifestations of great wickedness or evil so much as symptoms of confusion combining in unfortunate ways, all ultimately coming down to ignorance and unskillful means. Your own heated reactions, too, though they may look so justified and natural to you, are above all expressions of your insecurities, your feelings of inadequacy, your fears and worries. Consider how much you habitually contribute to these deplorable build-ups by your own less than skillful means, your imperfect understanding, your slanted point of view, your self-centered motives and intentions… Alas, how quick you are, no less than anyone else, to jump to the wrong conclusion and lose faith in others because your impressions pointed you that way for a moment.

In light of our own feebleness and fallibility, perhaps we should all focus a little more on the need not to be so judgmental and to have patience with and compassion for the foibles of others, taking the difficult moments as opportunities to practice forbearance and forgiveness under serious testing conditions. (And this not seven times only, but seventy times seven.) Even if you did get it right this time, by the grace of God, how many earlier failures did it take before the message finally got through and it clicked for you? Maybe others haven’t made their mistakes as often yet.

Even if someone definitely meant to hurt you, it was probably one-off and possibly as short-lived as your own angers often are. It is you, I’m afraid, who agreed to make it your problem in the first place, when you could have equally well, and much more sagely, declined the unwelcome “gift.”* And that was just the beginning; next you made yourself a movie director who keeps restaging the offensive episode in his mind, again and again, giving it fresh fuel and renewed power to aggrieve you every time, perhaps for years on end. Is that the way of the wise?

Certainly it is prudent to do what you can to avoid misunderstandings, counter misrepresentations, and correct the record as quickly and smoothly as possible, lest things spin out of control. The truth matters. But you would do well to remember something else at the same time: a crucial lesson taught by the Buddha under the heading of the Eight Vicissitudes, which is also the heart of the Bhagavad Gita and the core of Epictetus’s art of living—namely that the success of your undertakings is never ultimately up to you. Your proper domain is your inner life and the actions springing from it, never the fruits thereof. Nobody promised you only deserved praise, and not also unmerited blame, and your reputation, much as it should be guarded for prudential reasons, is, like all externals, ultimately beyond your control.

Resent it all you want, you will have to deal with injustices from others in your life, sometimes ill will, occasionally even hatred, whether you provoked it or not. If you would be wise, they know not what they do needs to be part of your calculations at all times. Or as Marcus Aurelius reminds himself again and again in his Meditations (IV.6, V.17, VIII.15, XII.16 etc.), it is natural and necessary that such things be done by such persons; to demand that things be otherwise is as sensible as requiring a fig tree to grow not figs but olives. “But a man has reason, you say, and he is able, if he is only willing, to discover wherein he offends. I congratulate you on your discovery. Well, then, you too are endowed with reason: use it to stir up his rational faculty! Show him his error, set him straight. If he listens, you may be able to cure him. But there is no need for anger.” (V.28)

If on your end you keep doing things right, storms may still hit you and rage for a while, but the dams you have built with your own wise conduct should hold, though a little worse for wear. It is the breaches that you make yourself by misguided actions and intentions, sometimes even the small ones, that can prove so devastating when the heavy waves come in. Guard firmly enough against your mistakes, and you will keep yourself safe, inwardly; fail at this one essential task and no amount of external security can protect you reliably. As James Stockdale writes in his Courage under Fire (see Post #28), “Stoics belittle physical harm, but this is not braggadocio. They are speaking of it in comparison to the devastating agony of shame they fancied good men generating when they knew in their hearts that they had failed to do their duty vis-à-vis their fellow men or God... Suffering, like everything else in Stoicism, was all down here—remorse at destroying yourself.”

The Dhamma, though equally insistent on the importance of right conduct and good intentions, takes things another step further and teaches that while we commonly add layer upon layer of impurities to what we take to be the self, we could shed much of our burden if we only understood that there is no abiding self that needs to be so fiercely protected against everyone and everything in the manner we imagine. We are all, at bottom, mere streams of interdependent causal connections flowing along and occasionally colliding with one another. If we only looked closely enough, we would discover that what arises from moment to moment is not, in fact, the genuine satisfaction that we so hope and long for, but only ever Dukkha, now in this shape, now in that. A message that may have a depressing ring at first, but that is by no means intended to discourage us; for it is by this insight alone that we may learn at last to overcome the habit of clutching and clinging that lies at the root of our suffering.

Do I hear the message? I do. Am I hearing it correctly? Who knows. Am I convinced? Sometimes more, sometimes less. Can I live by it consistently? Certainly not. So where does that leave me? I have no idea…

* The Suttas tell of an old brahmin priest, Bharadvaja, who got so enraged by the Buddha’s growing influence at the time that he resolved to seek him out and heap as much abuse on him as possible. When the old man had completed his first barrage of scoldings, the Awakened One made no reply to the insults, but asked instead whether his distinguished visitor was not in the habit of entertaining guests at his home too. Puzzled by this unexpected response, the old brahmin shrugged and allowed that it was so. “And on such occasions, you would offer them plenty of food and drink and other hospitable gifts, would you not?” Certainly, the brahmin admitted, but what of it? “Say they did not wish to accept your gifts for some reason, would they not then remain in your possession?” Of course they would, Bharadvaja grudgingly conceded, by now suspecting a trap. “It is just so with me, you see,” the Buddha concluded: “All these gifts of abuse and scolding you have brought to me, I will not accept any of them. They still belong to you, brahmin, they still belong to you!” (Samyutta Nikaya 7.2 )