George Costanza, Paradoxical Intention, Mad Wisdom and Laughter
I have wasted countless hours of my life watching television, and the idea that television is “an opium for the masses” is probably not far from the truth. That being said, I’m not a snob and I get hooked on shows just like anyone else. Of all the shows I’ve ever watched, Seinfeld was truly the one that got me through some dark hours in my life, and the show continues to be a huge part of my life years later in syndication.
I mention this because I want to draw attention to a particular episode called “The Opposite”. For people unfamiliar with this episode, it’s the one where George Costanza decided that because all his instincts in life have produced an undesirable result, therefore doing the opposite of what his instincts told him should be done. be the right thing When George implements this idea in his life, suddenly wonderful things begin to happen to him. What George had unknowingly stumbled upon was a concept known as Paradoxical Intent.
The term Paradoxical Intention was originally coined by an amazing man named Victor Frankl who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning webwinds.com/frankl/frankl.htm
about his experiences in a concentration camp and his later life as a psychiatrist where he conceived his unique philosophy known as Logotherapy. One of the key treatments Frankl used was paradoxical intent, in short, “to suggest to the patient, with appropriate humor, that he do or expose himself to what he fears.” An example would be telling someone who is still struggling with dieting that you want them to eat absolutely as much as they can for the next week. This type of advice often disturbs a person’s cognitions, and often the sheer absurdity of the suggestions helps people better understand their original self-defeating ways of thinking.
Related to the concept of Paradoxical Intention is the idea of acting “as if”. This gives a person permission to act contrary to their usual ways of dealing with the world. In other words, a shy and withdrawn person could act “as if” her life is full of joy and laughter for a couple of weeks to see if this creates any change in her life during this time, and guess what? Usually always does!! This is the power of emotional choice. This was especially true of the life of Victor Frankl, who during his darkest days in a concentration camp was able to think of his love for his wife and experience happiness, even as the threat of continued torture and imminent death hung over his head. I try to tell myself that if a man can choose happiness in those circumstances, I certainly can when some little thing in life doesn’t go my way. This is the power of mindfulness and taking stock, often, of how good things really are.
On the subject of mindfulness and Eastern religion, it is also interesting to consider an idea in Tibetan Buddhism called “Crazy Wisdom” or yeshe chölwa, which literally translates to uncontrolled wisdom. This was popularized by the erratic but brilliant Tibetan philosopher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who, though thought to be a deity much like the Dalia Lama in his native Tibet, moved to the United States and opened a series of centers for spiritual enlightenment with people like Allen. Ginsburg and William Burroughs as instructors.
Purveyors of Mad Wisdom like Trungpa were called Siddhas who “expressed the unconditional freedom of enlightenment through divinely inspired foolishness… vastly preferring to celebrate the inherent freedom and sanctity of authentic self, rather than cling to religious forms and external moral systems. Through their playful eccentricity, these rambunctious spiritual liars served to free others from delusion, social inhibitions, deceitful morality, complacency, in short, the whole variety of mind-forged handcuffs.”
These spiritual fools had what was called a “cosmic sense of humor” that saw through the illusions of society’s conventions towards a greater interconnectedness of being. While this is certainly entering the realm of metaphysics, these teachers, in short, were fools because they understood that we are a universe of fools, foolishly attached to our possessions and our conventions, without seeing how these attachments lead. to suffering
So our attachments lead to suffering? Absolutely. We often cling to our own ideas and to the seriousness of our little private universes, when in the bigger scheme the things we worry about are actually pretty silly. We waste so much of our precious time here on earth worrying about things that never come to fruition. Meanwhile, we keep zipping through space on a little blue ball that doesn’t care about our unpaid electric bills, unmowed grass, and unfair potholes. The Siddhas understood this absurdity, and in their world these foolish fools were considered the wisest of the wise. Perhaps there is a lesson here about not taking ourselves seriously, as it is often the fools and fools who may ultimately be the wisest.
