Living Contradictions

While watching the Barbie movie recently, I was struck by one of the lines. It occurs when Barbie returns to Barbie Land from the ‘real world’ and finds that Ken has turned what was once a place of opportunity for the Barbies, into a ‘Kendom’. In the land of the Kens, the men rule and the Barbies ‘live to serve’. The subservience of the Barbies is jarring, especially in light of their previous occupations and values. They appear to be completely oblivious to their past, as if in a state of amnesia.

When Gloria (a woman from the real world), gives an impassioned speech about the contradictions inherent in patriarchy’s expectations for women — like being a ‘boss’ but not ‘mean’, ‘leading’ but ‘not squashing other people’s ideas’ — it appears to jolt the Barbies out of their unquestioning servitude. Barbie explains, ‘By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance of living under patriarchy, you robbed it of its power’. That’s the line that struck me. Cognitive dissonance refers to the discomfort you feel when you hold two contradictory beliefs at once, and this reminded me of the type of conversations Socrates had with his fellow Athenians.

Socrates sought to wake the people of Athens from their slumber of inherited beliefs by a process of questioning that left them immersed in a sea of contradictions. This was so mentally debilitating that a state of bewilderment, or ‘aporia’, was produced in which they could no longer cling to any concept. Into this open state of mind, true knowledge could then make itself known. Such knowledge, to Socrates, was something to be recollected, not learned, since it was beyond the scope of human reason.

It’s not a stretch to suggest that many of the expectations for women listed in the Barbie movie are applicable to everyone in our modern era, regardless of gender. The idea of ‘healthy boundaries’ is related to this challenge of walking a tightrope between traditional, stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity, or being a ‘boss’ but ‘not mean’, respectively. Trying to get this balance right can itself be a source of significant strain, guilt, and shame. But feeling torn between contradictions isn’t something new. In fact, a significant aspect of human despair lies in our very nature being a contradiction. At least, that’s what it is when we identify with our ego.

The War Against Ourselves

‘That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.’

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.

In terms of A Course in Miracles, the ego is itself a contradiction because it represents a thought of separateness from God’s Oneness. Made from this thought of contradiction, the ego has contradiction in its DNA. To identify with the ego is therefore to enter a land of contradiction and suffer from inner conflict. This might be expressed outwardly in trying to choose between different courses of action, for example, however the real source of feeling torn is that we chose the ego. We bought a season’s pass to Contradiction Land, and unless we realise the source of our discombobulation, we’ll end up on multiple rides.

The ego’s most beloved contradiction is its drive to ‘love’ and hate. Ego ‘love’ relates to what we experience when we get something we think we need to feel good about ourselves, and what we do to get it. This often takes the guise of ‘goodness’. Hate is what we feel when we attribute our lack of peace to others. If we lash out from this state, it looks ‘bad’. To be identified with the ego is to believe we are the self that is ‘good’ and ‘bad’, rather than our spiritual Self, which is only Love — a love that asks for nothing.

When we choose to identify with the ego, we become a living contradiction and suffer self-doubt. Are we the loving person, or the hating one? Are we good, or evil? If it’s a matter of frequency, intensity, or both, which self wins? The ‘good news’ of the Course is that we needn’t worry, because we are not the ego or the associated contradictory, inconsistent self, no matter how much we identify with it:

‘The war against yourself is but the battle of two illusions, struggling to make them different from each other, in the belief the one that conquers will be true. There is no conflict between them and the truth. Nor are they different from each other. Both are not true’ (T-23.I.6:1-4).

A Masquerade

If we identify with the ego, we will also perceive others as living contradictions; people who both love and hate. We won’t see past the ego’s disguise and remember the Self we share, but will instead make their ego very real to us. ‘One day they say this, the next they say that’. Their inconsistency begs the question: can living contradictions be trusted?

The lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s song, ‘Brilliant Disguise’, illustrate how trust flies out the window when we experience self-doubt. When he looks at his partner, does he really see her — how she genuinely feels about him — or is it ‘just a brilliant disguise’? Later in the song, Springsteen reverses the scenario: his partner will ‘play the loving woman’, he’ll ‘play the faithful man’, but is it him that she sees, or just a brilliant disguise? He can’t trust her because he can’t trust himself. He’s aware of his inner contradictions.

Unfortunately, simply acknowledging our inner contradictions doesn’t spontaneously lead to something like Barbie’s cognitive dissonance miracle, or the state of aporia enjoyed by Socrates’ audience. We first need to accept that we chose inner conflict over peace. Then we can open our mind to the influence of the Holy Spirit, the link to recollecting our certain and consistent Self, releasing our dual self-concept in the process:

‘You will remember what you know when you have learned you cannot be in conflict. One illusion about yourself can battle with another, yet the war of two illusions is a state where nothing happens. There is no victor and there is no victory. And truth stands radiant, apart from conflict, untouched and quiet in the peace of God’ (T-23.I.7:7-10).

And as faith in our one Self increases, we experience the Course’s ‘Real World’ — a perception untainted by mistrust and fear — and Contradiction Land fades ‘into the nothingness from which it came’.

Image: The Swan No. 1, 1915, by Hilma af Klint, via Wikimedia Commons