George Costanza, paradoxical intention, crazy wisdom and laughter

I have wasted countless hours of my life watching television, and the idea that television is “an opium of the masses” is probably not far from the truth. That being said, I am not a snob and I get hooked on shows like anyone else. Of all the shows I’ve ever watched, Seinfeld was really the one that got me through some dark hours in my life, and the show is still 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 is the one in which 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 correct. When George implements this idea in his life, wonderful things suddenly start to happen to him. What George had unknowingly stumbled upon was a concept known as Paradoxical Intent.

The term Paradoxical Intent 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 intention, in short, “suggesting to the patient, with an appropriate expression of humor, that he does or is exposed to what he fears.” An example would be telling someone who is still struggling with diet that you want them to eat as much as they can for the next week. This type of advice often disturbs a person’s cognitions, and the sheer absurdity of the suggestions often helps people better understand their original self-defeating ways of thinking.

Related to the concept of Paradoxical Intent 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 isolated person might act “as if” his life was full of joy and laughter for a couple of weeks to see if this creates any changes in his life during this time, and you know what? Usually it always does !! This is the power of emotional choice. This was especially true in the life of Victor Frankl, who, during his darkest days in a concentration camp, was able to think of love for his wife and experience happiness, even as the threat of continued torture and imminent death loomed over him. his head. I try to tell myself that if a man can choose happiness under those circumstances, then I certainly can when some little thing in life doesn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. This is the power of mindfulness and taking stock, often, of how well we often have things.

On the subject of mindfulness and Eastern religion, it is also interesting to consider an idea from Tibetan Buddhism called “mad wisdom” or yeshe chölwa, which literally translates to mad wisdom. This was popularized by the erratic but brilliant Tibetan philosopher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who, although thought to be a very similar deity to the Dalia Lama in his native Tibet, moved to America and opened several centers of spiritual enlightenment with the likes of Allen Ginsburg. and William Burroughs as instructors.

The purveyors of mad wisdom like Trungpa were called Siddhas who “expressed the unconditional freedom of enlightenment through divinely inspired nonsense … greatly preferring to celebrate the inherent freedom and sacredness of the authentic self, rather than clinging to forms. external religious and moral systems “. Playful eccentricity, these mischievous spiritual con artists served to free others from illusion, social inhibitions, deceptive morality, complacency; in short, all varieties of mind-forged wives. “

These spiritual fools had what was called a “cosmic sense of humor” that saw through the illusions of society’s conventions toward a greater interconnectedness of being. Although this is certainly getting into the area of ​​metaphysics, these teachers in a nutshell, 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 do our attachments lead to suffering? Absolutely. We often cling to our own ideas and the seriousness of our little private universes, when in the larger scheme the things that concern us are actually quite silly. We waste much of our precious time here on earth worrying about things that never come to fruition. In the meantime, we continue to blast through space with a little blue ball that doesn’t care about our unpaid electric bills, uncut grass, and unfair bosses. The Siddhas understood this absurdity, and in their world these foolish fools were considered the wisest of sages. Perhaps there is a lesson here about not taking ourselves too seriously, as it is often the fools and fools who may ultimately be the wisest.

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