What the Life of Roberto Clemente Can Teach Us About Courage, and the Debate Between Self-Confidence & Conceit

This is a section of a talk given at the Terrain Gallery of 

the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, New York 

On October 21, 1971, millions of Puerto Ricans, including my high school friends and me, watched on live TV as Roberto Clemente, the famed baseball player, descended the steps of a plane at San Juan International Airport.  Having just arrived home after leading the Pittsburg Pirates to their 1971 World Series win against the Baltimore Orioles, he was swept up by thousands of fans, shouting, “Clemente, Clemente, orgullo Boricua”--pride of Puerto Rico.

 

Clemente was one of the greats of baseball: the eleventh player to reach 3,000 career hits; he won four National League batting titles; he was voted the 1971 World Series MVP, and was also a noted humanitarian. As an athlete he had a self-confidence that was authentic. Yet, not knowing the difference between confidence and conceit, he couldn’t make sense of the way he went back and forth between being sure of himself, even boasting, and doubting himself terrifically.  His life, which I’ll discuss in part tonight, can help us understand what men most need to know about self-confidence and conceit.   

Men all over the world are trying to feel confident, feel that we can count on our abilities--at work, in love, social life; and we can also can brag, show off, insist, “I am right, no questions please!”  We can also, as I’ve done, use something we are proudly confident about, to be conceited and later feel ashamed. 

What men most need to know is what Aesthetic Realism shows: that there is a central fight in every human being, which affects every aspect of one’s life. There are two ways we can go after confidence, which are as different from each other as real money is from counterfeit; one is based on respect for the world and other people and one based on contempt.  

Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism, described conceit as the feeling, that “one’s self is one’s only friend and the rest of the world is inferior.” Though very common—-in fact some men may see it as strength-—conceit is always harmful; it has made for terrible things in history.  “True confidence,” he explained “is to be able to say, ‘I like the way I see the world.’” Honest like of the world is the only basis on which a man can be sure of himself. 

Self-confidence and Conceit in a Boy from the Caribbean

Like Roberto Clemente, I was born and raised in a small town in Puerto Rico in the midst of an extended family. As a boy, the times I felt truly confident were in school.  I loved science and felt it had a logic I could count on. 

In sixth grade, after learning about the properties of chemical elements and the movement of the tectonic plates, my classmates and I were assigned to build a model of an active volcano. After each failure we reexamined the facts and gained more confidence as we got more exact. At last, with the right proportion of baking soda and vinegar a red, foamy mixture rose over the top of the "volcano" and flowed down its slopes!! We were thrilled! This is evidence for what I learned from Aesthetic Realism: that the desire to know always makes for self-confidence and pride. 

          But too often, I preferred a false criteria that “I knew better”--period. I used the easy praise I received from my parents, grandparents, aunts and neighbors to bolster my conceited notion that I was superior. I relished being told that I was more polite than Alberto, better behaved than Peter and smarter than Andres. Father Elias even chose me to be the altar boy for the best attended mass on Sundays. I took all this as proof that I was destined for better things, and I wanted others to know it.  

          When I volunteered to bring a platter of jumbo shrimp, which I had seen “fancy” people eat in the movies, to a school fundraising event, I thought everyone would be impressed. It didn’t matter that I had never eaten jumbo shrimps, knew where to buy them or how to prepare them. My mother, Delia Figueroa, suggested other possibilities, including flan, which she makes deliciously, but I said: absolutamente no! 

My conceit bubble was burst when a classmate’s mother pointed out that the shrimps had not been deveined. I was horrified and angry, but instead of being a critic of myself, I blamed my mother for the fiasco. I was too busy feeling humiliated to even think about the bad effect my conceited insistence had on her. Eli Siegel explained what was going on in me when he wrote: 

Conceit can make one satisfied where one shouldn’t be, but also can make one dissatisfied where one shouldn’t be. Persons would rather be dissatisfied with the world than dissatisfied with what they take to be themselves. [TRO 767]

Being so easily satisfied with myself and dissatisfied with the world was the reason I blamed a teacher in college for a bad grade on a paper that I had not given much effort to, and why I cursed a traffic agent for giving me a ticket even though the meter had expired, justifying myself that, “I was seeing a patient, doing something important, not like what you are doing!” 

Increasingly I felt unsure of myself and often spent weekends alone in my bedroom feeling depressed. In an early Aesthetic Realism consultation I was asked, "Has your conceit made you lonely?"  Yes, it had!  Ellen Reiss, Chairman of Education, explained in the journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known:  

There is nothing more burdensome than the false weight of conceit: the concentration on ourselves, the being laden with ourselves, and not wanting to see that we are related to everything. [TRO 1694]

I learned that when we contemptuously elevate ourselves, we will punish ourselves by feeling low and weighed down. This is what I was doing, and my consultants described the basis of the self-confidence I was longing for. In order to like ourselves and really be happy, we have to be fair to all that is not ourselves. That will enable you to have the confidence and pride you are looking for.

   The Life & Achievements of Roberto Clemente: 

What They Tell Us about Confidence and Conceit

 

In a recent article, columnist John Steigerwald, wrote about Roberto Clemente, Pittsburg Pirate #21, 

He finished with 3,000 hits and a .317 batting average, but those are numbers. You had to see him run the bases….you had to see him throw to really appreciate his arm…It’s been 42 years since Clemente played his last game and I’ve still never seen anyone throw like that. Indescribable would be another good word.

Clemente played eighteen seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and was the first Latino inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. 

 Sportswriter Ron Silverman describes him as having “the flair of Willie Mays, the swagger of Mickey Mantle and … the confidence of Hank Aaron.”  His confidence on the field was based on great skill and a desire to know the facts of baseball: from the hardness and grains of woods used for bats, the speed and trajectory of a ball, what stance at bat would make for the best contact with the ball, and he wanted to learn from other players.

But Clemente, like men everywhere, could be arrogant, “Nobody” he said, “does anything better than me in baseball;” and a Milwaukee Journal headline called him conceited.

He was born on August 18, 1934 in Carolina, Puerto Rico, the youngest of seven children. Like many families, life was hard for the Clemente family.  His father Melchor, was a foreman overseeing sugar cane cutters, working from dawn until after nightfall. His mother Luisa was a laundress who also prepared meals for the sugar cane workers. At age eight, Roberto began working alongside his father in the fields. 

According to David Maraniss, author of “Clemente: ThePassion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero,” people who knew Roberto growing up described him as often “shy” but also competitive, “proud bordering on arrogant.” 

What he experienced early in life, I believe, had him feel that he was born in a world he had to fight and protect himself from. Meanwhile, like every child, he was hoping to find meaning in the world, and at age six he found that meaning in baseball. His mother, Luisa, said that he loved it so much that he would forget to eat.  

Why baseball is beautiful and why it has been loved by people all over the world, was explained by Eli Siegel in this principle of Aesthetic Realism,

All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

In The Right of, Ellen Reiss describes thrillingly that:

To see a player slide into third base rightly is to see humility and triumph at once. To see a double play is to see people as simultaneously individual and related. And as we watch a player run well, we are watching power and grace as the same. These are the world's opposites. To feel them together is to respect the world.

Through baseball Roberto Clemente had a respect for the aesthetic structure of the world--the opposites! I think that on the baseball field was the place where Roberto felt the world made most sense and where he felt most confident. 

In 1955, at age 21, he was recruited to play right field for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Arriving in Florida for spring training, Clemente, a dark skinned Latino, was not prepared for what he met--the racism and prejudice of segregation. Prejudice is a horrible form of conceit and is contempt: it is the ugly idea that what is like us is superior to what we see as different from ourselves. 

 While his teammates stayed in whites’ only hotels, Roberto stayed in the home of a black family. Writes historian Samuel O. Regalado: 

They’re training in the south...where...Clemente like other Latin American blacks are introduced to the overt racism they had heard about back in their homeland but now actually see in front of them, and it’s really a concept that is very difficult for them to grasp.

Certainly there was prejudice in Puerto Rico; in fact his first girlfriend, writes Maraniss, “stopped seeing him because her family thought his skin was too dark,” but in the United States he met institutionalized Jim Crow. 

Throughout his career he endured horrible discrimination, but it’s important to ask: how did he use it?  Ellen Reiss describes the two choices we have when we feel hurt: 

We will either use it to want to know; or we will use it to justify and give free rein  to a desire present in us all the time — the desire for  contempt. [TRO 1439]

Roberto Clemente felt misunderstood and hurt by the team owners, the press, and even other players. He was disparaged for the color of his skin and his Spanish accent. But he didn’t know that the same contempt that causes racism, was also the source of his own conceit. According to reporter Phil Musick,

 

He was vain, occasionally arrogant, often intolerant, unforgiving, and there were moments when I thought for sure he’d cornered the market on self-pity. Mostly, he acted as if the world had just declared all-out war on [him].

The way he felt that he was his “only friend and the rest of the world [was] inferior,” weakened him. One of the ways was that he suffered from chronic insomnia. Insomnia, I have learned, is an ethical matter; it’s one of the ways we can unknowingly punish ourselves for having contempt. “The reason” explained Eli Siegel, “within people for their not sleeping...is: each night people are trying to find shelter in themselves from an unliked though participated in world.”

In a landmark talk, “The Beauty of Baseball Shows How We Want to Be,” presented at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, by Aesthetic Realism consultant and former professional baseball player, Ernest DeFilippis, he described what baseball players, including Clemente, and fans have not known: that what a player does on the field, 

is a guide to what he want[s] to do in the rest of his life. To respect ourselves, feel strong and kind, we need to be energetically engaged with reality, interested in things, ready to see and meet squarely, fairly, the “curves and fastballs,” the complexities of life.

          I believe a turning point in Roberto Clemente’s life that had him be more engaged with the complexities of life, is described by historian Rob Ruck:

Roberto had a political and social awakening. He wanted to be treated like other human beings.  He saw he had rights, he had a platform for speaking about what was happening to Latino players.

           Clemente came to feel that he could use his fame in behalf of justice to people. He began to study the news of what was happening in the South. He followed Rosa Park’s civil disobedience and the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, and became a great admirer of Martin Luther King Jr. Roberto’s wife, Vera Zabala, encouraged him, and said in a family biography, that:

Roberto would talk a lot about how being a black Latino coming into baseball meant you had two strikes against you. He wanted the Latino players to get their fair share of money...and respect.

He became a union leader in the Major League Baseball Players Association, defending players’ rights for better working conditions and benefits. 

He convinced other players to support a lawsuit against major league baseball's "reserve clause," which essentially bound a player to his team for life, making players pieces of property to be bought and sold irrespective of their wishes. He convinced his teammates to stand with him in protest in an effort to postpone the Pirates 1968 opening game in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral, and succeeded.

And he wanted to create sport cities for underprivileged children in Puerto Rico and other places. As his life went on, Clemente was impelled by a desire for justice not conceit. He said, “If you have a chance to make life better for others and fail to do so, you are wasting your time on this earth.” 

When an earthquake devastated Managua Nicaragua on December 23, 1972, Clemente worked day and night leading relief efforts in Puerto Rico.  When he learned that the aid sent was being stolen by the corrupt Somoza government, he insisted on going himself. On the night of December 31, his plane carrying supplies to Nicaragua crashed, killing him and everyone on board. In 1973, he received posthu­mously the Presidential Citizen Medal which reads in part: 

[Roberto Clemente] stands with the handful of men whose brilliance has transformed the game of baseball…More than that, his selfless dedication to helping those with two strikes against them in life has blessed thousands and set an example for millions. 

What Mistakes Do Men and Women Make About Coldness and Warmth?

Reprinted from the South Carolina Black News

In the summer of 1967, when I was ten, I heard a man speaking passionately to a large crowd about his plans to bring needed jobs to our town and improve living conditions. As hundreds of people cheered, I was impressed, but what I showed was coldness and indifference as I sulkily complained to my mother, "When are we going home? I’m tired of standing."

This man was Jaime Torres Rodríguez, my father, who was running for mayor of Ciales, Puerto Rico. He hoped to have a good effect on people’s lives. But I thought his concern for the welfare of men and women whom I didn’t even know, was against me. And I made the mistake — which I was to repeat for years — of being more interested in what was coming to me than warmly, respectfully being for what others deserved.

The way I shuttled from warmth to coldness caused me and others confusion and pain. Sometimes I would act as though a person I’d just met was destined to be the best friend I’d ever had. At other times I would avoid someone on the street whom I actually knew quite well. Though outwardly I was affable and easygoing, inwardly I would often seethe with anger. By the age of 15, when my grandfather died, I seemed to feel nothing. At his funeral I cried, not because I felt too much but because I felt too little. "How could I be so cold?" I wondered.

I’m more grateful than I can say that Aesthetic Realism brought kind logic, sanity, to this subject. I learned that the debate we have between the opposites of warmth and coldness is an aspect of a bigger debate raging in everyone about how to see the world: should we see it as something we hope to like and find meaning in, or as something to be aloof from and have as little to do with as possible? 

Coldness, quite clearly," Eli Siegel writes, is allied to contempt; and...contempt for the world is seen by man as a safeguard of himself .... Any time we can give a cold shoulder to something, our self-stock rises.

Mr. Siegel’s understanding of contempt is one of the most important discoveries in history. Without this knowledge, people cannot see that something we cherish warmly in ourselves is really contempt, the thing that most hurt us.

Warmth, Coldness, & the Family

As the firstborn and first grandson, I was generally the center of attention in my family. Very early, I came to feel that the praise my mother and other relatives lavished on me was the warmest thing in the world. I used it to be self-centered and superior, to feel I should be waited on and adored.

A person to whom I gave a cold shoulder for a long time was my father. He had begun working at age 13, during the depression, and years later was able to buy his own drugstore, of which he was rightly proud. In public, my father was outgoing and energetic, but at home he often seemed tired and didn’t want to talk. The way he acted so friendly and warm to customers, then in private would often complain about them, confused me. My father too had a fight between warmth and coldness; but instead of trying to understand and see that he was pained by it — which would have been true warmth — I coldly used it to feel he was insincere and to have contempt for him.

Meanwhile, what I held most against my father was that he had so many interests that weren’t me, and also that he was often critical of me for being selfish. I was bent on punishing him, and when he tried to show me affection, I would recoil. If he made a joke and everyone laughed, I was solemn, even grim. And I mocked his desire to hold public office, feeling it was a big interference with our Sunday outings.

What Questions!

Years later in an Aesthetic Realism consultation, when I said bitterly that my father was more interested in his business than in me, my consultants asked: "Where do you think he felt more respected, at work or at home?" "What a question!" I said, remembering the many times I was on the couch watching TV and would hear my father arrive from work at 9 PM. I would fake being asleep so that I wouldn’t have to greet him.

When my consultants asked me what he had done to me to deserve that coldness, I answered defensively, "He didn’t want to know me."

Consultants: It is sad not to be understood, but what have you done to be understood?

Jaime Torres: I don’t think much.

Consultants: What had I done to understand him?

This surprised me very much. And at the age of 27 I began consciously to change my desire to look for hurts to a desire to know. Because of what I’ve learned I have a new respect and care for my parents and sister, a feeling that is light years away from that summer of 1967. We began to have conversations as never before, and a new warmth came to be. Then my parents too began to study Aesthetic Realism, in phone consultations from Puerto Rico! On their 42nd anniversary, they wrote a letter, published in newspapers in Puerto Rico and New York, in which they said:

[We] are more alive than ever because of what we have learned from Aesthetic Realism .... We learned to understand and respect each other more, and to see the world around us with more value. Instead of routine, we now have more communication. We have seen how adoring our children and seeing them as better than others is contempt, and is one of the reasons why children don’t respect their parents. We believe that if families all over the world studied this education, the social problems that at this time are destroying human beings and the family would greatly change.

Aesthetic Realism is the best, warmest friend of the family, and every person in this world deserves to know it.

The Mistake about Love

A large field for mistakes about warmth and coldness is love. In TRO 1276, Ellen Reiss asks this question: "Are you troubled by the way you can feel cold to someone close to you, someone you thought you felt so warm towards?" And she explains: "We can also feel cold towards someone we care for because there is that in us which wants to love only ourselves."

Soon after I began seeing Donita Ellison, who is a high school teacher of art, I found myself having feelings about her that were big and new: I was swept! But I also made a mistake that without Aesthetic Realism I would never have been able to understand and change. For several months Donita and I spoke almost every day, and I was so glad to see her, couldn’t wait until I did. Yet I found myself one day feeling we were too different and therefore not compatible.

When I spoke about this in an Aesthetic Realism consultation, my consultants asked: "Is Donita Ellison a threat to your big love affair — the one you’ve had with yourself?" This was so true!

I remember the first time I invited Donita to visit my apartment in Westchester. After dinner at a restaurant and an exciting conversation through which we both had more feeling, on the way to my home I began to think, "This is getting too deep and it is out of my control." When we were in the apartment for a few minutes, I told Donita, "It’s going to rain and you have to drive back to Manhattan. Here is an umbrella. Drive carefully." As she left I felt relieved, but also so ashamed and cold. And when Donita called me after arriving home safely and was critical — I was very grateful to hear her voice!

My consultants explained: "There are two things in reality: you and the world. If you don’t want to be truly affected by the world, that leaves only you .... Does Donita Ellison have the right to affect you in a big way? Is it reality you are being affected by through her?"

Jaime Torres: Yes. 

Consultants: Is it wholly in your control?

Jaime Torres:  No, it’s not. 

Consultants: Congratulations!

By the end of 1993, I knew I wanted to marry Donita; and in my mind I pictured a proposal, an engagement, the ceremony and honeymoon, and living happily ever after. I had a plan to surprise Donita by announcing our engagement — which she knew nothing about — at a party with my parents present. Somehow, though, I didn’t feel at ease with my plan, and when I told my consultants about it they asked: "As you thought about this, how did you see Ms. Ellison? Is she just part of the decoration, or do you see her as a real person? In your thought, who were all the people at the party looking at?"

Jaime Torres: Me.

Consultants: What happened to Donita Ellison?

Jaime Torres: I guess she was also looking at me.

And they asked whether I saw how something that might begin well could be used on behalf of a selfish purpose.

I certainly did. And I saw that the only way I would feel I deserved to have Donita care for and trust me was to be able to say sincerely: I want to use you to like the world, and I want to do everything I can to have you like the world and to meet what you are truly hoping for.

I’m so happy and honored that Donita is now my wife, and that our wonderful Aesthetic Realism education continues.

Overeating and Feeling Empty--Is There a Relation?

 

This column was part of a talk presented at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation.

Years ago if I had been asked, I would have said I wanted big emotions and experiences that would have my life be full; but I didn’t see that there was something in me, as there is in every person, working against that. Aesthetic Realism explains the cause of emptiness — and how it can end. 

Eli Siegel, the philosopher and founder of this education, showed that at every moment of our lives we are making a choice between liking the world — seeing its meaning — or getting rid of the world and its complexities by having contempt. In his great 1949 lecture Mind and Emptiness, he said: “The desire to do away with things makes for a tremendous emptiness .... [Contempt] is a great discarder. It is a great incinerator of the useful.” 

I felt most people were insincere and the world was too complicated, always making demands on me; I wanted to be unbothered and not let things affect me too much. By age 27 I had a degree in podiatric medicine, and a position in a large hospital, but inside I felt a pervasive emptiness that continued even in the midst of an active social life. My life shows that no matter how much praise we get, and whatever our achievements, if our purpose is not to like the world and see meaning in things, there will be emptiness. The word like is important, because, I learned, if we want to feel superior we won’t be able to see how we are like other people and things, related to the world outside us. Seeing that relation in more and more ways, we can never feel empty.

Welcoming Meaning or Emptiness 

Growing up in Ciales, Puerto Rico, I saw meaning in the study of science, and would spend hours with my chemistry set, amazed by how different compounds came together to form a new one. But I also felt cursed by fate: I thought I lived in the most boring place on the planet, was born to the wrong family, and was destined to be overweight and miserable. I didn’t ask: Is my feeling of emptiness reality’s fault, or does it come because of how I see? 

The truth was that I grew up on a lush mountainside overlooking a green valley where two rivers met; and my parents were useful in our community and worked hard to provide a good education and comfortable life for me and my sister. 

I was praised by members of my family and came to feel I was a special child, unequaled in charm and sensitivity. My grandmother Ana treated me like a prince and would not let me play outside for fear I’d get hurt. Another child would have rebelled, but I used this as proof that I was too valuable to be involved in an unfriendly world. In my quiet way I acted like a tyrant: I said “Water” and a glass came quickly. I said, “I don’t like that,” and another lunch was prepared. I came to see, through my study of Aesthetic Realism, that it was this desire to be served and superior that made me feel I didn’t need to value and see meaning in anything. 

As I grew older, though I seemed very amiable, I was a snob. What I valued most was being liked by the “right” people and envied by everyone else. I excluded more and more, and as time went on, felt painfully bored, empty, and distant from people. Thank God I met Aesthetic Realism and the kind, exact logic that changed my life! In an early consultation, as I spoke about being an affable guy who just couldn’t “connect” with people, I was asked: “Do you like people?” 

Jaime Torres:      People say that I’m nice.

Consultants:        If those people were able to see what’s in your mind, do you think they would like it?

Jaime Torres:      Oh, no!

Consultants:        Do you know the difference between acting nice and being kind?

Jaime Torres:      Wow, I don’t think I do! 

I had thought I was keen in being able to spot flaws in others. I came to see I had a hope to find flaws — real or imagined — and this hope made me unable to have true feeling for people. 

Through consultations I began to see with excitement the meaning of things I had dismissed. I saw that the feelings of people were interesting, important, and added to my life. I never felt empty again! I respect Eli Siegel for his magnificent understanding of mind and the world.

Overeating and Emptiness 

Aesthetic Realism shows that the taking in of food represents an organic like of reality, that eating is a tribute to how much we need the world to be strong. It can also be used as a means of having revenge on a world we see as unfriendly. In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known  philosopher Eli Siegel describes a mistake people have made: 

A man very often says, he can never get pleasure from people--he can only get pleasure from food. He may go out in company, but there is a big fear. He feels he doesn't have things his way. But with food...he has it entirely his way. So there is a tendency to give ourselves more to food than to feeling, and in this way we lessen our lives...If there is something pleasant like eating, and people can feel that they are managing things, they will take that. So they will have a sensation from the plate and not from the heart.

  

Growing up, when I felt things got complicated — which was often — I’d get annoyed, and a quick means to composure was in the refrigerator. I’d have a swift victory over a pound cake, but afterward feel ashamed and empty. This terrible cycle would be repeated again and again. By the age of 15, I weighed close to 250 pounds. I’d take pills, lose weight, and gain it back.  

When I went away to college I was able to lose weight; but it wasn’t until I met Aesthetic Realism and began to learn that my deepest desire is to like the world, not look down on it, that I began to eat more respectfully. As I’ve seen meaning in, for example, how a pastry is made, the history of flour, how my morning coffee began with the labor of a man in Colombia, I have felt a sense of fulness that is bigger than the victory of devouring food. The only thing that will bring sanity to the subject of overeating, which torments so many people, is the learning from Aesthetic Realism about the fight in all of us between respect and contempt for the world. 

Several years after Donita Ellison and I married, I found myself waking after midnight, impelled to go to the kitchen for a snack. When I mentioned this in an Aesthetic Realism class, Chair of Education Ellen Reiss asked me: “Early morning dining — what do you think it comes from?” I said, “Wanting to please myself.” And she asked: “Do you think at night you feel you have yourself to yourself? Is there that in you which would like to be completely alone? In being married, you have the question of how you can be joined with someone and alone .... Ms. Ellison’s existence is a nag to you — she is dear to you, but why does she have to be around so much?” That was what I felt! Then Ms. Reiss showed me that the solution is in aesthetics. She said if a photographer, 

were going to photograph this glass of water in a certain light, he would need the glass and the light — but feel he is taking care of himself in needing them. No one could do anything in the art field without feeling that the thing liked also stands for oneself. Does Ms. Ellison — the stranger — stand for you? Does Jaime Torres like himself more through a conversation with Donita Ellison than through roaming around the house alone at night?” I am happy to say that after this discussion, my impulsion for nocturnal dining stopped. 

It is a wonderful thing that Donita, a woman from the Midwest, who has written important articles on behalf of justice for farmers, does stand for me. As we talk about what we are learning, about world events, about our thoughts, I feel Donita wants to know me, and I love her! A lifetime is not enough to express what it means to me to have learned from Aesthetic Realism that to be affected by the world is my greatest need and largest freedom.

A mistake I made about love, and what I learned!

This column was part of the seminar "What Mistakes Do Men and Women Make about Coldness and Warmth?" at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, New York City.

A large field for mistakes about warmth and coldness is love. In the journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #1276, Editor and Chair of Education, Ellen Reiss asks this question: "Are you troubled by the way you can feel cold to someone close to you, someone you thought you felt so warm towards?" And she explains: "We can also feel cold towards someone we care for because there is that in us which wants to love only ourselves."

  Soon after I began seeing Donita Ellison, who was a high school teacher of art, I found myself having feelings about her that were big and new: I was swept! But I also made a mistake that without Aesthetic Realism I would never have been able to understand and change.

For several months Donita and I spoke almost every day, and I was so glad to see her, couldn’t wait until I did. Yet I found myself one day feeling we were too different and therefore not compatible.

When I spoke about this in an Aesthetic Realism consultation, my consultants asked: "Is Donita Ellison a threat to your big love affair — the one you’ve had with yourself?"  This was so true!

I remembered the first time I invited Donita to visit my apartment in Westchester. After dinner at a restaurant and an exciting conversation through which we both had more feeling, on the way to my home I began to think, "This is getting too deep and it is out of my control."

When we were in the apartment a few minutes, I told Donita, "It’s going to rain and you have to drive back to Manhattan. Here is an umbrella. Drive carefully." As she left I felt relieved, but also so ashamed and cold. And when Donita called me after arriving home safely and was critical — I was very grateful to hear her voice!

My consultants explained: "There are two things in reality: you and the world. If you don’t want to be truly affected by the world, that leaves only you .... Does Donita Ellison have the right to affect you in a big way? Is it reality you are being affected by through her?"

Jaime Torres. Yes.
Consultants. Is it wholly in your control?
Jaime Torres. No, it’s not.
Consultants. Congratulations!

Consultants. Is it wholly in your control?

Jaime Torres. No, it’s not.

Consultants. Congratulations!

By the end of 1993 I knew I wanted to marry Donita; and in my mind I pictured a proposal, an engagement, the ceremony and honeymoon, and living happily ever after. I had a plan to surprise Donita by announcing our engagement — which she knew nothing about — at a party with my parents present.

Somehow, though, I didn’t feel at ease with my plan, and when I told my consultants about it they asked: "As you thought about this, how did you see Ms. Ellison? Is she just part of the decoration, or do you see her as a real person? In your thought, who were all the people at the party looking at?"

Jaime Torres. Me.
Consultants. What happened to Donita Ellison?
Jaime Torres. I guess she was also looking at me.

Consultants. What happened to Donita Ellison?

Jaime Torres. I guess she was also looking at me.

And they asked whether I saw how something that might begin well could be used in behalf of a selfish purpose.

I certainly did. And I saw that the only way I would feel I deserved to have Donita care for and trust me was to be able to say sincerely: I want to use you to like the world, and I want to do everything I can to have you like the world and to meet what you are truly hoping for.

I’m so happy and honored that Donita is now my wife, and that our wonderful Aesthetic Realism education continues.

To learn more about how Aesthetic Realism sees love and marriage you can read Barbara Allen's articles at: http://www.barbaraallen.org/Marriage.htm

Can we make sense of our self-confidence and self-doubt? Yes!

This was part of a seminar presented at 

the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City

From a young age, I worked diligently at presenting myself as confident, using mainly the comments and praise by my family and teachers about how mature I was for my age, how smart, and later how I could really take control and get things done. But regardless of what I showed, I often felt uneasy, and as time went on, I would go from, "I'm certain, this is the right way to go" to an hour later feeling "what was I thinking when I said that?"

In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known  Eli Siegel, founder of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, wrote:

The matter of sureness and unsureness is as great a plague as any in the human mind, because people usually have to act sure in order to forget they are unsure. Every time we are unsure and have to act sure, we feel somewhat ashamed.

These sentences describe the turmoil I was in. I told myself that being unsure--and especially showing it--was a weakness, a humiliation; and the best solution was to ride over it, come to a quick decision and act. But this was not true confidence: it was arrogance. In my conceit I would thoughtlessly tell people what to do without considering their ideas or feelings, and the result was I felt even more unsure.

Then in 1985 I learned about and began to study Aesthetic Realism, and met what I had been looking for. Confidence, I learned--whether about love, a job, or our general capabilities--has a criterion: we will be confident in proportion to how fair we are to people and the world itself. And central to be being fair is the desire to know, which includes the desire to question ourselves with pleasure and pride. Writes Ellen Reiss, Chair of Education and editor of The Right of:

One can doubt oneself falsely, of course. But there is an underlying self-doubt which... comes from something beautiful in us. And we should try to know it as well as we can, because it is the means to our true sureness. The underlying doubt... unarticulated yet poking and sometimes gnawing and thrusting within us... is this: Am I liking the world more through this thing I'm in the midst of--or am I using it to dislike the world?

In this talk, I'll speak about what I've learned and also on some aspects of the life of the 18th century physician, Edward Jenner, whose care for people and great desire to know, resulted in his discovery of the vaccine for smallpox.

How We See People Determines Whether 

Our Confidence Is True or False

I grew up in Ciales, a small town in the mountains of Puerto Rico, in the midst of an extended family that included my parents, a sister, grandparents, several aunts, uncles, and cousins. Being the first grandson, I got a lot of praise that made me feel important; and I felt powerful when adults would compete for my attention. If my aunt Carmen said “How is my boy? Come and visit me this weekend,” I would hear my aunt Norma from the other room “Nonsense, he is coming to my house first!” I didn’t know it then, but I was developing a false and hurtful sense of myself, based on the erroneous conclusion that other people’s happiness was assured by my presence. All I had to do was show up. If people outside of my family didn't treat me this way, they were mean and cold. It never occurred to me that I had an obligation to know people or be interested in their lives.

In my third Aesthetic Realism consultation, I began to learn that we use early experiences to come to a general opinion of the world. My consultants asked:

Consultants Do you think you know your mother?

Jaime Torres Yes, like the palm of my hand.

Consultants So we come to our first disagreement. We’ll ask you this: What was her favorite subject when she was in school?

Jaime Torres I don't know.

Consultants What did she want to be when she grew up? Who were some of her friends in school?

Jaime Torres I don't know.

Consultants What is her favorite book?

I had no clue!  My consultants continued:

Consultants All right, let's take something more recent--how did your parents meet?

When I answered yet again, “I don’t know,” they asked:

Consultants Dr. Torres, do you think your mother had a life before you were born; or do you think she was born in 1957 also, just to serve you?

This consultation was the beginning of useful self-doubt. I realized that for the most part I wasn’t interested in who people were; I saw them primarily in relation to myself. That night, I called my parents in Puerto Rico and told them what I was learning in consultations, and they were very happy. As I began to learn about the people who gave me life, Delia Figueroa and Jaime Torres, I felt this is how I want to see everyone! Soon after, I’m glad to say, my parents began to study Aesthetic Realism themselves in phone consultations from Puerto Rico and their lives flourished.

Aesthetic Realism showed me--and I love this logic--that when we go after a false confidence through contempt, we punish ourselves by feeling timid, inferior, and unsure. Eli Siegel gives this explanation: 

The truth that people want to evade most is that they can be their own means of hurting themselves through the way they see what is not themselves. The tendency to make the outside world less as a means of establishing oneself is...most appealing to us; easier than establishing a self through the accuracy and fulness with which we know things.

Whereas I once observed people with a running commentary in my mind like, "How stupid; I could have done that better," "Where did he get that shirt?" "She is always talking too much,” I began to ask myself what could I learn from that person? What did he hope for? Are her feelings as deep as mine? And as I wanted to know people deeply, I found I liked myself more and experienced with relief and pleasure a growing feeling of true sureness.

Love, Confidence, and the Hidalgo

When I met Donita Ellison, like many men, I had two different notions of confidence as to love: one based on feeling the world and people added to me; and the other based on thinking I needed only myself. Donita, originally from Springfield Missouri, is a high school art teacher using the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method. I was affected by her excitement about teaching and the kind way she spoke about her students. She is also very pretty, thoughtful and self critical, which I respected; and she encouraged me to express my thoughts and feelings. And Donita was a critic of me--of the way I expected to be treated like a prince. I was swept by her--finding myself wanting to be with her every day and talk to her. Sometimes I couldn’t go to sleep at night thinking about her, but then I'd tell myself “We’re not all that compatible.” In a consultation when I spoke about Donita I mentioned how unsure I was, even as I talked about how much I cared for her. My consultants said:

It’s clear Ms. Ellison is having a good effect on you. Is she a threat to your big love affair?” “What do you mean?” I said indignantly, “I'm not seeing anyone else!” “The love affair you’ve had with yourself!” they said. 

This was true, and I realized that in caring for Donita, I was more the person I wanted to be and more confident. Through her, the world looked better to me and I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. In 1994 we were married.

I saw myself as a modern man--we shared household chores, I helped cooking, I even like doing dishes! But behind all this magnanimity, there still persisted a way of seeing as backward as Fred Flintstone’s. I felt: We are married, things are settled, no questions please, you should be happy with this enlightened husband! However, along with my complacency, there was unsureness and agitation. And Donita was critical of the way I took her for granted. When I described this situation in a class, Ellen Reiss enabled me to see the mistake I was making. She spoke about a noted character in Spanish literature--the hidalgo, which literately translated to English means "the son of somebody" and carries with it a feeling of royalty. She asked:

Ellen Reiss Do you think you have the hidalgo feeling?

Jaime Torres I think I do.

Ellen Reiss Is Ms. Ellison the "daughter of nobody"? Have you felt in some way that you have done her a great favor in being in her company at all?

Jaime Torres I think I have.

And she continued:

Ellen Reiss Does contempt hurt one?

Jaime Torres Yes, it makes me dislike myself.

Ellen Reiss You can feel you are an hidalgo but you can have various unsurenesses.

And these unsurenesses I was right to have. Learning how to oppose my conceit and to see the true value in my wife and other people has given me more honest confidence. And Donita and I have a love and deep friendship that grows every year.

A Man Shows Honest Self-Doubt Makes for True Confidence

I speak now about a man I admire very much: Edward Jenner, who discovered the vaccine against smallpox--one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of medicine. His life is evidence for the necessity of honest self-doubt in order to get to a confidence that is true.

Edward Jenner, born May 17, 1749, was a country doctor in Berkeley, England. At that time, in 18th century Europe, the smallpox virus routinely killed millions of people, and the treatment itself was often fatal. He had heard from the farmers and country folk, as well as his patients, that milkmaids who contracted a mild disease called cowpox were never infected with smallpox, and after much study he came to the following theory: that giving people the milder disease might protect them from the deadlier one. And if this premise were true, millions of lives could be saved.

Dr. Jenner's desire to know was great, and I have seen that implicit in this desire was an honest self-doubt. A true scientist never takes the first thing he hears as ultimate truth; he asks himself over and over--Is what I'm seeing accurate? What more do I need to see? What have I missed? These honest questions impelled Edward Jenner to rigorous investigation. For two years he carefully studied cattle infections to be able to differentiate cowpox from similar ones. He talked to milkmaids who seemed to be immune from smallpox and recorded their medical histories. Finally, with excitement and high hopes, he presented his preliminary findings to the local county medical society on August 10, 1786. They rejected the report immediately, calling it nonsense, "old wives tales." Biographer I. E. Levine writes,

Jenner was stunned. True, he had expected the report to receive some criticism... but he had not anticipated such violent onslaught...He had hoped to enlist the help of his colleagues to test his theory.

For a long time afterward he doubted himself and thought of quitting, but his wife, Katherine Kingscote, encouraged him tremendously. Jenner continued his methodical research and increasingly came to feel his hypothesis was true. In 1796, his theory was put to the test when a mother, very worried about her frail eight-year-old son contracting smallpox, begged Jenner to inoculate him with cowpox virus. He did, and six weeks later the boy was reinoculated with smallpox virus—and it worked, he was not infected! Jenner called this procedure vaccination (from the Latin word 'vacca' for cow). And as he repeated it again and again on many people, no one became infected with smallpox! He wrote to a friend saying,

The joy I feel at the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities is so excessive that I sometimes find myself in some kind of reverie. 

In 1798 Jenner published his research in a pamphlet and he thought that finally the medical authorities in London would accept his findings. But that was not to be for a long time. There were grotesque cartoons depicting vaccinated people growing horns or giving birth to calves, and members of the powerful Royal Medical Society had the arrogant attitude, described by Levine, of "Who is this presumptuous country surgeon who is convinced he has found the answer to a puzzle that has eluded the best medical minds for decades?" 

1802 caricature of Jenner vaccinating patients who feared it would make them sprout cowlike appendages.

Eli Siegel described this state of mind--in any century--when he wrote:

Some of the best-known scientists acclaimed as scientists didn’t have [the] desire [to know]...There was another desire that was very strong too...The desire for prestige, the desire for importance, is the foulest and most effective enemy of truth both in the sciences and non-sciences.

Because medical persons in established positions were so intent on protecting their importance and prestige they kept this life-saving vaccine from people for years and tens of thousands died.

In her commentary to an issue of The Right of, Ellen Reiss wrote that every person should want to understand this state of mind because:

It is the most hurtful thing in the world. It is: I should be able to have contempt for anything, be superior in some way to anything; and if anything interferes, it should be crushed.

The onslaught on Jenner helps me understand more and place the resentment that Eli Siegel endured throughout his life, in even more encompassing fields. His knowledge was vast and scientific, based on principles that have been tested and found true. He defined and explained finally things that had been pondered for centuries: what beauty is, the purpose of life, the cause of insanity, depression, the cause of war, the aesthetic structure of the world and ourselves, to mention a few of his seminal breakthroughs. And he was a poet. His steady desire to know the world and to question himself made him beautifully confident. What he saw made for tremendous respect. The other side of this respect, the noted poet William Carlos Williams described this way:

The extreme resentment that a fixed, sclerotic mind feels confronting this new. It shows itself by the violent opposition Siegel received from the "authorities" whom I shall not dignify by naming.

Meanwhile, over 200 years ago, certain "fixed sclerotic minds" in England were meeting a groundswell of opposition from ordinary English citizens. Vaccinations went on because parents demanded them and because word had spread of how, as a result of them, there was no smallpox around Berkley! So the doctors in London were forced to learn the procedure, but because of their careless preparation difficulties continued.

Dr. William Woodville, the head of London Smallpox Hospital, seen as the foremost expert of the disease, published an article charging that after using Jenner's procedure several patients died. Jenner's conviction, come to through honest self-doubt, had given him true confidence, the real thing, so much so, he was impelled to return to London and confront Woodville. Based on accounts and journal entries Levine recreates this dialogue.

Jenner: "Since you attribute [some deaths] to vaccination, I'd like to examine your records...and if you refuse, I'll be forced to announce that you are unwilling to help me obtain the true facts." Woodville turned pale. He began to sputter. "You are threatening me sir! It’s abominable!" "This is not an issue of personalities at all," Jenner retorted coolly, "The future...is what concerns me."

Upon examinations of records and the treatment rooms, it was clear that cowpox samples had been tainted with smallpox--the real cause of those deaths. Jenner asked:

Did you and your assistants wash your lancets between inoculating certain patients with smallpox and others with cowpox matter?" "We merely wipe them with a cloth. That is how it is done everywhere, as you know," he answered.

[This is not the right procedure] Did you read my pamphlet before administering the vaccine?" Jenner persisted.

Woodville adopted a defensive tone. "No, I did not. Nor was it necessary that I do. I have devoted my entire professional career to the study of smallpox, there is no one more experienced than me."

Writes Levine: 

Here was a distinguished surgeon who had undertaken a new medical technique without even taking the trouble to learn the basic clinical facts about it. The arrogance of the man was almost beyond belief.

This arrogance is so common in the medical profession, and I once had it. I have seen that this desire to be superior is contempt, and against the beginning, kind purpose in medicine. Every doctor needs to learn from Aesthetic Realism about this as much as he or she needs to learn physiology or anatomy.

Woodville, to his credit, admitted his mistake in front of Parliament, and changed what had been a smallpox hospital to a vaccine center. Vaccination was then accepted, and mortality fell dramatically. Jenner was now praised and sought by royalty and the same people who had earlier rejected him. And for a short time it seems he succumbed to flattery. He bought a house in London, spent a lot of money and time with high society, and got more in debt. His wife was a kind critic when she showed him that "The will of God [was not for him to] drive round London in his [fancy] coach serving those who were well able to command other service," but to care for the people who needed him most. He was grateful to her for opening his eyes; they moved back to Berkeley where he was glad to become a country doctor again.

Vaccination quickly spread through Europe and the Americas, and although Jenner received worldwide recognition and many honors, he made no attempt to enrich himself and actually devoted much of his time vaccinating people for free--sometimes up to 300 a day. He died on January 26, 1823. In 1980, as a result of Jenner's discovery, the World Health Organization officially declared "the world and its peoples" free from endemic smallpox.

Bronze in Kensington Gardens, London

Through Aesthetic Realism we can understand the fight in us between respect and contempt, and how to question ourselves. Because of this knowledge, I embarked on a new discovery: to know people from the inside, and to see that their feelings are as real as my own; and I learned to see meaning in things I had dismissed for a long time. I have seen the pride there is in being able to question my purpose with the people I meet, the patients I treat as a podiatrist and the woman I love, Donita; and because of it, I feel increasingly confident. Every man in this world deserves this education.

Article of interest:

Covid vaccine resistance is nothing new. Anti-vaxxers are as old as vaxxing itself

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/covid-vaccine-resistance-nothing-new-anti-vaxxers-are-old-vaxxing-ncna1284828