Why, Despite Praise and Approval, Do People Still Feel Empty?

—from an Aesthetic Realism seminar

As 2006 begins, people everywhere are hoping for a fresh start, a chance to be a better person, particularly after a holiday season which leaves many feeling depressed and let-down. I am so happy to tell you of the knowledge that can meet your hopes as it has mine: Aesthetic Realism, the education founded by the philosopher and critic Eli Siegel.

In principles that are scientific and kind, it explains the best thing in us–our desire to like the world and see meaning in things. It also explains the thing in every person that makes us feel empty, lonely, and tired of life–contempt: “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” Because of what I learned, the emptiness that plagued me, changed logically and permanently to happiness and confidence that grow every year. The knowledge of Aesthetic Realism is the greatest gift possible for every person.

I remember a Sunday morning on our terrace overlooking the East River in Manhattan. My parents were relaxing, talking and reading the paper, and I was complaining how boring it was. “Are you bored most of the time?” I was asked years later in an Aesthetic Realism consultation. “A lot” I admitted. “Do you think,” my consultants continued, “that is the way things are, naturally boring, or do you think it comes from a hope on your part?”

The emptiness I once despaired would be with me forever ended when I learned that to something in the self, finding things meaningless is a victory–the victory of contempt. Aesthetic Realism explains that if we make less of reality, no matter how much we have achieved or how lavishly we have been praised, we inevitably feel empty, because we have been going away from our life’s purpose: to like the world. While I was called a “gem” by my 4th grade teacher, was later told I had “wisdom, perception, and purity of spirit,” received a Regents scholarship and was accepted at the college of my choice, by age eighteen I was dull and lethargic. I had a feeling of doom.

Growing up, I took classes in modern dance, Yiddish, fencing, French, music theory and more. But while I started them with enthusiasm I found reasons to drop every one. I felt fencing was exhausting, music theory too complicated, Yiddish unimpressive. “Have you felt the less you cared for the more successful you were?” Mr. Siegel asked me years later. I had.

Aesthetic Realism is magnificent in showing–self-esteem movement to the contrary–that criticism of where we are unfair to the world is a need as fundamental and proud as the need for air. If a person doesn’t get it, that person is deeply empty. The kind, exact criticism I heard first in Aesthetic Realism consultations and then in classes taught by Eli Siegel, did nothing less than restore my life to me: For instance, in a consultation I was asked: “Is the world good enough to excite people or not?” When I answered yes, my consultants asked me to give a reason. “Because the world is here,” I offered lamely, “and it’s here to be excited by?” “That’s not a reason,” they said, and continued: “Either the world deserves for you to be excited–or it doesn’t, and anyone who acts as though it does is a fool, and you have contempt. Have you gone by the second?” I had. I felt people were fools for getting excited over things–I saw it as vulgar.

I pined for a boyfriend, yet I realize now that I saw the selves of men as dull and not worth much exertion, and I think the message got across. While I felt I was too good to be stirred by most things, I was stirred by something I thought was not ordinary: the Japanese language. But before long, I used it to look down on everything else. I was in agony and didn’t know why: waves of anxiety would suddenly come over me, and I began having frightening thoughts that I would die at 21.

Years later in a class, I told Mr. Siegel about my thoughts about death, and he asked this question so surprising to me: “Do you think insincerity has something to do with that?” He explained with thrilling logic: “Insincerity is one of the ways of encouraging the death feeling, because as soon as you start pretending, you ask, ‘Where has my real self gone?’ If we feel that somewhere we are lessening ourselves, if it becomes conscious, it can become associated with death and the fear of death itself. We do tend to diminish ourselves. If you diminish yourself enough, it is the same as death.”

I love Eli Siegel for his desire to know and his good will. He looked at thoughts that terrified me and explained that there was ethics behind them. Learning this enabled me to respect and be true to myself. I learned that my self was made to be blazingly fair to the world.

I, who had been a diminisher of things, came alive as I saw I had to do with everything–trees, sidewalks, lampposts, people–through the opposites. I fell in love with such non-oriental writers as Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson. And I celebrated my 21st birthday with a heart full of gratitude, truly confident and at ease in the whole world for the first time. I began to feel I could have good meaning for other people, and this included men. As a person who had been too conceited to see the depth and full reality in a man, I am enormously grateful for my marriage to Joseph Spetly, whose perception of the world and kind, often humorous criticism of me I need to be myself.

In his poem “And It Does, Marianne,” Mr. Siegel wrote: “Emptiness, just so, isn’t had at all, Marianne.” In Aesthetic Realism, he made it possible for every man, woman, and child to feel this.