How Can a Man Be Rightly Sure of Himself?

Knowing the World Versus Using It

As a boy and young man, I loved studying singing and dancing. Later at Syracuse University as an acting major, some of the times I felt best were working on a role, trying to understand a character. I liked thinking about what the character's life was like before we see him in the play, how did he move and talk?

In my freshman year I was cast in Bertholt Brecht's play Galileo as a crippled man dressed in rags in a large street scene with many people. My legs were tied behind me, and, lying on the ground, I had to pull myself along with my hands begging for food, trying not to be stepped on or hurt. Though it was a small part and seemingly lowly, I loved it and had a certain confidence during rehearsals. I liked trying to become this man whose life was so different from mine, who was forced by circumstances to be humble.

But in my everyday life, I went after another kind of sureness, based on arrogance. As the youngest of three sons in suburban Miami Shores, Florida, my parents made a lot of me, and I came to feel I was the best boy in the neighborhood—better than my two older brothers.

I was the "good" one and I milked it. Also, I was sure that the Coopermans were one of the better families in Miami Shores. We had money, my father had a Cadillac, and I thought of us as the Jewish Kennedys. By the time I was six or seven, I walked around feeling like a prince—smugly convinced that my place in life was above that of most people. Though I wouldn't have put it just this way, I equated being sure of myself to looking down on other people, having contempt for them, and this had terrific consequences.

I often felt agitated, bored and very separate. And from as early as I can remember, I had great difficulty falling asleep—something that did not change until I studied Aesthetic Realism. Sometimes I secretly took my mother's sleeping pills to knock myself out. Then when I did sleep I often had nightmares, and remember once yelling out for my father to come to my room, because I was practically frozen in bed with fear, convinced someone behind the chair was trying to get me.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that you cannot have contempt without a kickback. In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Ellen Reiss explains:

The underlying doubt, the underlying uncertainty that we can have, unarticulated yet poking and sometimes gnawing and thrusting within us, in relation to any aspect of our lives 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? People haven't known that this unspoken question is behind the nervousness or unsureness or perhaps sudden sinking they may feel.

When I graduated from college and needed a job, I worked as a condominium salesman for my father and brother who owned a retirement development in Sunrise, Florida. Once I began I was ambitious to be a hotshot salesman. So while acting affable to the retirees who came to look at the apartments, I was conniving in my thoughts, seeing each one as a potential sale who would make me money and also make me look good. I remember laughing it up as I told my father and brother how I pounded on the walls in the model apartment to show one elderly couple how solid they were. I thought I was so clever, and they were so gullible.

I saw no relation between this contemptuous way of thinking about people and the fact that I hated my life. I was living alone in one of the model apartments, and was excruciatingly lonely and unsure of myself—so much so that I often smoked pot in the morning before I went into work, feeling I couldn't function otherwise.

A college friend had told me about Aesthetic Realism, and one sunny afternoon in 1976, from the sales office I called the Aesthetic Realism Foundation and asked to have consultations. I told the young woman at the other end of the phone that I had to learn to like myself first, and then I would feel at ease and confident with other people. She said Aesthetic Realism explains it's just the opposite—you have to like the way you see the world and other people first, and that will have you like yourself. The logic made such sense, but I had never heard anything like it before.

Soon I had my first consultation, and was asked at one point: "Are you an agonized mingling of sureness and unsureness?" Yes, and hearing that put into words I felt understood.

I remember, too, that soon after this consultation was the first time I actually saw I had contempt. I was in the Broadway/Lafayette subway station and asked someone for directions. The directions turned out to be wrong, and I muttered under my breath, "God damned New Yorkers." A second later I thought "That's it!—that was contempt—you just panned a whole city of people because one man made a mistake." Seeing this I wanted to jump for joy!

Learning how contempt worked in me, and also getting a tremendous education in what it means to respect people, to have a wide interest in the world, I began to feel a sureness I never had before. Just a few months later I wrote in a letter to Eli Siegel: "We have never met, and yet you have changed my life...I am more comfortable in my own skin...Thank you."

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