Unclear Fallout
A ghosting story
An unclear fallout is when you stop being friends with someone but you don't quite know what happened. There was never a dramatic confrontation or a formal parting. Instead, you are left with a residual feeling of unreciprocated affection.
Ghosting is a modern term, but people have been failing to reply to letters since the invention of literacy. I like the word though because it contains within it the idea of being haunted by the mystery of what went wrong.
Maybe the friend doesn't have time. Maybe they didn't get your messages. Maybe they no longer like you and what you represent. Maybe you did something egregious that you can't recall or which wasn’t done with ill intentions. It's easy to generate stories in your head, especially when it feels more painful to confront the person directly.
One of the saddest stories I heard recently was of the lonely death of John 'Culadasa' Yates. Culadasa became famous for writing The Mind Illuminated, a modern classic on meditation. For many, this was the book that helped them on the path to enlightenment by providing a step-by-step guide to developing attention and awareness until your conscious mind is permanently changed. Culadasa himself claimed to be 'awakened' and would appear on podcasts and in Patreon Q&As telling people what it is like and giving them advice on how to get there.
Culadasa was a big deal. Then came the inevitable sex scandal.
According to his wife, Culadasa had been taking funds from their meditation centre and spending them on prostitutes. He did address the accusations to his remaining loyal followers, claiming that it wasn't a sexual thing and that he was just helping out the sex workers, but a cloud hung over him in the community and he was forced out of his retreat centre.
One student who stuck by him conducted one of the last interviews with Culadasa before his death. In it, he talks about how he didn't have any friends nearby who could help him get to the hospital. The reason he gave was that his sense of universal compassion meant he didn't prioritise the specific compassion necessary to form friendships. Check out this clip of him looking rueful about this:
Are the feelings of meditative bliss worth the loneliness he experienced? I suspect not. Universal compassion sounds great, but not if it means the feelings are diluted by the time you get to dealing with real-life human beings. Like Mrs Jellyby in Dickens’ Bleak House you become a telescopic philanthropist, raising money for distant children while their own run around in rags. There is only a limited amount of time in the day to attend to relationships; you can't spread those feelings too thin.
As Charles Eisenstein writes, the age of the guru is over:
The yogic teaching, “Don’t try to cover the world with leather, just wear shoes,” served us well in the age of spiritual self-sufficiency, but it serves no longer, especially if taken to mean, “Heal thyself; the world is not your responsibility.” That was true, for a time. It was medicine. It healed us of self-rejection and self-sacrifice. It was a necessary stage toward the next step, when we do seek to heal the world – not as an act of self-sacrifice, not at the cost of our own well-being, but as a necessary step in our own self-healing. Through our relationship to the other we heal ourselves. There is no other way.
I have, sadly, fallen out with a few close friends over the years. It is as intense a feeling as the end of a romance. You have invested time and emotion in a relationship and now its value has gone to zero. Either you've drifted apart and no longer stay in contact or there has been some irreconciable difference that makes them reject you. In both cases, the sunk cost fallacy is relevant. We hate to lose more than we love to gain. A bad investment will be pursued much longer than a new opportunity would. But how do you know when a friendship is dead? I have, for instance, been able to renew old friendships many years after they have been fallow.
I like that the phrase 'Unclear Fallout' looks a bit like 'nuclear fallout'. Nuclear fallout puts into context the fact that everything could be rendered unliveable in an instant so it is probably not worth holding grudges.
I can't imagine holding a grudge, even without the threat of nuclear armageddon. People learn, people change, I would hope that they can work out their differences. And most grudges are incredibly petty. David Hawkins has a good example in Letting Go:
A man had not spoken to his brother for twenty-three years. Neither of them could remember what the incident was about; it had been long forgotten. But they were in the habit of not speaking, and so for twenty-three years they paid the price of missing each other’s company, affection, togetherness in family matters, and all the shared experiences and love they could have had. When the man learned about the mechanism of surrender, he began to let go of his feelings about his brother. Suddenly, he broke out in tears of grief, realizing all that had been lost over the years. By forgiving his brother, he triggered a similar response in the brother, and the two were reunited. Then, one of the brothers flashed back on the incident. It had been an argument over a pair of tennis shoes. Over one pair of tennis shoes they had paid a price extending over twenty-three years!
Often the worst forms of fallout is when you have a mimetic rivalry with someone you know. The two of you are competing over the same patch of ground and see whatever the other does as an attack. When our models are distant, we can imitate them without fear. When our models are nearby, it can end in trouble. René Girard's proposed escape from the mimetic trap is to turn to Jesus, the ultimate self-sacrificing model.
The trouble is, even if you let go of your grudge or forgive the other person, there is no guarantee the other person will. There are only so many times that you can reach out to someone who is unwilling to hear from you. I believe in total integration but I am only in control of my own integration, not that of other people. If you persist with the spirit of universal love, you become like Culadasa, losing touch with the people around him.
So what should you do? I'd say focus on the people you do care about and who care about you. Be open to old friends, new friends, lost friends, forgotten friends, but accept that friendships are strongest when they are reciprocal.
After writing this article,
published an excellent piece on friendship, which calls for the creation of "an entire friendship religion." Check it out.
Wise words, although I can't imagine you falling out with anyone!