Words Become Flesh • Peter Pans or Enlightened?

Peter Pans or Enlightened? (from Chapter Eight: Violet Shadows)

PETER PANS? OR ENLIGHTENED SOULS?” I asked. Our society is so
obsessed with celebrities. I myself love the movies. Movies aren’t
real but the feelings we get while seeing them are real. Are actors
on to something? Or are they Peter Pans who never grow up? In
developmental theory, actors are fixated in the phase of the
grandiose self. They are three- and four-year-olds crying out, ‘Look
at me! Look at me! Look at me!’ On accepting the lifetime achievement
award at the Golden Globes, Dustin Hoffman said these
very same words. He said them in answer to the question of why
he became an actor.

“What I mean is that they play doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs
and the list is almost endless. Yet they are never really anything.
They play all these roles and professions but they never commit to
one in reality. In one sense, it seems phony and hollow. I remember
Clark Gable suggesting as much. He revered the real men
doing hard labor, so to speak. I don’t think that about hard labor,
but I do wonder about committing oneself with blood, sweat and
tears, to something in particular.”

“Richard Gere practices Buddhism. I have heard that he loves its
honesty among other things. Please continue,” Tacomi said.
“I have wondered if, as you said, last time, we need to see the
emptiness of all this fleeting world. And at the same time, we need
to feel compassion for each and every being as precious. Precious
yet insubstantial? How do we do that?”

“That’s the difficult balance that an enlightened one, a buddha,
is able to do,” he said smiling knowingly.

“I have started to think that actors may be (or have the chance
to be) enlightened more easily than others who take their profession
seriously. I don’t mean actors don’t take their profession of acting
seriously. I mean that there is a paradigm here for accomplishing
the task of feeling genuine compassion and, at the same time,
knowing that nothing is real . . . ultimately, the story is not real.
Actor and audience realize this.” . . .

“You could also understand emptiness and compassion by con-