Sara E.M. | 
09 22nd, 2010| 
Elizabeth Gilbert’s best seller, Eat Pray Love, is now a feature film starring Julia Roberts. The combination of the film’s release and my search for new books to read on my iPad (I’m finally back from travelling, returning from busy cities to my small, quiet hometown with limited choices in leisure activities) prompted me to give the famous self-help book a chance. I have a respect for Gilbert, since I was at TED 2009 when she gave a TED talk around her new book, Committed. It’s obvious she has a new age slant, but she is also a well-spoken, intelligent, and talented individual.
Eat Pray Love is a well written book. I really enjoyed her style of storytelling; one of my favourite scenes is when she personifies depression and loneliness as two detectives who have tracked her down during her travels. Unfortunately, it’s the content of the book I had trouble with. But you might be thinking, “Sara, why would you read this kind of book?” and indeed, it’s valid to point out that I’m not exactly the book’s target audience. My interest and passion is in promoting science and critical thinking through art and storytelling, but I have a great deal of respect for TEDsters and if I’m going to read a book that contrasts this philosophy it’s going to be from an author who’s spoken at a conference of the world’s leading thinkers and doers.
The book is a memoir of a point in Gilbert’s life where she goes through a divorce and then takes a year to travel to Italy, India, and Indonesia to ‘find God’ and find herself. My biggest frustration—which seemed to colour the rest of the book for me—was that she was obviously going through major depression. She writes about this herself, how she became depressed as she was going through divorce while simultaneously starting a new, drama-filled relationship. I couldn’t help wondering if depression was what started her problems, rather than it being a result of them. One of the early chapters explains how miserable she was even before her marriage dissolved, “My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and—just as during all those nights before—I was sobbing”. She comes to the conclusion that she doesn’t want to be married anymore. For privacy reasons, she doesn’t go into any details of what exactly made her unhappy concerning her husband. She paints a picture of a woman with a ‘perfect life’ who is mysteriously unhappy.
In my mind, a quite plausible reason for her unhappiness is depression. Depression isn’t simply persistent sadness; it’s a deep feeling of hopelessness that takes away your ability to find joy or pleasure in anything. Whatever the reason for her life crisis, it didn’t seem like this was given any consideration as a cause of her growing feelings of dissatisfaction and loss of self. It’s possible that the reason for this is that those who suffer from the illness can feel as though there is something wrong with who they are or how they are living and that if they could only change themselves and their life they would feel better—a new career, a new city, a new relationship. The problem with depression is that it can distort your perception of life in a negative way, regardless of any genuine problems. I can’t imagine how one could begin to make a distinction until the illness is treated.
This brings me to the problem I had with the first portion of the book, “Eat”, where she is spending time in Italy, trying to learn how to relax and find pleasure in life. One of the biggest barriers to treatment of depression can be the taboo of mental illness. About ten days into her visit to Italy, she begins to feel depressed again, “I’d stopped taking my medication only a few days earlier. It had just seemed crazy to be taking antidepressants in Italy. How could I be depressed here?” She continues to explain her ‘long list of personal objections’ to being on medication even though she admits to clearly needing medication and even more, that it actually helped her immensely. Despite all this, she clings to the taboo and a list of justifications for doing so (like her belief that Americans are overmedicated, which, to me, seems completely irrelevant to one’s own personal health).
This irrationality made it difficult to go through the next portion of the book, “Pray”, and her stay at an ashram in India. I can set aside my distaste for the cliché of an upper-middle class Caucasian turning to cherry-picking Eastern religions when faced with dissatisfaction. What’s hard is trying not to see this personal journey of hers as a depressed women running away from evidence-based medicine to the more emotionally appealing fantasy of a spiritual rebirth. My science-based worldview would prompt me to ask why someone would rather believe they are personally flawed, needing a complete life overhaul, than face depression as a health issue. Even though it is a painful and difficult illness, wouldn’t that be better than having a defect with something as important as your very soul? She even mentions her psychiatrist addressing her hesitation to take antidepressants “If you had a kidney disease, you wouldn’t hesitate to take medication for it”. Quite tellingly, Gilbert reveals she comes from “…a family who regard any sickness as a sign of personal, ethical, moral failure”.
It was that point of view of illness that gave me a new understanding of her motivations for embarking on her journey. There’s nothing sexy about taking medication; it can even feel like a sign of weakness (as if it brings up the image of medication being for the elderly…you know—-people who once had purpose trying to extend what small amount of time remains in their now irrelevant lives!). But spirituality is a romantic idea, especially seductive to those with a sense of dissatisfaction with life that leads them to seek ‘purpose’ and look for ‘answers’. We can imagine ourselves on a sort of Joseph Cambell-esque hero’s journey—the main character of an epic quest. There’s something that sounds quite noble about embarking on a quest of self discovery. In reality, the hardships of real action in the face of our troubles are greater than any struggles involved in looking inwards, and can require far more bravery. To me, following the path of the mystic can simply be a way to avoid hard work, to avoid actually doing something. It’s easier to take refuge inside ourselves, no matter how dark or difficult our inner world may seem, than to navigate the world around us which does not bend to our desires. Sometimes, we don’t have the luxury of going on a hero quest before doing real change in the world. You have to face life’s challenges as the person you are today.
Gilbert’s time in India results in 36 chapters of new age skyhookery. Whether it’s Western or Eastern philosophy being discussed, both seek the same ends; to become one with the cosmos (whether you call it god, the universe, a higher power, or enlightenment). What has always been interesting to me is that it is spirituality that creates the separation to begin with. It’s a vital part of the belief system. It separates us using souls, spirits, chakra, chi, ego, and spooky ideas about human consciousness. Scientific probing of the world reveals a true oneness with the universe—quite literally, we are made from the same material as everything else in the universe. Every atom in our body and in each breath we take was forged in the heart of star that burned for billions of years. Nor does it make the separation between “mind and body” that is so key to any spiritual practice. Science continues to make the argument that our mind is the product of the brain.
The reality is that the true goal of spirituality isn’t to become one with the universe or god. What mystics and gurus are chasing is happiness, “According to the mystics, this search for divine bliss is the entire purpose of a human life. This is why we all chose to be born, and this is why all the suffering and pain of life on earth is worthwhile—just for the chance to experience this infinite love”, Gilbert writes. It was coming to this realization that gave me a better understanding of spiritual thinking. When you’re an advocate of reason and evidence-based thinking, it’s hard to understand why anyone searching for truth wouldn’t be interested in using a method to evaluate claims and determine the quality of evidence. The confusion comes from mistaking truth and knowledge as what mystics are looking for. In spirituality, the search is for bliss, and if you can find some, one way to try and hold on to it is to pin it to reality as fundamental truth. The ‘bliss’ needs to also be the ‘truth’.
This new age mind set was expected and I was prepared for it. It’s not the fact that this spiritual mindset was there at all that bothered me. What I found disturbing is its correlation with desperate people trying to overcome hardship (Eat Prey Love?) and its use as a substitute for medical treatment, something which only got worse in the final portion of the book, “Love”, in Bali, Indonesia. Gilbert spends most of her time at the home of medicine man and at a small shop of a holistic healer.
It wasn’t the promotion of alternative medicine through countless naturalistic fallacies that troubled me. What I had a hard time with was the romanticizing of poverty involved in her Bali story. The villagers’ reliance on traditional medicine was shown as a virtue and sort of proof that these people live a simpler, natural, and therefore more moral existence, rather than the more plausible reality of being too poor to afford proper medical treatment. I kept getting the sense that any attention drawn to the reality of widespread poverty was balanced by a positive spiritual description of their society. We can feel better about their low economic status and archaic social structures because they are spiritually rich. This often leads to the tired idea that once people acquire wealth, economic and social prosperity their lives almost certainly become amoral and spiritually bankrupt.
As a story, Eat Pray Love is a well written and well constructed plot, with well written characters. It would be much improved if the actual events of her life were written about without so much of the self-help inner dialogue of ‘suggestions’. The introduction mentions that her writings about her experience in India is from a personal standpoint, “…and not as a theological scholar or as anybody’s official spokesperson”. However, the tone of the book seems to imply it is meant to be read as a guide, as anecdotal evidence that heading off on a journey of self-discovery will cure you from any personal life-crisis you may be going through. Even its title seems to be telling you to do something, as opposed to passively reading—After all, it’s not called Eating, Praying, Loving…look at what I did. No! Do what I did:
Eat, Pray, Love!
Alternative medicine is a major public health risk. Untested and discredited treatments are promoted for just about any health problem you can imagine. Those who are most desperate are often the target of alt-med treatments, swooping in to provide an “alternative” or “complimentary” cure when real medicine, unfortunately, has been unsuccessful. There is one area, however, where the quack alternative treatment has established itself as the standard treatment: 12-step programs in the area of addiction.
