We survived the Great Eclipse. After months of hype, money-making schemes, warnings of traffic and cell phone gridlock, and even declarations that “totality will change your life,” it has come and gone. Now we can breathe again and digest this once-in-a-generation event.
We easily understand the astronomy. Celestial bodies align; the moon occludes the sun and creates twilight mid-afternoon and a peek at the sun’s corona. But the human movements are more mysterious. Why do millions make a pilgrimage—160,000 to Vermont alone—to witness, in the flesh, those brief moments of totality?
We are, it seems, starved for the real. In an increasingly virtual world, we crave the real deal. That distinction between virtual and real mattered so much that people devoted days to travel and traffic jams for the full-bodied sensual experience of totality; to feel the temperature drop and the cooled breeze brush over skin; to hear the descending stillness, punctuated by calls of bewildered birds; to see the weird light and, with naked eye, the unforgettable view of corona streamed round the negative of the sun. To absorb the altered sights and sounds, to breathe the altered air, all this linked us to our primeval ancestors, to primitive fears that the sun was eaten (recorded on ancient Chinese oracle bones) and to the awe that centuries ago inspired Chaco petroglyphs. We surrendered ourselves to the natural world, beyond anything we could program or control.
In contrast, so much of present life is tech-mediated. Sherry Turkle, MIT researcher of technology and human-machine relationships, claims that we even prefer the artificial to the messy real. Her daughter’s response to turtles caged at a museum was, “they should have used robots.” Likewise, we gravitate to robotic seal pups and trick-learning dogs that are always available, accepting, sentient and kind. When we do connect with other humans, it’s often through video chats, video games, texts or social media, tech platforms of convenience that also insulate us from the unpredictability, and the richness, of real-time real-space human contact. And there’s no end to technology’s invasion into ever-more of our lives: Apple’s Vision Pro glasses “augment” the ordinary real with surround-sound virtual reality.
The eclipse re-connected us, momentarily, to the natural world. Our ever-expanding human footprint stamps out humility and awe. But gazing up to the sky, even shoulder-to-shoulder on the ground, we saw the natural world eluding our domination. Although entrepreneurs threaten to mine minerals from the moon, although the Parker Probe has “touched the sun” to penetrate its corona and sample solar wind, we’re not messing with the sun’s energy factory and we’re not moving the planets and moons. To behold the cosmos put us in our place and embarrassed our omnipotence. Ready or not, the eclipse happened, celestial bodies on their own timetable.
The eclipse also gave us a shared experience, the thrill of the throng, gathered together under our one sun, joined in our craving for the real. When the moon plunged us into totality, crowds cheered and honked their horns, reassuring us of our connectedness, our shared focus, respite from the fragmentation of daily life.
Alienation isn’t new to the 21st century. Vermont’s last total solar eclipse occurred in 1932, when the path of totality cut across northern VT and NH. The event was popular, with tourists and scientists traveling here by train and even plane. People already hungered for the real. Now, almost a century later, we’re far more mobile. Likewise, news from eclipse chasers spreads faster and feeds contagion. The 2017 eclipse that traversed North America was the most-watched event ever (216 million viewers, 21 million of whom traveled to watch in-person). Their eye-witness accounts, broadcast over social media, must have sharpened the hunger to experience totality, to not miss out on these awesome moments. And it seems undeniable that we are also ever-more starved for the real.
What about claims that the eclipse changes lives? It is true that events such as wars, illness, and death have life-changing impacts. They ruin our foundations, they force us to accommodate loss. But the “change your life” claims about the eclipse imply internal change, the suggestion that totality is a transcendent experience, a pivotal moment that deepens perspective, re-orders priorities, and makes one new. Without question, moments of perspective can catapult us into a new awareness. But over time, the personality, with its old, wearisome defenses, snaps back. Events like an eclipse can’t touch character.
What is the real for which we’re starved? Isn’t it real contact with another person, a person with whom pretense and defense relax as we feel safe and expose our hungers, wishes, and fears? Isn’t it intimacy that we crave? And isn’t the stubborn intractability of character, those habitual modes of self-protection, the obstacle to intimacy?
Psychotherapy offers a path to intimacy, that unique emotional contact between patient and therapist. Of course, we hope to feel close to our families and a friend or two. Sometimes we’re fortunate and that happens. But there’s a deeper intimacy that’s usually reserved for the private search for self-knowledge and the tender understanding of one’s therapist. Being real in therapy also makes it easier to be real with others.
Psychotherapy is a slow, gradual, hard-earned evolution. Every moment in therapy matters; they all have transcendent potential. Occasionally, we have moments like those 90-some seconds of totality, when we experience ourselves, momentarily, with breath-taking awe, in a new way. But usually, the transformative moments are more subtle. Change accrues imperceptibly; illusions of omnipotence and the quick fix yield to accepting the need for a guide to self-knowledge. It’s the steady, dedicated, disciplined understanding of one’s deepest self, along with the methods of self-protection and self-deception, that leads to self-knowledge. That’s true life-change.