The Spiritual Significance of Rick and Morty

Or… what you can learn from possibly the most self-aware show on TV right now. Or otherwise… how you can write really overblown titles for your Medium posts.

If you haven’t watched any of this before, or have previously dismissed it, I suggest you give it a chance before you spoil it all for yourself by reading on; there is a lot more to it than meets the eye. Similarly, if you’re not up to date with season three (episode six, Rest and Ricklaxation), you might want to hold off and catch up first.

Embracing your shadow

Have you ever wished you could gather everything you dislike about yourself and just eject it out of your being? Could you visualise that and see it as the solution to all of your problems? This is a concept somewhat-advocated by spiritual writers such as Eckhart Tolle, who talk about imagining your darkness as a separate entity and keeping it separate from yourself. The idea is that the darkness is not the real you so in order to prevent yourself from identifying with it, you tell yourself that it is not you. This requires a lot of energy to do well so eventually, you spend so much time separating your darkness from yourself that you are still none the wiser about who you really are… you just know who you’re not. That’s not particularly enlightening.

Rick and Morty explores this in its own way and it’s to its own credit that it does so without taking it so seriously. The two eponymous characters have a particularly traumatic experience during their latest adventure, realising they’ve both pushed themselves way over the edge, and decide to detox. Of course it’s Rick and Morty so the idea of detoxing is taken to its insane conclusion: to detox is to completely rid yourself of everything you hate about you, that you would consider toxic to yourself. Essentially your shadow, or your darkness.

The answer comes almost as soon as the question is presented, with the good and wholesome Rick realising that it’s not at all healthy to lock his narcissism and his feelings away and pretend they don’t exist any more. Morty, on the other hand, becomes a domineering sociopath and runs away from his own darkness when presented with the opportunity to reconnect with it, before eventually giving in. You could read a lot more into those situations and understand more about the two characters but the episode really strongly touches upon the idea of self-acceptance, and embracing the whole of yourself and not just the light part of it.

Taken at face value you can learn that running away from what you dislike about yourself is not going to make you a better version of yourself no matter how fanciful it sounds. And disassociating from that darkness doesn’t make it go away. More likely than not it still maintains its control in the form of your reaction to various situations: if it seems like the opposite of what you would normally do then it is basically the exact same thing, only the expression of it has changed to make it appear different. The underlying issue hasn’t changed at all.

And, as the episode concludes, no matter how much you may try to escape from yourself, it’s always going to catch up with you one way or another. This is a really powerful point to make and because of that it makes it my favourite episode so far.

Accepting responsibility for your own happiness

Jerry, the father in the show, is essentially a caricature of the popular Western mentality of using victimhood to manipulate others. While I’m not fond of using the term ‘pathetic’ to describe someone on the opposite end of the narcissistic spectrum, I think JP Sears makes a good point about the relationship between the narcissist and the perpetual victim. And he’s right, this is absolutely not a popular view.

Sears presents this as a duality and that the narcissist and the victim are basically two sides of the same coin: the narcissist is self-centred and the victim is centred on the narcissist, essentially complaining that nothing is ever about themselves while also making everything about the person they hate for making everything about themselves. None of this is popular because it challenges a deeply embedded set of behaviours and naturally someone who is accustomed to making themselves a victim will only see this as an attack against them.

Jerry tries to resolve his own personal issues by complaining that Rick in particular is taking his family away from him. In doing so he is expressing his own frustrations by making everything about the person he really hates for making everything about himself. He does absolutely nothing except raise awareness of a problem everyone is aware of — even Rick himself — without making any effort at all to change the situation for himself so he can feel happy. This goes as far as separating and then blaming Rick for taking his wife away from him, which also highlights just how ridiculous this kind of behaviour can seem.

Not much will change if you spend all your energy on telling people about all of your problems while completely submitting to their dominance over your life. This sense of being a victim has unfortunately become a virtue in various social circles and a whole new kind of social capital has been developed around just how much sympathy you’re able to get. That attention becomes nothing more than an addiction and the amount of negativity it requires to squeeze out those increasingly diminishing drops of happiness can be really destructive to yourself and to others.

This is not self-acceptance, this just resignation and getting angry at the world because you’ve decided that’s just the way it works. It’s not a good thing to want people to be sorry for you. This might, however, be easier than being happy for yourself and seeing that happiness spread around those you interact with: your loved ones, your family, your friends, the strangers on the street who see your glowing smile.

This doesn’t stop you from actually being a victim and neither is it insensitive to those who actually are victims of seriously traumatic events. Bad things do happen and they can totally mess you up, but it does nothing for your own healing and development to dwell so heavily on those events instead of working through the trauma or other underlying issues in order to get your life back. This is a temporary state, even if it takes years to work through and is super painful. It’s not an identity, as portrayed by Jerry.

From my own perspective, this publication could have been exactly that kind of self-victimisation. If you read through my previous posts where I talk about my vulnerabilities, and my path so far, there is so much material in there I could have used to build up the persona of somebody who constantly suffers from bad luck, complains about how everybody but himself is responsible for it, and feels like the world owes him something better than that. For a time I did have that mindset, and I thought the world was unfair and punishing to me specifically (as if the entire universe put my singular existence under the microscope and plotted to make it as shitty as possible) but it did nothing except hold me back from my own potential as a person, and from enjoying life itself. I’m not defined by my own traumatic experiences but they are absolutely a part of me and they have been the source of various unpleasant behaviours I have.

This is the kind of stuff that forms your personal shadow, as it does mine, and a shadow is merely a spot of darkness in an abundance of light. It will always be there and even if you don’t see it after you’ve blotted out the sun, all you’ve done is bring darkness to everybody else.

There will always be people who have it better than you, and people who have it worse for you. The challenge you have is to figure out what is best for you and what you need to change to achieve that, because nobody else is going to offer to do that for you.

I’m going to stop it there because the show explores so many different philosophies and spiritual beliefs that you couldn’t hope to go into detail about all of it. Those two things have stood out to me as the strongest lessons so far, with an amazing supporting cast of other realisations to back them up. Each adventure is a foray into a particular belief or behaviour and a demonstration of what can happen if you take the idea and run the wrong way with it, and that in the end it requires running the wrong way to understand the significance of what is being explained.

What Rick and Morty also demonstrates is just how effective it is to open these adventures to the wider audience through the medium of surrealism and comedy. Many people may quite rightly zone out when listening to a lecture on zen buddhism and the oneness of the universe, or some of Nietzsche’s writings on nihilism, but comedy and cartoon can do a hell of a lot to distill these ideas into a pill that’s somewhat easier to swallow and maybe a doorway to your own personal adventures.

And therein lies the spiritual significance of it all. It’s not really about the content itself, but how mind-opening it can be.