The beloved Sesame Street curmudgeon is a Buddha in disguise.

Here’s a no-brainer of a question for you, which recently took the Twittersphere by storm: if you had to be marooned on a deserted island with one of the following four Sesame Street characters — Grover, Elmo, Cookie Monster, or Oscar the Grouch, which would you choose?

The answer is obvious to anybody who gives it a moment’s thought. Grover would go mad within 24 hours. Elmo would probably be dead within the same time span, strangled by his companion in response to his non-stop self-referential babbling. And as for Cookie Monster, it would take him all of five minutes to ascertain that there are no cookies on the island, whereupon he would deem you an adequate substitute for said baked goods.

Oscar, by contrast, is not only accustomed to loneliness, boredom, and hardship, but positively relishes in such states of mental duress. Not only would he not cause a fuss about being marooned, he would probably enjoy it — including the exquisite suffering of baking in the hot tropical sun in the tight confines of an aluminum garbage can. He would, in other words, be perfect company in such circumstances.

Of all the iconic characters thrown up by Sesame Street over the decades, Oscar the Grouch is without doubt the most fascinating. Foul-tempered and misanthropic to a fault, Oscar nonetheless regularly exhibits an altruistic streak in his kindness towards the children on the Street and towards his fellow Muppets (He famously helps Ernie find his lost rubber duck.), all the while reasserting his mean-spiritedness lest he lose any of his “grouch cred”. As such, Oscar is paradoxically the epitome of self-effacing benevolence, as the mere act of accepting praise for a good deed is anathema to his core identity as a “grouch”.

There’s indeed a Gandhian quality to this humble, cantankerous ball of what look rather like ganja who makes his home in a garbage can — the epitome of the ascetic life (although many have pointed out that his can seems to defy the laws of physics in its ability to contain a swimming pool, a bowling alley, and a piano, among other amenities). His benevolence towards living creatures big and small, from Slimey the Worm to Fluffy the Elephant, is very Jain, while his preoccupation with the refuse of society generally, his embrace of the unpleasant, and his unkempt, matted-haired appearance hearkens to the sadhus of India and even to Prince Siddhartha’s early attempts at enlightenment through extreme asceticism. In terms of spiritual wisdom, he’s way ahead of his Sesame Street peers.

But there’s more to Oscar the Grouch’s spiritual genius than mere asceticism and grudging altruism. As a being who purports to “hate being happy” and “love being miserable” he is a living, breathing zen koan, a paradox best summed up in his own philosophical cornerstone How To Be A Grouch.

Ludicrous as this might seem, we are all trapped in our own version of this psychological hamster wheel. Our pleasures, as the Buddha himself expounds, are by their very nature fleeting, and therefore unsatisfactory. Any success or pleasure we might feel begins to subside the moment it kicks in, and then we are back to the grind. We are all locked into the same cycle of happiness and misery as Old Groucho. The only difference is that most of us are completely unaware of our suffering. Oscar, by contrast, is acutely aware of it, and appears to relish in the conundrum.

The vast majority of us are deeply averse to negative feelings — so much so that we forfeit all sorts of possible pleasure out of fear of pain or displeasure. For most of us, pain is more powerful than pleasure, and most, given the option of enduring five minutes of the worst pain imaginable in exchange for five minutes of the greatest pleasure, would recoil from the idea. As the unrelentingly pessimistic anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar puts it in his case for not being born, “There’s such a thing as chronic pain, but there’s no such thing as chronic pleasure.”

For Oscar the Grouch there is no such predicament. By relishing in the unpleasant — and indeed finding paradoxical joy in it — he exposes the truth of dukkha (often erroneously translated as “suffering” but more accurately characterized as “dissatisfaction”), which is the positive and negative thoughts are in fact one and the same — mere apparitions in consciousness that begin to disappear the moment they arise. Unlike the vast majority of us, Oscar seems to have escaped from a slavish attachment to positive emotional stimuli, and an aversion to the negative. In his psyche, pleasure and pain are one and the same, and his lack of attachment to either is truly prodigious.

What sense is any of us to make of Oscar’s claim to “love being miserable”? On the surface this statement appears to be self-contradicting, as the mere state of “loving” something denote a positive state of mind, which is the diametric opposite of misery. The only sense that can be made of the Oscar the Grouch paradox is that in a heightened state of mindfulness, one could indeed derive a feeling of rapture from being fully present and clearly aware of unpleasant conscious stimuli, and one can indeed imagine deriving pleasure from this. Anybody who exercises knows that certain types of pain can be exquisitely pleasurable, given the right framing. As a long-distance runner, I’m well acquainted with levels of physical pain that would translate to unimaginable agony if they were the product of terminal illness, but because they’re synonymous with the final 100 meters of a marathon they’re feelings I’ve come to long for. Could such reframing be applied to any other form of physical or psychological discomfort? Oscar the Grouch certainly makes a strong case for it.

Source: muppet.fandom.com

Little is told about Oscar’s daily routine. Apart from the brief moments of the day when his green mop head emerges from his trash can so as to berate or yell at whoever happens to be loitering around him, he (presumably) spends his days in total darkness and isolation with little to do but contemplate the absurdity of his own existence and explore the contours of his own consciousness. As such, he is merely following in the tradition of mystics of east and west alike, who have sequestered themselves in caves, monasteries, and other dark, inhospitable locations for the purpose of achieving spiritual breakthroughs.

Like many of history’s great gurus and mystics, Oscar is a prickly and disreputable character the likes of which most people shun, but this is their loss. Oscar is by far and away Sesame Street’s most enlightened being — a true exponent of mindfulness. He knows that Cookie Monster will never be truly satisfied no matter how many cookies are at hand, and that Elmo’s soul will never be sated no matter how much love and affection is lavished upon him. He knows that Bert and Ernie, despite their seemingly polar-opposite dispositions, are both on the same antidepressants, and that The Count will never reach infinity. He knows that life pretty much sucks most of the time. And he’s cool with that.

Oh, and when he’s yelling at you to leave him alone, it’s probably because he’s trying to meditate.

Just sayin’.