I'd like to discuss some heavy ideas for a little while. It will smack as pessimism to some or even nihilistic but I hope to show that it may have a good ending. So I hope only to discuss this as long as it takes before there is diminishing returns on our investment. I'll describe the main thrust now but I would like for participants to engage the ideas just a little more deeply then your first impulsive reactions. I am providing some references below that do much more justice then I could. So, please don't feel obliged to reply right away. Please read these references. So, with some trepidation of your reaction I will begin.
Ernest Becker's Pultizer Prize winning books Denial of Death (1973) and his sequel Escape from Evil (1975) described a sense of vulnerability and mortality gives rise to a basic anxiety, even a terror, about our situation. We devise all sorts of strategies to escape awareness of our mortality and vulnerability, as well as our anxious awareness of it. This psychological denial of death, Becker claims, is one of the most basic drives in individual behavior, and is reflected throughout human culture. Indeed, one of the main functions of culture, according to Becker, is to help us successfully avoid awareness of our mortality. That suppression of awareness plays a crucial role in keeping people functioning- -if we were constantly aware of our fragility, of the nothingness we are a split second away from at all times, we'd go nuts. And how does culture perform this crucial function? By making us feel certain that we, or realities we are part of, are permanent, invulnerable, eternal. And in Becker's view, some of the personal and social consequences of this are disastrous.
First, at the personal level, by ignoring our mortality and vulnerability we build up an unreal sense of self, and we act out of a false sense of who and what we are. Second, as members of society, we tend to identify with one or another "immortality system" (as Becker calls it). That is, we identify with a religious group, or a political group, or engage in some kind of cultural activity, or adopt a certain culturally sanctioned viewpoint, that we invest with ultimate meaning, and to which we ascribe absolute and permanent truth. This inflates us with a sense of invulnerable righteousness. And then, we have to protect ourselves against the exposure of our absolute truth being just one more mortality-denying system among others, which we can only do by insisting that all other absolute truths are false. So we attack and degrade--preferably kill--the adherents of different mortality- denying-absolute- truth systems. So the Protestants kill the Catholics; the Muslims vilify the Christians and vice versa; upholders of the American way of life denounce Communists; the Communist Khmer Rouge slaughters all the intellectuals in Cambodia; the Spanish Inquisition tortures heretics; and all good students of the Enlightenment demonize religion as the source of all evil. The list could go on and on.
We will defend this sense of protection and security against death through whatever means. The interesting thing here is that there is no difference between the secular, religious or the personal in regards to its function to help a person feel more protected, masterful, worthy and meaningful. This theory is an intellectual leveler of arbitrary classifications of knowledge and human motivation. It tends to subsume (not contradict) other empirical evidences of the sources of human motivation.
Psychologically, there is no difference between symbolic OR physical defense of any worldview. We protect our sources of strength, mastery and power through whatever means. Attachment to secular principles rationales can be used to justify genocide as much as Jeffery Dahmers private rationale to "absorb the life force" of his victims by eating their parts. We can get more imagined life by attaching to whatever symbol promises more of it. So, bolstering our own sense of power by belittling others and their competing symbols of meaning and significance - intelligence, beauty, social status, are as valid as generating our own realities . And we do so as a part of the very customs, manners and etiquette that orders our social world. Just as a gold fish would be hard pressed to describe water, we swim in vast ocean of culturally approved immortality symbols.
In my view, Ernest Becker was right about this core thesis. It starts with a child's overriding need for physical security and then proceeds to a inexorable bolstering of self esteem using culturally approved hero symbols. As the child's mind develops the capacity for symbolic representation of the world - simply an abstraction of reality - that activity becomes more real than actual physical mastery.
The notion of immortality systems is an especially useful diagnostic tool. It is easy to spot people (including oneself, of course) clinging to absolute truths in the way he describe--and it is not hard to understand why they do. It is not just anxiety over physical vulnerability. It goes deeper than that. We all want out lives to have meaning, and death suggests that life adds up to nothing. People want desperately for their lives to really count, to be finally real. If you think about it, most all of us try to found our identities on something whose meaning seems permanent or enduring: the nation, the race, the revolutionary vision; the timelessness of art. I think it is accurate to say that a denial of death pervades human culture, and that it is one of the deepest sources of banal argument, intolerance, aggression, and human evil. On the other hand, it is the source of all ethical systems, mastery over our environment through science and technology and most humanities cultural achievements. But more profoundly, these ideas have provided an immense revelatory scheme of the way all civilizations were constructed and why the motivation to go forward (towards what?). Even the jobs we choose, kinds of people we marry, stuff we purchase, and institutions we support are becuase of the mass tacit agreement that these pursuits contribute to our collective immortalities. The whole advertising industry ferrets out these primal needs and desires and packages them in ways that make their immortality promises more concrete.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: janek,
Posts: 32 | Location: New York | Registered: 09 January 2007
janek - Personally, I agree with the first reviewer at Amazon, Becker puts too much emphasis on the denial of death as "the deepest source." And I say this out of 'direct-self-observation', not belief in some theory. It's natural, it seems to me, that any living system is concerned about survival. But as best we can tell, animals (besides humans) don't seem to have a large "irrational fear problem."
The irrational fear, to my direct observation, is related to the human habit of forming a self-image, which as the person goes through life accumulates thousands of memories (experiences and beliefs) associated with this image. When another human questions any of these beliefs, it's commonly 'interpreted' as questioning the self-worth of this self-image, so it's commonly resisted. And as these experiences continue to mount up, the fear of losing all that experience tends to increase the fear. And of course, always lurking in the background is the reality that the human organism is going to cease to exist at some point. That certainly produces fear, but the root is the 'thought-process' that creates the 'reified' self-image. Without this self-image, there's no fear of the organism dying. There's a concern for the organism, but not fear. But of course, many people call or define that 'concern' as 'fear'. I think there's a difference between being concerned and being fearful.
I also don't see ethical systems as being based on a denial of death, but rather the cultural ideologies (beliefs & opinions) of a particular culture. Sure, denial or fear of death is a big motivator in these decisions, but the ethical system is created out of what the culture 'thinks' will work for them to maintain some degree of order, not just to avoid death.
The jobs we pick, who we marry, stuff we buy, I see as more directly connected to the self-image and 'cultural myths', more so than to a denial of death. The US has a prominent cultural myth of: "The one with the most toys wins." People who are viewed to be "succesful" in this sense, are generally given higher esteem. It's that thinking that drives people to want to improve their "self-image".
I suggest that even religious followers, who believe they are going to 'live forever', still realize that this is just a belief, not something they know for certain. We may try to deny this, but if we aren't certain about something, we know that we aren't certain, even if we try not to think about it. And one can observe this directly by looking at any belief we hold that we think is true, but aren't certain about.
I also don't think that denial of death is the cause of violence. Staying alive is a factor in this, but my direct observation of human conflict tells me that human conflict is generally 'thought-based'. If one group of 'self-images' identifies with something like a radical Christian ideology, and another a radical Jewish ideology, and another with a radical Muslim ideology, it's quite likely, if these groups mistake their ideologies for "the one and only word of God", that there's an excellent chance of conflict between these ideological groups. Not directly because of a fear of death, but because of the belief that 'their' ideology is the 'one truth' that must be followed...to get their "reward in heaven", immortality, or whatever. But it's the character of the beliefs, and confusing the beliefs for something they can't possibly be (the Actuality of Life), which leads to the conflict. Other people who don't have these radical beliefs, may still be in 'denial of death', but they don't kill each other without the attachment to the beliefs...to my observation.
That's my understanding on these issues, but I'm not sure what question you were asking or whether you were just making a statement?
Regards - Howard
"Thought works by conditioning. It has to get conditioned. You need conditioning to learn a language, to learn how to write, or to do all sorts of things. When the conditioning gets too rigid, though, it won't change when it should." - David Bohm
Posts: 1211 | Location: Southern California | Registered: 16 August 2002
Matthew Alper in his book The God Part of the Brain makes the same convincing case. We as biological entities are incapable of accepting our own nonexistence, therefore we create all these glorified delusions that we are immortal. "Spirituality" is simply an adaptation to the impending death that we all must realize, a way to extend our existence into the future after we physically die.
Alper is a scientific materialist, he denies that there is even any energetic component to life. I am somewhat more mystical, because I believe that an energetic component continues after we die. Alper does an excellent job of refuting religious fundamentalists, so I overlook his materialism for argument's sake.
-- The only time we see the middle of the road is as we run from side to side. R.O.Clark
Posts: 3959 | Location: Santa Fe | Registered: 11 June 2003
You can see the spaces in the above URLs that are causing some of the links not to work. Just delete those spaces!
You can click on the "edit button" (the middle one of the three at the bottom right of the message; the one with a picture of a pencil-top eraser) and delete the spaces yourself.
Sue N.
Posts: 4624 | Location: UK | Registered: 16 November 2004
"We tend to believe our political views have evolved by a process of rational thought....."
"Among the most potent motivators, it turns out, is fear."
"...heightened fear of death motivates people to defend their world views."
"In the rational group, the effects of mortality salience were entirely eliminated."
"Thought works by conditioning. It has to get conditioned. You need conditioning to learn a language, to learn how to write, or to do all sorts of things. When the conditioning gets too rigid, though, it won't change when it should." - David Bohm
Posts: 1211 | Location: Southern California | Registered: 16 August 2002
Thanks for the examining the issues and willing to discuss them. That is the intent of the post. I would say that most people make a quick subjective assessment of themselves and find they do not of have an "irrational fear problem". It is not so much people have an "irrational fear problem", but they develop a "rational fear solution" to our basic anxiety about death. This rational solution, centered in the cerebral cortex, masks the unconscious anxiety of death.
Heres an abstract of the theory.....
1)Becker uses the convincing child development theories of Soren Kiekergaard and Otto Rank and anthropological data from tribal cultures to show how fear/anxiety of existence (and possible death) is dealt with in all societies. The goal of all humans is to reconcile our animal natures - which depend on physical power and skill for the mastery of our real environment - with our developing symbolic natures, which attempts to control nature through imagination.
2) Humans are social hierarchial animals whose instinct for self-preservation and growth is similar to any animal. We require a sense of safety, comfort, and mastery of skills in our physical environment. It is the selfish (not the in the moral sense) will to live and prosper - that propels all life. These requirments for survival are very apparent in "primitive" circumstances - as in tribal nomadic cultures. Thus, the threat of famine, injury and death is alway just around the corner. The social and psychological adaptions to these circumstances are more clearly defined. We need each other because alone we are unlikely to survive. The threat and fear of death is the motivator of affliation of all human animals.
3) Human-animals eventually learn to use symbols to represent the real world. Human animals eventually confuse symbols for reality. In fact, humanity creates an "artificial symbolic world" comprised of magic and worldviews. We invent magic to control the animals, religion to have life beyond our physical reality and culture to create social efficiencies in controlling the environment. We emotionally invest in the consensual adopted worldview that promises the most protection. Idealogies, religions, modes of self-expression have a tendency to remain embedded in individual psychologies because they have solved the sense of security, comfort and significance people need. They are important because they work - people experience some real tangible success with them. They also tend to be seen as absolute solutions to meaning and purpose because of this effectiveness. The ultimate protector of our significane and worth in life is an ideology that promises immortality. Thus, we invest in various "immortality systems". These systems promise a spectrum of anxiety relief - from a paradise in heaven, to having continued a lineage of descendents, to being remembered and valued for accomplishments within a subculture.
3) We tend to affliate with those that have the skillful means (or promise them) that can provide for our safety, comfort and continued life. This is the heroic impulse and our need for belongingness that allows us to survive as a group. Just like a pack or herd, we provide status to the most percieved skillful (and thus are provided dominance); our heroes - our parents, hunters, soldiers, shamans, priests, and presidents. Heroes take advantage of their status to organize the human society according to their beliefs about safety and continued prosperity and social consensus.
4) Culture is an ARBITRARY social construction. They are symbolic roles and transactions invented to deal with the collective survival of the group. Culture is a heroically symbol rich environment that allows the conscious fear of death to become unconscious. This staves off the anxiety of death and allows confidence, and sense of freedom within its environment. The function of culture is to create the rituals, rules, conditions, social hierarchies, institutions that promise the most safety, comfort, mastery, significance and worth of the individual and state.
5)The heroic impulse and our need for belongingness and need for group efficiencies allows us to survive as a pack/tribe/hoard. Just like a social animal, we provide status to the most skillful at organizing or providing. Our heroes - which include our parents, bread-winners, soldiers, shamans, priests, and presidents. Heroes take advantage of their status to organize human society according to ideologies or beliefs. There is a implicit social consensus in what promises the most safety and continued prosperity. Absolute belief (faith) provides the emotional salve, strength and confidence to confront life. Furthermore, belief systems and ideologies are seen as "absolute", with each system percieving a threat from competing absolute.
6) Thus, gaining personal mastery and power and trusting others with it is uniquely human dilemma. The development of the ego is largely the conditioning of the human psyche to find individual worth, significance and status in an arbitrary cultural environment. We willingly give up our individual freedom and self expression to these culturely approved strategies. Significance and worth tends to be seen as a limited pie. One person's worth and status is threatening to another's worth and status. The urge to be right or the impulse to prove another wrong most often comes from the intention to bolster ones status over the other in a competitive attempt at gaining limited life.
7) On the level of ideologies, religions, and cultures - the very existence of another world-view implies that ones one world view is wrong, thus invalidating our source of comfort and security. Thus, the source of human created evil in the world is defending of one's "good" against another's "bad".
8)The conclusion of Becker is that all human activity is "religious" in the sense that any thing that brings a sense of mastery, belonging-ness or provides meaning and purpose will be pursued, maintained and defended with vigor. That sense of purpose and worth translates to conscious and/or unconscious feelings of protection and ultimately - immortality. Another conclusion - that is very hard for people to accept emotionally - is that humanity must believe in a "vital lie" to find the confidence, hope courage to confront life.
Here are some more thoughts on symbolic processing and repression/dissociation of fear.....
The key to undestanding how death anxiety repression, supression or dissociation occurs is understanding child development of ego defense mechanisms and current brain research on memory suppression, repression and dissociation.
Repression refers to the sequestering of unacceptable, conflicting or intolerable psychic material from conscious awareness. Repressed material is unconscious, that is, it is not directly accessible to consciousness. In fact, repressed psychic material cannot make itself know directly; its existence is inferred through slips of the tongue, dreams and other symbolic phenomena.
Dissociated material can, in comparison, be said to be subconscious. Knowledge of dissociated material can be as direct as knowledge of any other kind of conscious material. That is, it need not be inferred and can be directly observed by the self or others under the right circumstances (for a full discussion, see Braude, 1995).
In describing the differences between repression and dissociation, Braude (1995) and Gruenewald (1985) invoke Hilgard’s image of repressed material as existing being below a horizontal barrier, above which lies consciousness and dissociated material as being separated from consciousness by vertical barriers.
Suppression can be distinguished from both repression and dissociation in that it involves a conscious effort to ‘not think about’ something. The person engaged in suppression does not have amnesia for the suppressed material, the material does not reside sub- or unconsciously and the suppressed material can be accessed readily.
According to Cameron (1963), one of the main strivings of the human psychodynamic system is to maintain organisation and avoid disintegration. Defences are those mental and behaviorial activities that protect the system from threats to this organisation such as overwhelming, conflicting and intolerable emotions. Simply stated, the purpose of a defence is to protect the individual by helping them avoid or manage these threats (McWilliams, 1994).
Popular use of the term ‘defence’ tends to imply pathology or maladaptiveness, however, it should be noted that defences are not inherently pathological; they begin as “global, inevitable, healthy, adaptive ways of experiencing the world” (McWilliams, 1994, p. 96).
In childhood, individuals develop a preference for particular defences which, in adulthood, are relied upon and invoked unconsciously to allow the individual cope with stressful situations. Factors influencing one’s preference for a given defence or set of defences include:
(1) one’s constitutional temperament; (2) the nature of the stresses that one suffered in early childhood; (3) the defenses modeled – and sometimes deliberately taught – by parents and other significant figures; and (4) the experienced consequences of using particular defenses
The status of dissociation as a defence is acknowledged in the psychoanalytic literature (see Cameron, 1963, and Ellenberger, 1970). It is understood as “an attempt to preserve ego integration by reducing ego span, that is by eliminating some ego functions in order to bring emotional tension within manageable limits. . . . The normal person practices dissociation in order to hold off something traumatic, so that he [or she] can prepare [them]self to accept, digest and ultimately assimilate it” (Cameron, 1963, p. 341).
Other neuroscience and cognitive work that supports suppression includes
Prefrontal Regions Orchestrate Suppression of Emotional Memories via a Two-Phase Process Brendan E. Depue,1,2* Tim Curran,1,2,3 Marie T. Banich1,2,3,4 Science 13 July 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5835, pp. 215 - 219 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/317/5835/215
An outline of a child's reconcilation of the body and spirit.....
A baby is born with an innate expectation of experience (resolving the moot nature versus nuture debate). We expect to feel safe in the sense we develop normally in the context of safety. First, this expectation of safety comes on a physical level. Then it comes on an emotional and social level.
Infants experience an almost overwhelming world, a frightening place of unknown danger. Their discrimination abilities are still undeveloped and see the world as it is - a world of giants whom they depend on almost all of their security and comfort. In a way, we are just like any animal - alert and vigilant to the unknown, immediately satisfied or disatisfied, accepting of care and comfort - but also confused. Being born as an animal in a symbolic world is tricky road to follow.
First, there is a feeling absolute power and security in the child. Second, there is realization of our finitude and anxiety. Finally a mastery of symbolic language and transfer of anxiety from emotional centers to higher cognitive levels. This latter development provides the social skills, self confidence and ego boundaries to "solve" the anxiety problem by repressing it or, at least, disassociating from it.
To make this more concrete; first, a demanding body and unconditional loving parents make life easy. The baby is under the illusion of absolute power. He wimpers and is cared for. But then our vulnerability is realized with minor accidents. But more subtly, there are social conditions and consequences made on his/her care. We are made socially vulnerable as the world turns out to be more complex (rule bound) then we have been led to experience.
The conditions of care, at first, are simple and physically direct. Our parents will instill safe motor behaviors that remove us from immediate dangers (the electric sockets). The amount of the anxiety developed during this stage is proportional to how much care and attention the child receives and his/her disposition. However, we are reminded of dangerous realities all the time, that is certain.
Soon, parental upbringing soon turns to more stringent emotional control and symbolic behavioral requirements. In this last stage, we all learn that words (symbols representing the world NOT that world as it is) are as potent as physical power, primal demands and crying for care. The child soon learns that NEGOTIATION (using developing symbolic processing ability) is vital to his survival. Manipulating symbols in a society ruled by its cultural symbols is now the main aim.
As the child's developing ego and abstraction ability progresses and his realization of actual death develops, the child literally displaces the earlier body-felt anxiety and rationalizes that into the ego. He represses it. The ego's symbolic processors takes on the role managing this anxiety from our emotional centers (from the amygdala to the executive functions of the cerebral cortex?). That is why we don't FEEL this primal anxiety and in fact, why we can function normally (if putting on the blinders of repression is normal). So, the source of violence is "thought-based". But, simiply displaced from its orginal source that still exists in the unconscious.
At this point, a childs goal is to gain social status by developing self esteem and self confidence. They emulate those that show some mastery of the universe - something very desireable for survival. The begin to identify (with a big I) with their first heros - the parents. This Heroic Impulse is infused throughout society.
You can see this progression in our own children too. First the child is dependent as your pet for food and comfort - mostly getting what they want from infantile demands. At this stage they have sensible fears of real objects that can cause harm, such as dogs and strange people. But then they realize they must perform certain physical demands (holding the spoon right). Their care is contingent on some approved behavior. The next step goes onto the emotional control realm where tantrums are turned to attitudes engendering polite behavior - all of this approved behavior being culturally specific.
Eventually, once the function of symbolic speech is developed, we demand that the child holds certain agreeable BELIEFS to gain our support. Once the childs abstraction ability is fully developed he/she tends to IMAGINE the boogey men under the bed or closet or even develops imaginary friends which boost his/her self esteem and confidence. At this point, stick & stones AND words can both defend him and hurt him. He is on the road to becoming a fully symbolic meaning-seeking creature within a symbolic-driven society. He begins to build his own self esteem by constantly comparing his/her treatment with others through the cultural signs of his status. Children are almost ridiciously narcisstic. They are critically and minutely aware of unfairness and what that may mean to their inherent worth (Bobby got a bigger scoop then me!). Of course, this is extrapolated into the crass materialism and status seeking purpose of our culture.
A childs self esteem project within a culture is complete when only selected words or authority figures will hurt him. He has formed boundaries around his society constructed self through attack and defense - nevermore seeing the world as it really is. This entire development serves to bolster the power of the child to play successfully in the arbitrary "human symbolic game" called culture.
In a way, the child's drive to independence is automatic. He raises himself. To be human is to reconcile the instinctive with the symbolic through developing self esteem and social status. The parenting needs only be "good enough". The childs drive to self esteem will be found in whatever form the society allows it be expressed. The amount resilience in some children is amazing. But not all have the constitution (genes, biochemical imbalances, that lead to moderate traits etc.) or moderate environment to negoitiate the path.
A person's strong self expression towards life and transcedence may not match the prevailing cultural norms. This person will seek fringe groups for self esteem or go underground, and lead a double-life if need be, expressing his self in hiding.
To take this to extreme levels of pathology for illustration; the neurotic is a person that sees the world as it is - without symbolic illusion - so creates all sorts of fetishes (compulsive hand washing, paranoia, weird sex, or needs to control others) to control his world and thereby protect and gain life. These are necessary props for a weak belief in his inherent security. On the other extreme level, the schizophrenic so abstracts and imagines all the possible ways in which he could possibly transcend the world through symbols - they imagine they are jesus, birds (or other convienient immortal) and/or develop alternate realities.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: janek,
Posts: 32 | Location: New York | Registered: 09 January 2007
Janek, great thread. I been following from the sidelines. Have you ever read Rollo May's Escape from Freedom? He covers a lot of these same themes. His book ought to be a primer for anyone who hopes to critique the political establishment.
Posts: 1162 | Location: Boulder Creek Watershed | Registered: 14 February 2004
I have not read Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm nor the The Meaning of Anxiety by Rollo May. I am a rank beginner at existentialism but am very impressed with it all...thats why I'm so eager to discuss it. When you combine this existential thought with eastern philosophy and practice (I do mean action) it forms a potent way of understanding and experiencing the world. I'll, no doubt, get copies and read them.
Posts: 32 | Location: New York | Registered: 09 January 2007
Thanks for the correction. I've not read the Meaning of Anxiety yet, but two other books by may are classics: THe Cry for Myth, and Man in Search of Himself. Fromm, of course, taps into some powerful landscape and I find Castaneda to be walking the same ground but with a decidedly nuanced approach that is unique unto himself.
I am currently re-reading all his work having done so over twenty years ago and taking even more away this time.
Posts: 1162 | Location: Boulder Creek Watershed | Registered: 14 February 2004
The following description is designed to bring up some existential feelings of our finitude. Often we allow our rational minds to "take over" our awareness, so much so that it takes the credit of another part of our selves that has often solved many of our life problems. These awarenesses are often subtle body-felt experiences that are masked by our logical selves. Its the intuitive part of you, that inner voice, that has no voice, just feelings, the one that comes up with "aha" solutions while showering, golfing or when allowing your rational self to be quiet, silent. One of the aims of contemplative practice is to come to terms with our inevitable impending death in concrete emotional terms - not just a shallow intellectual admission. Going to fight the conflict in Iraq (and surviving) or being Hospice volunteer is a better solution to this deep awareness, but here it is. Please realize this takes some courage to contemplate deeply as it relates to YOU.....
You may die in a sudden catastrophe or quick stroke but more likely, in this society, where we can extend life, there will more likely be a time when your breathing will be increasingly difficult and rasps as it goes in and rattles when it goes out. When each breath will be a struggle and you dimly realize your sense faculties disintegrating. You will slowly realize that you can no longer move your arms or legs or will not be able to control your bowels. You will feel imprisoned in your body as if its made of rock. A thousand pounds will crush your chest. Everything around you, your room and the people attending you , floats like a mirage. Your consciousness loses its stability. You are being crushed and your mind is going! You do your best not to panic and try to stay present in what is happening. You realize you are urinating and that spittle is dripping out your mouth and tears fill your eyes. You can't control the fluids in your body anymore; the water element is dissolving. As it dissolves you feel you are being swept away by a river, churned by huge waves, engulfed by tons of water. You are drowning in your own fluids as water fills your lungs and heart. Your sense faculties begin to disintegrate. Sight, taste, touch and smell are gone. Yet, you still hear your loved ones around you. You hear them talk about you and to you. About how you may be feeling. What kind of life you led. Even misgivings and unresolved issues. But, now its too late. You begin to have a rapid series of hallucinations in which everthing Then everything dissolves into light. You sense a movement of energy downwards, and you are in a field of light that has no center or periphery. There is no other, and all sense of aversion has gone. You begin to sense that your sense of "I" is disappearing. That independent, unique, permanent and very special self - the one that can adroitly discern who and what is worthy, who and what is not. It sets us apart from the world and therefore functions as the basis of anger. But anger and aversion is now disappearing so we are too. There is e an experience of clarity without dimension. You feel a movement of energy upward and the light intensifies. Then the implicit sense of "I" begins to fade. The "I" that persists as the observer when the mind is quiet, still and not thinking. The greater sense of clarity begins and we begin to lose a sense of affinity - even a affinity for life! We are getting ready to let go. To leave it - our material things, our family, our prestige, accomplishments behind. Finally, the vestiges of our personal mysteries and ignorance begins to dissolve. When this is complete, there is no reference, no orientation. There is total blackness. When the black brillance arises the process can no longer be reversed. You are and will be dead.
Posts: 32 | Location: New York | Registered: 09 January 2007
A man of knowledge as Castaneda suggests is someone who has more than come to terms with the meaning of death. A metaphor might be a man driving along while noticing approching headlights in his review mirror that keeps getting closer and closer. As praxis, once one crosses the threshold of fear or makes a herioc effort to face his or her existential angst, the fear is overcome allowing one to live fully in the Now. No small feat by any standard given everything a man or woman sees, touches, smells, hears, is mediated by technology.
The point of facing anxiety and fear in any context is to discover character whereas character is not a quest for modern man, but it can be found on a battlefield, or in the middle of a desert, or on top of a mountain. The problem, of course, is the addictions that keep one from approaching the thershold experience. Or the over preoccupation with dialouge at the expense of experience.
Posts: 1162 | Location: Boulder Creek Watershed | Registered: 14 February 2004
Facing ones fears directly, without absolutist symbolic crutches, is the main challenge. The reason that the movie "V for Vendetta" was so well liked is that it showed so well the relationship between fear and principle. Although all principles are finite and therefore to some degree unreal, we can bet on principles that seem to allow more personal expression and individual expression for the greater number. Of course, these principles must be freely chosen or discovered. I wonder what are the ethical implications of V's fradulent imprisonment and torture of Evey for her betterment?
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Posts: 32 | Location: New York | Registered: 09 January 2007
Another reason I like the film so much is that Ernest Becker's scholarship does not embrace the idea that discoveries ought to be divorced from action or value judgment. The reason he was so scorned by his peers in his time was that his work led him to at least speculate its implications for public policy.
I certainly do not want to give anyone the impression that I am overly concerned with thinking about death. Afterall, "healthy repression" is one what allows us to develop our character. But, we ARE having a discussion on how the denial of death permeates our entire culture, so some strategies for counterbalance seems appropriate.
Considering that Tibetan spiritual culture has an entire meditative curriculm based on accepting ones bodily impermenance (The Book of the Dead), this is the least that we can do to direct our own enlightenment.
In that spirit, I offer another movie that centers on the theme existential death. It is an australian made film called "Look Both Ways" (as in crossing the steet!). It does a fine job of examining how ordinary people in real situations deal with the prospect of their or others demise. See
If unabashed defense of thought is what causes us so much suffering, then techniques of putting beliefs into service of oneself (instead of the other way around) could also be helpful. Read
So, how does these motivations become institutionalized in society? Becker was a cultural anthropologist as well as psychoanyaltic scholar. He used tribal observations and descriptions to make these basic repressions more apparent in society....
Primitive rituals in all societies tend to strip away all the cultural abstractions and are nearer to the central issue - the tribe's survival in the immediate dangerous environment. Hunters are "idolized" as heroes because they represent the physical power, talent that will allow the tribe to survive. These hunters soon learned, not only to depend on their physical powers, but also symbolic magical rituals that control the animals and eventually their fellow tribe members through guilt, duty and obligation. But, do not trivilize this strategy. Magical ritual and sacrifice provided the cultural glue and class boundaries to create a more efficient society. Magic is simply Religion that we know longer believe. Todays religion is tomorrows magic.
That is why society needs to have heroic myths, magic, religion, ideology, or ideas - they provide a sense of symbolic security (alleviating the primal anxiety); group cooperation and validation; and institutional efficiencies to maintain these illusions and provide meaning in our lives - a reason to go forward collectively through "culture".
Of course, our culture conspires with our leaders through these satisfy these symbolic needs all the time (Support our Heroic Troops). When you add the need to replace weak parental hero figures with stronger heroic affliations during times of crisis, then you have a method of controlling the masses. However, most of the time, we give up our freedom willingly for the reasons discussed.
So, culturization is the rationalization of anxiety into rituals, customs, institutions that promise to extend our safety, prosperity and immortality. However Idolization of any Absolute or as Marcus Borg, historical christian scholar, has put it - "absolutizing the finite" - is the main unreality. The "Finite" being anything which you place a label or category around in the the world. This is the cause of much of the man-made evil in the world.
Ideologies, hobbies, football teams and most of human activities with which we identify or cathect (with a big I and C) are simply self consistent symbolic representations or activities that promise the same degrees of safety, power, self-expression, security, prosperity or immortality. Perhaps some of us follow this list exactly as we mature. When finite ideologies are made absolute - humans will defend their immortality symbols to the death (or symbolic death). Social ostracism or deeming another as inherently unworthy is a way of symbolically killing another human being. By diminishing another, you have bolstered yourself. Why would soceer fans erupt into violence over a game? The cathected team obviously provides some sort of feeling of superiority to the fan which must be defended.
We literally learn to deceive ourselves with culturally created social fictions in order to take life with self confidence. We give up our freedom willingly for the promise of safety, security, status and immortality. For some people, realization that meaning is arbitrarily created through a compromise of personal expression and culturally approved symbols is depressing (You mean it isn't absolute?). That doesn't mean you should not pursue them, but be aware of the game, making sure there are not other modes of reaction or "immortality projects" less consequential or harmful - when your sense of purpose or meaning is threatened.
Beckers sequel to "Denial of Death" is "Escape from Evil" which outlines the historical development of societies in response to death denial. This book is especially interesting to me because it has such explanatory power for seemingly different cultural practices. It all comes down to same thing - resolving our finite animal natures which see the world as it is and our symbolic natures which can get some things right, but have inherent limitless boundaries into the imaginary. Taking anything as absolute - even the idea of rationalism - is yet just another finite idea in an infinite universe.
Posts: 32 | Location: New York | Registered: 09 January 2007
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