Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates Read online

  Good, Daryl. Well said. But let’s be perfectly clear here, we’re not talking about your twenty-first-century scientific mind that calls ’em the way it sees ’em. No, we’re talking about your regular, sitting-here-on-our-porch consciousness. Right now, do you really believe that your days are numbered, that each moment that ticks by is subtracting from your allotted moments as a living human being? That when you reach your that’s-all-she-wrote moment, you will cease to exist in every conceivable sense of existence?

  Huh? You’re mumbling, Daryl. We know it’s a daunting question, but perhaps we can help you out here.

  Our guess is that, in your heart of hearts, you don’t really believe you’re going to die. And the reason for that is that you are a civilized human being. That’s nothing to be ashamed of—at least not yet. We human beings have one heck of a problem accepting and incorporating this obvious fact into our consciousness. So what we do on a moment-to-moment, day-to-day basis is deny our mortality. Actually, we usually do this fairly easily with all the help we get from the social structures and customs of whatever civilization we happen to live in.

  In his masterwork, The Denial of Death, the twentieth-century cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote that even though we know objectively that we are mortal, we cook up all kinds of schemes to escape this devastating truth. (Becker died just two months prior to being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his book—an untimely death if ever there was one.)

  Why we desire to deny our mortality is pretty obvious: the prospect of death is terrifying! It brings on the ultimate angst. It gives us the fantods to face the fact that we are only here for a short time, and when we are gone, we’re gone for eternity. How can we enjoy life with the clock ticking so loudly in our ear?

  According to Becker, the only way most of us deal with this situation is delusion—in fact, the Big Delusion. The B.D. is the basic human drive—way more basic than the sex drive, he says—and it gives rise to “immortality systems,” nonrational belief structures that give us a way to believe we’re immortal. There’s the ever-popular strategy of identifying ourselves with a tribe, race, or nation that lives on into the indefinite future, with us somehow a part of it. Then there’s the immortality-through-art system, in which the artist foresees her work enduring forever, and therefore herself immortalized too—in the pantheon of Great Artists or, at the very least, as a signature at the bottom of a sunset landscape propped up in a corner of her grandchildren’s attic.

  Then there are the top-of-the-market immortality systems enshrined in the world’s religions, ranging from living on as part of the cosmic energy in the East to sailing off to be with Jesus in the West. At a less lofty level, there is the immortality-through-wealth system. This one provides us with a nifty life goal to wake up to every morning: go get more money. That way we don’t have to think about the Final Bottom Line.

  Wealth also admits us to a tribe that will live on: the exclusive club of movers and shakers. There’s even a bonus—we can pass along a piece of ourselves, our moolah, to the next generation.

  But caveat emptor! (Or, if you’re not from ancient Rome, “Let the buyer beware!”)

  When Bob found out he was going to inherit a fortune after his sickly father died, he decided he needed a woman to enjoy it with. So one evening he went to a singles’ bar where he spotted the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

  Her natural beauty took his breath away.“I may look like just an ordinary guy,” he said as he walked up to her, “but in just a week or two my father will die, and I’ll inherit twenty million dollars.”

  “I should have bought more crap.”

  Impressed, the woman went home with him that evening. Three days later, she became his stepmother.

  The go-for-the-bucks route offers another popular way of simulating immortality: donate to an immortal institution, hopefully one that will emblazon your name on the front of a building, or cut out the middleman and just build a monument to yourself.

  But before you assume that your vow of poverty (or at least of a middle-income salary) will get you off the hook, think again, says Becker. You’re still probably striving for some earthly goal that lulls you into believing you’re here forever. Say you strive to be “hip” or “saintly” or “style-setting”—it ’s the same deal. You’re still buying into the Big Delusion that you’re outsmarting the Reaper by adopting a role that transcends your puny, scary individuality and makes you “bigger than life” . . . and death.

  We sustain these various delusions simply by being civilized, according to Becker. Virtually every civilization has evolved a shared immortality system. In fact, these systems are the basic function of a culture. Without them, we’d all go wacko with death-angst and we wouldn’t be able to keep our civilization humming along. We’d return to the law of the jungle. Denial of death is civilization’s survival strategy!

  It’s easier to sustain a delusion if you have it in common with others in your culture, or better yet, right inside your own house. Consider the shared delusion of Clara and her husband.

  Clara went to a psychiatrist and said, “Doctor, you’ve got to do something about my husband—he thinks he’s a refrigerator!”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” the doctor replied. “Lots of people have harmless delusions. It will pass.”

  “But you don’t understand,” Clara insisted. “He sleeps with his mouth open, and the little light keeps me awake.”

  Unfortunately, immortality systems make us behave badly. When we identify with one immortality system and invest it with ultimate personal meaning, we have this nasty problem of coming up against other folks with different systems. We often see this in the clash of world religions, and it presents a major problem: all our immortality systems can’t be right, so the others’ must be wrong.

  But civilization has provided a remedy for that too: Kill the bastards! Once they are dead, they won’t be a threat to our own sense of immortality. Hey, works for us.

  A lot of ink has been spilt over all the blood that has been spilt in the name of a particular religious doctrine and its specific immortality system. Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, the bible of the “new atheist” movement, has an exhaustive inventory of all the crimes against humanity committed to maintain the primacy of our own religion. But surrealist comedian Emo Phillips has a story that pretty much sums up the situation.

  “You picked the wrong religion, period.

  I’m not going to argue about it.”

  I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said,“Stop! Don’t do it!”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” he said.

  “Well, there’s so much to live for!”

  “Like what?”

  “Well . . . are you religious?”

  He said yes.

  I said, “Me too! See? We’ve got lots in common already, so let’s talk this thing through. Are you Christian or Buddhist?”

  “Christian.”

  “Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?”

  “Protestant.”

  “Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?”

  “Baptist.”

  “Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?”

  “Baptist Church of God!”

  “Me too! Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you reformed Baptist Church of God?”

  “Reformed Baptist Church of God!”

  “Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915?”

  He said, “Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915!”

  I said,“Die, heretic scum,” and pushed him off.

  Phillips has an even shorter version (if you’re running out of time):

  Probably the toughest time in anyone’s life is when you have to murder a loved one because they’re the devil.


  ONE DEEP THINKER’S ILLUSION IS ANOTHER’S WISDOM

  Becker’s contention that denial of death is mankind’s Big Delusion comes with an impressive pedigree. In his short treatise “The Future of an Illusion,” the father of psychoanalysis and mother of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud, named the fear of death as one of the major factors that drive humans to create and defend the illusion of gods and religion. Because we are helpless before the prospect of death, our unconscious invents a father-figure-in-the-sky to help us cope. Conveniently, Sky Daddy rewards good behavior too, so, Siggy says, we have a compelling reason to resist our most antisocial instincts—“incest, cannibalism, lust for killing,” that sort of thing. But most importantly, the Ultimate Father Figure alleviates our fear of death by providing life everlasting for those who conform to society’s demands.

  In short, Freud thinks belief in God and in God’s promise of eternal life is a cultural fairy tale designed to help us escape the specter of death.

  Never one to shy away from contradictions, Freud later cooked up the Todtriebe, or drive toward death (often mistranslated as the “death instinct”). Freud’s original hypothesis had been that the pleasure principle, Eros—the drive to maximize life, love, pleasure, and productivity—was humankind’s prime motive. But as Freud grew older he looked down upon humanity, and, lo, something else seemed to be in play here, something not so pretty. Like all that war and mayhem couldn’t be accounted for by just Eros. Enter the Death Drive.

  At its most benign, the Death Drive expresses itself in our need to withdraw from stimulation and pursue peace and quiet; it’s a kind of dress rehearsal for death. Freud referred to this as the “Nirvana principle,” the need to “conduct the restlessness of life into the stability of the inorganic.” Be your own compost. Anyone who has watched bowling on TV from a BarcaLounger can relate.

  So all this means we should turn our Todtriebe inward, right? No way, says Freud. This is one powerful drive, the Todtriebe, and once let out of its cage it turns into a monster: it won’t be satisfied with simply watching Bowling for Dollars; it’s got an appetite for masochism and suicide.

  So we should turn our Death Drive outward, right? Nein! says Siggy. That way lie murder, mayhem, and war. Yikes! What’s a poor schlub to do?

  See a shrink, says Freud. The goal of therapy—and of living—is to harmonize the Death Drive and Eros, get them into balance.

  JUNG AT HEART

  Just because the whole God-religion-eternal-hereafter package comes from our unconscious doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s all hog swill, argued Freud’s onetime disciple, the Swiss analytical psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Maybe our unconscious is wiser than our conscious mind. Maybe what Sigmund calls unconscious fabrication is really unconscious confirmation. Maybe we don’t make up religions, we discover them inside us. And just maybe, as the unconscious psyche gets passed on from generation to generation, it evolves on its own, getting smarter while our conscious minds merely continue to limp along.

  What is really going on, says Carl Gustav, is that religions speak for the psyche by providing symbols that come “from the heart.” The reason these symbols have revelatory power is that they are products of our deep, unconscious mind, a storehouse of instinctual wisdom that is accessible to our conscious mind only through dreams, cultural myths, and religions. It is when the conscious mind gets out of touch with this deeper psyche—becomes alienated from it—that we develop neurotic symptoms, like getting depressed as hell by the ultimate meaninglessness of it all.

  “Look, making you happy is out of the question,

  but I can give you a compelling narrative for your misery.”

  PSYCHED!

  Had Jung lived just a little longer—he died in 1961—he might have added psychedelics to his list of pathways to one’s deeper, more enlightened psyche. Magic mushroom and LSD trips provided many a sixties seeker with transcendental insights into what appeared—at least at the time—to be a Higher Reality.

  Yet to our knowledge, none of these drug-induced states produced an account that is either as astounding or as clear as Jill Bolte Taylor’s meticulous observations while watching herself undergo a massive stroke. In 1996, this Harvard neuroscientist watched in fascination as the left hemisphere of her brain shut down. In the process, Dr. Taylor came to know a spiritual reality that Jung only dreamed of.

  Taylor explains that the right hemisphere of the brain processes what is going on for us at the present moment. It thinks in pictures, taking all of the sights and sounds and smells occurring for us right now and putting them together in a whole. In our right brain, we are “perfect, whole, and beautiful.” We experience ourselves as an “energy being” that is connected to all the energy in the universe and to the energy of the whole human family.

  By contrast, our left brain is linear and methodical. It takes the present moment and picks out details, connects them to past learning, and projects future possibilities. It thinks in language, not pictures, and one of the things it says is “I am.” It experiences the self as separate from the energy flow around it and separate from other human beings. It is the function of this left brain that Taylor largely lost during her stroke.

  As her left brain shut down, she experienced herself as boundaryless and at one with all the energy in the universe. She felt peaceful and euphoric. At the same time, her left brain—her anxious brain—would intermittently kick in with the message, “You are in danger of dying! You must get help!” But getting help without the sustained assistance of her left brain was nearly impossible. Even after she managed to phone for help, as she tried to explain her situation, all she could do was bark like a dog.

  Later, in the hospital, she experienced the world around her as chaos and noise, but then suddenly felt her spirit soar through a “sea of euphoria.”

  Taylor’s conclusion? The world is full of loving, peaceful people who can “step to the right of their left brain.” We are at once beings who are “the life-force power of the universe” and also beings who are separate from the world and separate from others. And most significantly, to some degree we can choose to be in either place at any given time.1

  What Taylor experienced in her right brain was what Jung called the deep, unconscious source of religious experience. Jung had only speculated about where this experience originates; Taylor pinpointed its location. Taylor’s right-brain experience exploded her left brain’s constructs of time and space. Her experience was transcendental: she was part of the Immortal All.

  Jung says that the unconscious psyche is not only instinctually aware of the fact that we die, but actually accepts this fact. The psyche prepares itself for death, usually many years before it happens. While our rational, conscious mind sees death as an anxiety-provoking, grim finale, our psyche—our right brain?—accepts it.

  Jeez, I guess there is more to death than coffin nails, isn’t there?

  Yes, Daryl, and we’re afraid it only gets scarier.

  { 2 }

  Let Your Angst Be Your Umbrella

  Daryl, we’ve got some bad news and some good news. Which do you want first?

  I’ll take the bad news.

  Okay, here it is—this is going to get a whole lot more anxious-making.

  Great. So what’s the good news?

  The good news is that after we finish this book, we’re taking our wives on a vacation to the south of France!

  But first back to Becker. He says that in the end neither psychology nor organized religion can provide us with a sanctuary from the life-is-meaningless-and-then-you-die problem. Neither of those can rid us of the anxiety of facing death, or its flip side, the anxiety of facing a life that is finite and can never satisfy our yearning for infinity.

  Those anxieties are part of the human condition, whether we like it or not (personally, we don’t). Add to them the fact that we are the only creatures that pay death taxes, and what we have is a tinderbox of angst.

  Not to worry; Becker says there is a way to authe
ntically accept our mortality and transcend it in a manner that puts us in touch with a Higher Reality without the need to make trouble with anybody else ’s immortality system. To understand this route, we have to reach way back to the mid-nineteenth century, long before Freud or Jung, to the Danish philosopher and religious thinker Søren Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism.

  Most of us would rather skip over the anxiety of contemplating death and jump immediately into some happily-ever-after immortality system like, say, a front-row lawn chair in Heaven. But that hippity-hop route is a highway to Nowhere according to Becker and his inspiration, Kierkegaard. If we skip the step of confronting Death head on and of hanging in there while we experience the prospect of Eternal Nothingness, if we deny ourselves the full load of dread and terror that accompanies living in the face of “Nevermore,” then we ’ll also miss out on our only chance to experience transcendence. That, says Søren, is because angst is our ultimate teacher!

  Hold it right there, guys! This Dane sounds like a nut job! For starters, it’s a well-known fact that you learn things better if you’re in a good mood than in a bad mood. And let me tell you, I’m getting in a real bad mood listening to this stuff.

  We know whereof you speak, Daryl. We couldn’t help but notice that you are quaking in your skin, tears running down your cheeks as you focus on the incontrovertible fact that Life is short and Death is sure. And we have to admit, it doesn’t exactly feel like the best time for a learning experience. But let’s give Søren a chance to make his case. You know, out of respect for the dead?

  First we need to do some catch-up on the human condition. In The Concept of Dread and The Sickness unto Death (it was those upbeat titles that made S.K. such a hot seller in Denmark), Kierkegaard arrived at the meaning of anxiety and despair through a mix of philosophy and psychological introspection. But the psychological problems Søren was interested in weren’t the kind that spring from one’s personal history—like, say, that your mother always preferred your brother and that your dad thought you were a wuss—but rather the issues we all have as a result of being human and mortal. In fact, we suspect that if Kierkegaard were alive today, he might think the neuroses your corner psychotherapist treats are mere substitutes for our real issue: being responsible for living a meaningful life on the edge of the abyss of death.