A New American Phenomenon
I spent probably the first half of my life in one or the other state of acute fear. Due to a variety of circumstances, one of them asthma, I came to know the fear of imminent death. It was so visceral, so primordial and pre-verbal, it still defies description for me. I can fully understand why someone would do almost anything to make that feeling stop and to live his life as if death were someone else's problem.
But over the years, as I've gotten healthier, I've become less and less afraid. I don't believe that was just because of my improved physical state. There were at least a few times that I thought death was possible if not within proximity. On looking back, it seems to me that the process actually worked in reverse. I think I became healthier because I became less afraid. In particular, I became less afraid of death.
One reader, Synduatic, commented on one of my recent Huffington Post blogs on suffering. He implied that a good portion of our well-being stems from our ability to meet death. He paraphrased a few great thinkers who concluded that to avoid death was to avoid a free life:
A rich philosophical tradition, to which you gave passing reference, surrounds these ideas, too. Plato said that philosophy is a meditation on and a preparation for death; Seneca said that he or she who learns how to die unlearns slavery; and Montaigne said that to philosophize is to learn how to die.
I had to agree. He pointed to a deep fracture in the American psyche because there is no culture that shuns death (or suffering) the way ours does. And what we shun, we fear. And what we fear controls us.
This resistance is so pervasive, that death itself surprises us even though, as we can all agree, we've all been dying since time began. Tunnel-visioned this way, we behave illogically, as if with just one more pill or one more wave of research or one more face lift, we could somehow skip the last stop on the line. On his blog, a bemused Terry Roberts recalls one 90-year old woman who found out she was very ill and would soon be dying. Stunned, she said, "How could this happen to me? Just bad luck I guess."
Richard Heffner (on the PBS series, "The Open Mind") alluded to what may be one of the many reasons we resist death the way we do in the United States. Its very nature has changed over the last 40 or 50 years. Where at one time a stroke would have been the end point of a life, that point has become an interminably elongated line with a perpetually retreating horizon. Due to the entrenchment of chronic disease, he writes, the "possibilities for a gentle closure of life are often overwhelmed by uncontrolled physical pain, excessive financial burden, unresponsive care plans, and emotional isolation."
He goes on to underline that with the following:
"There has developed in contemporary culture a profound dread of death and the process of dying."
I'd like to take it a step further. My observation is that we don't just fear death, nor do we just ignore it by housing our dying in group homes or hospitals. Out of unprecedented decades of comfort in this country, we simply refuse it. It is the most systematic -- and systemic -- delusion in world history.
And if what Synduatic says is true -- that spiritual and physical health are built on an acceptance of our mortality -- then we are either forced to redefine health or remake ourselves in our own distorted images.
What Makes You Healthy? Not What We Think.
In that same post, which seemed to bring out the best and brightest readers and the most thoughtful comments, someone asked me what I meant by health. I had to stop and think about it. I had been using the word as it is used in common parlance and didn't really consider what I was saying more specifically.
And when it comes to my work, this is significant because the movement towards health is the goal of all that I do. How do I know when my patients are "done?" Is it because they say so? Because I say so? Because an insurance company says so?
Most people, if asked, would say simply that health is the absence of sickness. But that just begs the question and then we have not one but two undefined concepts, both health and sickness.
While I obviously can't speak for everyone, I believe there is an American Gestalt or cultural philosophy about health. And I also believe that this perspective is neither healthy nor accurate.
For one thing, the modern medical philosophe doesn't accept death at all. He works furiously against it. On at least one level, he defines health by the absence of death. I am not referring to health solely in the physical sense. Obviously once we're dead, health has no meaning in the way people normally use the word. Yet, that is where we are all going. Death is a part of who and what we are. Thus, the colloquial and accepted definition of health precludes us from being mortal. This may sound simplistic, but philosophically it makes all the difference in the world because it perpetuates a belief system that is a lie. Health, by definition if it is to be accurate, must somehow incorporate the idea of mortality.
Furthermore, it denies another even more important truth: that we are not just our bodies and real health does not stem from an HDL reading that is within "normal" parameters. It is much, much more than that.
For most moderns, health is what looks good. Clear skin, thin thighs, white teeth. Healthy has a growing family, works for a high salary, and never takes a day off. It doesn't get a cold. It doesn't need a lot of sleep. And it doesn't feel pain. Healthy never suffers, has endless energy and is in a state of constant productivity and unrestricted enjoyment.
So, what if I said, "Not necessarily?"
Health as Reality, Adaptability and Vitality
Most of what's involved in having those Hollywood healthy looks is the suppression of symptoms -- the wiping away of acne or rashes, the sucking out of body fat, the bleaching of teeth. Got a cough? Shut it down with a teaspoon of dextromethorphan or codeine. Got dyspepsia from eating poorly? Pound it down with a little Prilosec™. Very little thought is given to what erasing the symptoms without treating or changing the cause can do, but that's the way Western medicine has evolved. And that has affected the way we see ourselves --as potentially immortal if we stay symptom free.
Over the years, I have met an astonishing number of beautiful people who don't get colds, haven't had a fever since they were children, and are as sick as they can get. And I have met other people in the throes of incredibly uncomfortable acute disease who are far healthier than pharmaceutical companies would have them imagine. In truth, it takes quite a bit of vitality to produce a fever or an inflammatory response. An acute disease that is fought off is a sign of a healthy organism. The truly sick ones bypass that altogether and move into chronic disease which indurates, alters, and weakens at far more fundamental and dangerous levels.
Health is not solely a matter of being symptom-free. It is, in my eyes, more the byproduct of a spiritual state.
A choice one of my teachers put to us: "Who was healthier, Evel Knievel or Helen Keller?" A few people in class picked the motorcycle daredevil. After all, with the exception of some broken bones, wasn't he full of energy and adventure and had full use of his faculties? Wasn't Helen Keller blind and deaf from a terrible fever? How could that be healthy?
And he explained that even though her body was imperfect, her spiritual, emotional and mental state was a better example of true health and balance than the deliberate recklessness of Evel Knievel. Even with her deficiencies, she was more centered, more focused, more capable of being of service, more vital, more loving.
The best definition of health I have ever encountered is to be found in the Organon of the Medical Art by Samuel Hahnemann. According to Hahnemann, health is a spiritual, mental and physical amalgam. It begins with an accurate awareness of one's self as a spiritual being, the absence of delusions and fixations, an understanding of one's purpose in life, the vitality necessary to pursue that purpose (even if one is blind or limited to a wheelchair), the ability to adapt to change as it arises, and the willingness to give and receive love.
In his philosophy, to actively suppress acute disease is the beginning of all true chronic physical and mental illness. And that suppression unfortunately is all that our current medical protocol is based upon.
Health as Meeting Mortality Head On
I'm not looking for an early death. I don't want to suffer either. But I know that Synduatic is right. There is no way to avoid it. Not if we want to be truly healthy. And that is the paradoxical truth right at the heart of it: To be healthy, we must be able to die.
The more delusional we are, the more in denial about who and what we are; the more in denial, the sicker we are. It may manifest in our minds or our bodies, but manifest it will.
In the U.S. that denial manifests to a large extent as thrill seeking and addiction (gambling, alcohol, meth, danger, pornography). When I was still a graduate student, my supervisor told me, "All heedlessness is based in a fear of mortality. All addiction is a way of denying both the fear and death."
Damiano Iocovozzi, a fellow Huffington Post blogger, wrote in a comment to another post ("Modern Medicine:Healing or Stealing?"),
The great American medical business machine cranks onward with unhealthy advertisements offering every tonic & pill, inventing diagnoses that are pushed with the greatest solemnity. It feeds into the stigma most have on anything in decline or dying. Sometimes I think that in the USA death is optional!
So, in answer to that simple and incredibly difficult question: Health is not what we think it is. It is more. More than the end of a cold. More than a creature comfort. More than a pimple-free skin. It is balanced thinking and acceptance of reality, whether we like that reality or not.
Here's the truth for me: I don't like death any more than I did 25 years ago. I lament it every time. I can't watch a rabbit get chased by a dog without cringing. I am not complacent about suffering. It moves me to either help or to frustration if I can't. But I'm not afraid. And I don't turn my gaze. I look straight down the road, knowing where it leads and where we all must go. I have learned that I am not my body and that Love transcends all things; that the emphasis currently placed on how we look and what we have is the foundation not of good health but of illness in its most insidious form.
I'd like to close with this quote from Synduatic and my thanks:
Thus, at a basic level, your piece is about philosophy to the extent that suffering is a form of death. And as you may have gathered, philosophy, for me, has everything to do with death and various forms of death. We die when we give up certain dogmatic presuppositions. We die when we give up certain unarticulated assumptions. And when we give them up and turn them loose it's a form of death in order to be reborn, regenerated and reformed, so we can mature and develop as human beings. Philosophy has everything to do with learning how to die in order to live more critically, more compassionately, more sacrificially, so that in one's own death, your death (or suffering) becomes a weapon for truth, love and justice.
Amen.
Follow Judith Acosta on Twitter: www.twitter.com/VerbalFirstAid
We learn far too young to embrace our young adult-selves, with -- among other things -- oversexualized clothing and behavior, and are loathe to leave this youthful self behind as we enter middle and senior age.
But life itself is nothing if not transformation in that every moment can be viewed as both a birth and a death, as our cells are constantly dying and being reborn. At any moment we may experience an enhancement or reduction of our physical or mental bodies -- in, say, creating an idea, growing hair or muscle -- or forgetting a name or lesson or losing anything from a fingernail to a limb.
Yet through it all we know ourselves to be ourselves. Or do we?
I have to wonder if in our frantic attachment to the image of mature youth we are living in a perpetual state of what Jung called "unthinkable anxiety" -- that if we do not maintain our precious static image of self, we will disintegrate entirely -- and so we never fully live, are never fully whole or healthy.
But I am also aware how I am simply stuck in this place ... I do not fear death, but I am not learning how to die. I may be addicted to simply "waiting to die", by using my laptop to learn, reach out, and fight for causes. I want to seek more balance, I suppose; I enjoy my life immensely, and have used my circumstances to just stand still.
"Philosophy has everything to do with learning how to die in order to live more critically, more compassionately, more sacrificially, so that in one's own death, your death (or suffering) becomes a weapon for truth, love and justice."
I am waking up, bit by bit, to the desire to use my eventual death to learn how to die. I dread that I may not have the courage to take the next step. But this is a start.
It is seen as antithetical to our "can-do" culture.
We don't just fear death and suffering, we fear the influence of it in our lives.
We don't want to be associated with bummers.
We are a capitalist theocracy and we aren't supposed to allow "negativity" into our orbit.
Our idea of success is being so wealthy that ugly images are removed from our sight.
Our environments are sanitized for us.
Death? That's just really negative.
Think of the media blackout on corpses returning from the Iraq and Afghan wars.
As a nation, we should be mourning together the losses of our sons and daughters.
But it's removed from our sight. And the massive amount of disfigured and traumatized soldiers returning at a rate to rival a world war, is even more well hidden.
Our kids are encouraged to party and shop and just be kids.
And the adults keep trying to join the party and behave like kids.
This is mass narcissism of, dare I say it, deadly proportion.
And the fracturing of our society is one byproduct.
Yes, death is scary.
But a delusional populace, narcotized by the toys of narcissism, facebook, twitter, camera-phones, that rejects the national need to mourn together, is scarier.
... another great Huff Po article on this topic: Living Well, Dying Well by Sadhguru Vasudev--http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sadhguru/living-well-dying-well_b_682508.html
However, many people now are fearing death less and less. Spiritualistic traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism help us to understand that death is just a phase change. We never really were these bodies and at death, we return to the sender. Whatever that may be.
The Near Death Experiencers also help to assuage any fears we might have of death. They describe, not only, their environments at the time of death, they also relate the emotional feelings they have. I have only heard of one or two that had terrible experiences when their life was on the line. Most relate a holistic feeling of well-being, love, joy, bliss.
Many traditions around the world celebrate death as a release from this plane of existence to a higher one. I tend to go with this worldview. If only temporarily, we leave this state of consciousness and enter the highest state of consciousness; God's consciousness where everything is realized.
So for those who are more epicurean in their focus, does changes phases mean going from a fine main course to a fabulous dessert? :)
Lawson
Plato, Seneca, Montaigne and many more philosophers prove that the most brilliant among us say inane things or things we can take out of context and make far more dire than they were meant to be.
I don't plan to step in front of a Mack truck anytime soon, but I don't sit around worrying about dying. I'm more intrigued about what the experience will be like than fearful of it, altho I hope not to know for quite some time.
Pain, on the other hand, that I fear. But some of us, like my father and 2 of my grandparents, just slip away quietly in the night, never waking again, with no sign of fear or pain.
What can be so terrible about death? If there is an afterlife, it is undoubtedly better than here. And if there isn't, we'll be feeling no pain or sadness. Either way, there's no more misery.
What we do fear, far more legitimately, is our health care system and the amount of misery others may be willing to inflict on us before we die.
"There were also many varieties of hell, each for a specific type of offense. One guilty of many offenses might have to spend time in several different hells before burning off enough acquired karma to be reborn as a person again. The whole realm of hell is a massive operation and requires a large staff of hell wardens and attendants to keep the place running and to ensure that residents stay on task. There are clients in need of being boiled in cauldrons, beaten and smashed with various types of objects, burned up by various types of flames, and so forth. This is hard work, but the *dedicated staff* is up to the task. Indeed, they seem to love their work, no doubt because they know they are making the cosmos a better place with each crack of the whip or swing of the iron rod."
-- http://www.east-asian-history.net/textbooks/480/ch4.htm
Joseph Campbell near his end cited a Persian proverb: "When the Angel of Death approaches, it is terrrible, when he arrives, it is bliss."
The obits in the paper often allude to sacramental fortification or called home, or baptized into the hope of resurrection. I would like mine to read: "Initiated to the final secret. . ."
All living beings were born.
No one was born.
Therefore, no one is a living being.
Yet more and more people are experiencing their souls. The soul knows the truth - that it has incarnated many times in physical form to get to its current level of attainment. It is said by the Masters of Wisdom that most people have lived around 100,000 lives in human form.
"Life in the universe is absolute; in creation it is always relative. That is why people should not cry at death, it is not something horrible or ghastly. Their friends and loved ones have simply returned to their homeland. The books and writings received by writers through channelled sources are a sign that this message about life on the other side of death is beginning to get through to humanity.
The human race is now being inspired to experience a feeling of awareness. People will not be able to explain it, they just know that they feel different about life."
- World Teacher Maitreya through an associate as reported by Share International
i just can't be stoic about death. life on this planet is awful. there is beauty but it is fleeting.