Tom Engelhardt has published an interesting analysis of America today and its leadership in this article.  Read this article, it’s well worth it.  However, Engelhardt is missing a crucial dimension in his analysis.  He argues that Americans are lead by people who create ‘enemies’ at every turn, not real ones, but made up ones all over the world, enemies incapable of doing the US much harm at all, if any.  He argues that external enemies can be useful and so they are.  They provide a way of maintaining domestic solidarity and compliance in the face of perceived external ‘enemies.’  Without these ‘enemies’ Americans may have the time and inclination to really think about what the real problems are with their country.  Engelhardt refers to the number of people who die every year in the US by suicide by gun (19,000), homicide (11,000) and automobile crashes (32,000 and rising again) as evidence that Americans have selective outrage when it comes to how people die.  More people die on American highways every year than are killed in all of its ‘wars.’  All of this is fine analysis but it leaves out one important issue. What is the real reason for the need for enemies?  That’s where Ernest Becker comes in.

Some social scientists may dispute the lack of empirical evidence in his work, but I fail to see their point.  No, Becker’s analysis of the role of ‘the enemy’ in his book Escape From Evil was not arrived at following lab experiments.  It was arrived at after careful historical and anthropological analysis of how and why we make war, why we kill and take joy in it, why we are so quick to follow a ‘leader’ who promises us prosperity.  Becker aims to show how our fear of death and yearning for immortality lead us to all kinds of very distasteful behaviour towards our fellow women and men.  According to Becker we perpetrate evil in our attempt to eliminate evil.

So, reading Engelhardt should be followed by a reading of Escape From Evil which will help to put his work into a more fundamental context.

In looking at the tons of amazing literature and studies out there about what it means to live authentically, there must be a point at which they all intersect. And there is. The intersection occurs on a spiritual level when we chose to live a life with no regret, making choices that nurture our body, mind and soul. Doing this offers us the only opportunity to truly serve others, give back, give in and be rich with compassion inwardly and outwardly. Anything short of this means we are not living a life true to ourselves and that we are seeking means of external validation. In fancy psychobabble terms, our authentic self can be described as being the person we were created to be versus our fictional self, the person the world has told us to be. Bottom line, when we are living a fictional self, we are subscribing to the agreements of the world versus what catalyzes our true being.

To boil it down to the barest of terms, what being authentic really means, simply put, who are you? When asked this basic denominator question, most of us have a tendency to say things like; I’m a therapist, a father, a student, I’m 42 years old, I live in California, I do extreme sports, I’m a dog lover, I love Merlot and long walks on the beach.” This is not an accurate description of who we are but what we do; it is an explanation of our place in society, our likes/dislikes, roles and labels. Most of these descriptors have been assigned by the world and our place in it, not by our authentic self.

We are drawn to those living authentically because they are comfortable in their own skin, have honor, integrity and are consistent in their words, behavior and actions. If we reflect upon the majority of great novels, stories, myths and movies the focus lies on the authentic hero. The protagonist that fights for the under-served, advocates for the disenfranchised and lives honest to their core values all in the pursuit of being authentic emotionally, spiritually and physically. This is the Hero’s Journey at it’s finest and explains why it is contagious to watch and be a part of, but so challenging to live.

If we are not being faithful to living our authentic self, there is often an emptiness or a void. These feelings can go unnoticed if we have strayed too far from acting in accordance with the person we were created to be. We can become so enmeshed with our fictional self that we lose sight of what it means to be authentic. Due to the demands of the world and the way we respond to them, it is easy to fall into the roles that others expect of us. When we fall into the patterns of external validation it can be easy to ignore the pull of our authentic call but often end up feeling soul-sucked or drained. By living our fictional self, we are living for others rather than what our greater calling is. Our fictional self is the voice telling us to pay attention to society, money, labels, being liked by the wrong people…ultimately when we buy into the belief that what other’s think is more important than living the path that is congruent with who we really are. This means living in right speech, right action and surrounding ourselves with others living the same. Doing anything other than this means we are putting our trust in someone else’s value system and following a broken GPS.

The challenge in living this journey is in having the courage to break free from people, roles and “things” that go against our spiritual code. The pursuit of authenticity can also be hard because we still need to make money and play well with others, which at times can seem oppositional to being true to who we are meant to be. Thankfully, the two can exist together. Living authentically does not mean we need to become an ascetic and disown all earthly goods or roles but rather an honest evaluation on how well our current labels, financial status, need for materialistic possessions, friends and means of income support our journey.  If any part of our life is so discrepant in feeding our authentic self, then it may be time to act in accordance. Making these changes and cutting people, things and roles out of our life can be scary. This is why most people choose to stay stuck in their fictional self. 

So, how the heck do we live authentically? There is no road map or definitive answer on what it looks like or means to live authentically; it is a completely subjective journey. But regardless of the individual, it begins the same by creating personal agreements that are in alignment with core spiritual values.

As mentioned earlier, there are many theories on how to best live an authentic life and how to nurture your authentic self, but I’m only going to highlight a few of my favorites. Theories are only theories until we experience them first hand, so the best advice is simply to live your authentic life by making authentic choices in whatever that truly means after honest soul exploration. But hopefully if nothing else, this will get the wheels spinning.

A solid jumping off place is to evaluate who we are in relation to the agreements we have been told and have chosen to believe. Most of us have been domesticated to think, act, speak and be in certain ways. This domestication has not given us permission to think freely and to challenge this way of being. It has become all we know, as if living our life on autopilot. These agreements that have defined us may not even fit but yet we live with them as constant companions, all the while taking us further from our authentic self and only reinforcing our fictional shell.

It takes immense courage to challenge these old agreements and to create our own. Thankfully, Don Miguel Ruiz distilled four simple agreements that can easily be a guiding force in living authentically. They are perfectly simple yet utterly challenging:

1. Be impeccable with your word.
2. Don’t take anything personally.
3. Don’t’ make assumptions.
4. Always do your best.

By staying true to these four principles, we can begin paving the way to our authentic self. 

Another area that causes us to stray from being as authentic as we can is not being present in the moment. Depression is living in the past, anxiety is living in the future and peace is living in the present. When we are not living in the moment, we are clinging to outcome and not being true to who we are. Buddhism believes in four noble truths. The Cliff’s note summary is: there will be suffering, suffering comes from clinging/attachment and that suffering can end.

When living inauthentically, we are choosing to either consciously or unconsciously suffer. When we are suffering we are not in a position to give to self or to others and are not flourishing to our full potential. Most of the reasons we suffer and ignore the call of our authentic self is attachment. This can be attachment to our past, to our future, to our lifestyle, to having “people” in our life, to a false sense of community, to money, to being liked, to our possessions, to beauty, to being good enough and the list goes on. When we cling to certain outcomes, we are living fear based and can easily fall prey to our fictional self. This fear causes suffering and detours the pursuit of authenticity. 

The best way for suffering to end is to live through right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. If actively living right by our agreements, we will be organically aligned with our authentic self.

Part of awakening our authentic self requires acceptance of our own mortality. This is one of the hardest things to do because the ego struggles in comprehending finality. American’s spend a great deal of time doing everything in their power to avoid and push away anything that is a reminder of death. As a culture, we are steeped in death denial. This is a terrible disservice on so many levels including the ability to live authentically. 

There are writings after writings sharing individual’s awakenings after they have had a near death experience and how they made dramatic life changes as a result. These experiences can range in severity from a minor accident that shed light on one’s impermanence all the way to being pulled towards “the light.” Regardless of the severity, when faced with mortality, one of the most common reactions is to make major life changes, ones that put the individual closer in line with being their authentic self. Being close to death is said to make a person more alive, more compassionate, more aware and truer to their inner nature. This is in part because of the experiential awareness that life is fragile and the need to live with no regret. 

Something significant to ponder is to play with the idea of what you would do if you were given one year to live. This question often brings to mind all of the things we would not want to leave this earth without having experienced, given, let go of or done. The answers would probably give some informative clues on ways to live more authentically. Stephen and Ondrea Levine, death psychologists, did this powerful exercise as though they were truly only given a year to live. They lived one year as though it were their last: from writing their trust, to meditating on death, to visiting death, to making their end of life arrangements. In other words, they sat with death every day for a year, making friends with him and the valuable lessons gleaned were beautiful. At the end of their year, they were more attuned to who they were created to be. Preparing for death everyday gives us courage to truly live. 

I give you permission to truly be with death and what it means to die. Change your agreement in believing it is dark, see it as healing and courage. Think of it daily; yours, your loved ones, your enemies look him straight in the eyes. This assists in taking the fear out of the finality and is one of the clearest ways to teach us how to fully live. Death is one of life’s best teachers. Befriending death allows the authentic self to kick the fictional self’s ass. 

The heart of the authentic journey is to know and to live the truth of who we really are. This begins by creating healthy agreements aligned with our soul’s code, being present in the moment without clinging and befriending death.  Every moment we are not active in this adventure we are just breathing and not truly living.

 Questions for Reflection 

~ Do you know at this moment in time who your authentic self is? Explain it in detail. 

~ Are you actively living your authentic self or doing things to compromise it? When it is being compromised, what happens? What are the parts of your life that are incongruent with being authentic? What is keeping them in your life?

~ What are the necessary ingredients for you to personally feel your dynamic, authentic self? How can you add more of these ingredients into your day to day living? 

~ Playing in the world of make believe, what would your life look like if you were totally being authentic all of the time? Would you be in a relationship? If so, what would it be like? What would you be doing for a living? Who would you have in your life? Who would you not waste your time with? Where would you be living? What would be different than how your life is currently? Now, face mortality and hold the thought that you will someday die…knowing this, what is stopping you from living the life you just described? It doesn’t have to be make believe. Go and do something to bring yourself closer to this vision.

Resources

Dass, R. (2001). Fierce grace (documentary).

Hanson, R. (2009). Buddha’s brain: The practical neuroscience of happiness, love  and wisdom.

Khyentse, J. D. ( 2008). What makes you not a Buddhist.

Levine, S. (1998). A year to live: How to live this year as if it were your last.

Ruiz, M. D. (1997). The four agreements: A practical guide to personal freedom.

Van Valin, V. (2008).  Casting out fear: Shedding your fictional self –  Awakening your authentic self.

In looking at the tons of amazing literature and studies out there about what it means to live authentically, there must be a point at which they all intersect. And there is. The intersection occurs on a spiritual level when we chose to live a life with no regret, making choices that nurture our body, mind and soul. Doing this offers us the only opportunity to truly serve others, give back, give in and be rich with compassion inwardly and outwardly. Anything short of this means we are not living a life true to ourselves and that we are seeking means of external validation. In fancy psychobabble terms, our authentic self can be described as being the person we were created to be versus our fictional self, the person the world has told us to be. Bottom line, when we are living a fictional self, we are subscribing to the agreements of the world versus what catalyzes our true being.

To boil it down to the barest of terms, what being authentic really means, simply put, who are you? When asked this basic denominator question, most of us have a tendency to say things like; I’m a therapist, a father, a student, I’m 42 years old, I live in California, I do extreme sports, I’m a dog lover, I love Merlot and long walks on the beach.” This is not an accurate description of who we are but what we do; it is an explanation of our place in society, our likes/dislikes, roles and labels. Most of these descriptors have been assigned by the world and our place in it, not by our authentic self.

We are drawn to those living authentically because they are comfortable in their own skin, have honor, integrity and are consistent in their words, behavior and actions. If we reflect upon the majority of great novels, stories, myths and movies the focus lies on the authentic hero. The protagonist that fights for the under-served, advocates for the disenfranchised and lives honest to their core values all in the pursuit of being authentic emotionally, spiritually and physically. This is the Hero’s Journey at it’s finest and explains why it is contagious to watch and be a part of, but so challenging to live.

If we are not being faithful to living our authentic self, there is often an emptiness or a void. These feelings can go unnoticed if we have strayed too far from acting in accordance with the person we were created to be. We can become so enmeshed with our fictional self that we lose sight of what it means to be authentic. Due to the demands of the world and the way we respond to them, it is easy to fall into the roles that others expect of us. When we fall into the patterns of external validation it can be easy to ignore the pull of our authentic call but often end up feeling soul-sucked or drained. By living our fictional self, we are living for others rather than what our greater calling is. Our fictional self is the voice telling us to pay attention to society, money, labels, being liked by the wrong people…ultimately when we buy into the belief that what other’s think is more important than living the path that is congruent with who we really are. This means living in right speech, right action and surrounding ourselves with others living the same. Doing anything other than this means we are putting our trust in someone else’s value system and following a broken GPS.

The challenge in living this journey is in having the courage to break free from people, roles and “things” that go against our spiritual code. The pursuit of authenticity can also be hard because we still need to make money and play well with others, which at times can seem oppositional to being true to who we are meant to be. Thankfully, the two can exist together. Living authentically does not mean we need to become an ascetic and disown all earthly goods or roles but rather an honest evaluation on how well our current labels, financial status, need for materialistic possessions, friends and means of income support our journey.  If any part of our life is so discrepant in feeding our authentic self, then it may be time to act in accordance. Making these changes and cutting people, things and roles out of our life can be scary. This is why most people choose to stay stuck in their fictional self. 

So, how the heck do we live authentically? There is no road map or definitive answer on what it looks like or means to live authentically; it is a completely subjective journey. But regardless of the individual, it begins the same by creating personal agreements that are in alignment with core spiritual values.

As mentioned earlier, there are many theories on how to best live an authentic life and how to nurture your authentic self, but I’m only going to highlight a few of my favorites. Theories are only theories until we experience them first hand, so the best advice is simply to live your authentic life by making authentic choices in whatever that truly means after honest soul exploration. But hopefully if nothing else, this will get the wheels spinning.

A solid jumping off place is to evaluate who we are in relation to the agreements we have been told and have chosen to believe. Most of us have been domesticated to think, act, speak and be in certain ways. This domestication has not given us permission to think freely and to challenge this way of being. It has become all we know, as if living our life on autopilot. These agreements that have defined us may not even fit but yet we live with them as constant companions, all the while taking us further from our authentic self and only reinforcing our fictional shell.

It takes immense courage to challenge these old agreements and to create our own. Thankfully, Don Miguel Ruiz distilled four simple agreements that can easily be a guiding force in living authentically. They are perfectly simple yet utterly challenging:

1. Be impeccable with your word.
2. Don’t take anything personally.
3. Don’t’ make assumptions.
4. Always do your best.

By staying true to these four principles, we can begin paving the way to our authentic self. 

Another area that causes us to stray from being as authentic as we can is not being present in the moment. Depression is living in the past, anxiety is living in the future and peace is living in the present. When we are not living in the moment, we are clinging to outcome and not being true to who we are. Buddhism believes in four noble truths. The Cliff’s note summary is: there will be suffering, suffering comes from clinging/attachment and that suffering can end.

When living inauthentically, we are choosing to either consciously or unconsciously suffer. When we are suffering we are not in a position to give to self or to others and are not flourishing to our full potential. Most of the reasons we suffer and ignore the call of our authentic self is attachment. This can be attachment to our past, to our future, to our lifestyle, to having “people” in our life, to a false sense of community, to money, to being liked, to our possessions, to beauty, to being good enough and the list goes on. When we cling to certain outcomes, we are living fear based and can easily fall prey to our fictional self. This fear causes suffering and detours the pursuit of authenticity. 

The best way for suffering to end is to live through right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. If actively living right by our agreements, we will be organically aligned with our authentic self.

Part of awakening our authentic self requires acceptance of our own mortality. This is one of the hardest things to do because the ego struggles in comprehending finality. American’s spend a great deal of time doing everything in their power to avoid and push away anything that is a reminder of death. As a culture, we are steeped in death denial. This is a terrible disservice on so many levels including the ability to live authentically. 

There are writings after writings sharing individual’s awakenings after they have had a near death experience and how they made dramatic life changes as a result. These experiences can range in severity from a minor accident that shed light on one’s impermanence all the way to being pulled towards “the light.” Regardless of the severity, when faced with mortality, one of the most common reactions is to make major life changes, ones that put the individual closer in line with being their authentic self. Being close to death is said to make a person more alive, more compassionate, more aware and truer to their inner nature. This is in part because of the experiential awareness that life is fragile and the need to live with no regret. 

Something significant to ponder is to play with the idea of what you would do if you were given one year to live. This question often brings to mind all of the things we would not want to leave this earth without having experienced, given, let go of or done. The answers would probably give some informative clues on ways to live more authentically. Stephen and Ondrea Levine, death psychologists, did this powerful exercise as though they were truly only given a year to live. They lived one year as though it were their last: from writing their trust, to meditating on death, to visiting death, to making their end of life arrangements. In other words, they sat with death every day for a year, making friends with him and the valuable lessons gleaned were beautiful. At the end of their year, they were more attuned to who they were created to be. Preparing for death everyday gives us courage to truly live. 

I give you permission to truly be with death and what it means to die. Change your agreement in believing it is dark, see it as healing and courage. Think of it daily; yours, your loved ones, your enemies look him straight in the eyes. This assists in taking the fear out of the finality and is one of the clearest ways to teach us how to fully live. Death is one of life’s best teachers. Befriending death allows the authentic self to kick the fictional self’s ass. 

The heart of the authentic journey is to know and to live the truth of who we really are. This begins by creating healthy agreements aligned with our soul’s code, being present in the moment without clinging and befriending death.  Every moment we are not active in this adventure we are just breathing and not truly living.

 Questions for Reflection 

~ Do you know at this moment in time who your authentic self is? Explain it in detail. 

~ Are you actively living your authentic self or doing things to compromise it? When it is being compromised, what happens? What are the parts of your life that are incongruent with being authentic? What is keeping them in your life?

~ What are the necessary ingredients for you to personally feel your dynamic, authentic self? How can you add more of these ingredients into your day to day living? 

~ Playing in the world of make believe, what would your life look like if you were totally being authentic all of the time? Would you be in a relationship? If so, what would it be like? What would you be doing for a living? Who would you have in your life? Who would you not waste your time with? Where would you be living? What would be different than how your life is currently? Now, face mortality and hold the thought that you will someday die…knowing this, what is stopping you from living the life you just described? It doesn’t have to be make believe. Go and do something to bring yourself closer to this vision.

Resources

Dass, R. (2001). Fierce grace (documentary).

Hanson, R. (2009). Buddha’s brain: The practical neuroscience of happiness, love  and wisdom.

Khyentse, J. D. ( 2008). What makes you not a Buddhist.

Levine, S. (1998). A year to live: How to live this year as if it were your last.

Ruiz, M. D. (1997). The four agreements: A practical guide to personal freedom.

Van Valin, V. (2008).  Casting out fear: Shedding your fictional self –  Awakening your authentic self.

Also.. regarding Angst and “the throes of finitude”. Could it be: that it is not the subliminal awareness of death that freaks the shared mind of mankind out (shocking it to flee into the fluffy nest of myths and superstition and secular fictions) but quite the opposite: life itself, that mongrous monstrosity of contingency. After all, as they say: all suffering has to do with wishing the moment to be other than it is. And indeed, we do routinely dwell in the sticky filaments of guilt and anguish strung between our past and our future. Which, as the phenomenologists have shown, is the basis of human consciousness, really.

Perhaps.. perhaps not.
The life of the mind is complex..

When I state that I’m not a commie, that doesn’t mean for one second that I’m a proponent of ‘capitalism.’  Many people see communism and ‘capitalism’ as opposites, as alternate ways of organizing ‘the economy’ and ‘society.’   I don’t, nor did Karl Marx when he got old enough to think straight.  As an aside, Harold Adams Innis, the brilliant Canadian political economist and historian said, in a moment of particular lucidity, that one cannot make a contribution to the social sciences before one reaches the age of 50 and he’s probably correct.  He was 58 when he died and his best work happened in the last 5 or 6 years of his life.  Marx was born in 1818 and died in 1883.  It wasn’t until the late 1860s that he really got his shit together, hunkered down in the British Museum and started writing Capital.  Yes, yes, he wrote the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts earlier, but he really got serious later.

The reason I say I’m not a communist is that I’m not a proponent of communism.  For me, or anyone else, to be labeled a communist or anything else for that matter implies a certain level of advocacy, of ‘proponency.’  It’s not necessary to be proponent of something that will eventually happen no matter what we think or wish.  It’s like being described as an old-agist.  I know that old age will happen to all of us, but that doesn’t mean I’m a proponent of old age.  I’M getting old, but that doesn’t mean that I advocate old age. That would be ridiculous.  A communist mode of production will inevitably replace the capitalist one because the internal contradictions within the capitalist mode of production dictate it in the same way the feudal relations of production replaced slave based ones and the capitalist mode of production replaced feudal ones.  The change will happen gradually, just as old age creeps up on us.  Before it’s clear what’s happening, the old bones get brittle, the arteries plug up and the organs just can’t cut it anymore.  The resiliency of youth is past, old solutions no longer get the same results they used to.  Life inevitably brings on death, they are different sides of the same coin.  What that means for me as an individual is clear, what it means for ‘society’ or for the ‘capitalist mode of production’ is also clear.  Nothing is forever, nothing.  Not the capitalist mode of production, not our beloved countries, not our cities, not our towns, not our fabulous wealth.  The question is not whether or not the capitalist mode of production will live on forever, but when it will die.  It’s not even a question of how.  That’s also been clear for a long time.  Still, classical economics is still in classical denial over the whole thing, a fact which is made clear on virtually every page of The Economist which is a proponent of capitalism.

For what I’ve written above I could be branded with the sin of determinism, one of scholarship’s seven deadliest.   If saying that one day I will die makes me a determinist, well that’s ok by me.  Call me whatever name you want.  Furthermore,  what I write above does not mean that life is completely meaningless to me.  We live life on many levels, a day at a time.  My life is full of activity and that means that every day I make many moral decisions most having nothing or little to do with my eventual death.  I don’t  live life as though my life is about to end (I didn’t do that even when I had cancer and the possibility of my quick exit from this life was very real).  I DO things, there is nothing else to do.  I read the papers, listen to the radio and watch TV.  I play with my grandkids.  I can’t help but get outraged by the blatant bullshit and crap that comes out of the government in Ottawa on a daily basis.  Yet I understand  the role that national governments play in the capitalist mode of production and their essential collaboration in making it possible for capital to flow with greater and greater ease globally  and for controlling labour by keeping tight reins on migrations and regulation.  I haven’t lost my moral compass.  I even get angry on one level…say, at incivility, at stupid driving, at poor highway engineering…while understanding that at other levels, the picture is much different and anger makes no sense.  As I write above, we live life on many levels, many planes.  They are all connected although not always in obvious ways.  Even otherwise highly educated people don’t see the connections.  The connections, interconnections and interweavings become visible only after a sustained gaze upon them.  To see them requires special training.  Somewhere, Norbert Elias got that training, as did many other thinkers who have had a sustained influence on me over the decades.

“Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a visionary French Jesuit, paleontologist, biologist, and philosopher, who spent the bulk of his life trying to integrate religious experience with natural science, most specifically Christian theology with theories of evolution. In this endeavor he became absolutely enthralled with the possibilities for humankind, which he saw as heading for an exciting convergence of systems, an “Omega point” where the coalescence of consciousness will lead us to a new state of peace and planetary unity. Long before ecology was fashionable, he saw this unity he saw as being based intrinsically upon the spirit of the Earth: ‘The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth.’ “

Methinks my former physics professor was slightly disingenuous about his motives for telling me I wasn’t ‘intellectually prepared’ to read de Chardin.  Anyone still steeped in Catholic doctrine would have to reject de Chardin.  It’s easy to see that from the above quote.   de Chardin’s work contradicted the Catholic Magisterium and many of his books were censored by Rome. He basically rejected the whole Biblical account of creation in Genesis.   His Le Phénomène Humain published posthumously strayed far from the dogma of the Church.  So, fearing the loss of yet another young adherent to the Church, my Oblate physics teacher was really imploring me to avoid reading heresy.  But it was too late.  I was already on a road to greater intellectual curiosity.  I read works by ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz.  I read popularizations of anthropology such as Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative. I read The Origin of Species.  Later, at Simon Fraser University, I would quote Ardrey in an anthropology paper to be told that my professor that he was a charlatan. What can I say, I was a newbie.

In any case, my point here is that de Chardin opened my eyes to thinking about the world and the universe in very different ways from what is contained in Catholic doctrine.  Biblical accounts taken literally made no sense to me whatsoever.  I read the Bible over and over again and continued to be mystified by the language, the smiting of one’s enemies, and the gnashing of teeth.  It took me some time to realize that taken metaphorically, the Bible makes much more sense than it does literally.  de Chardin led the way in my awakening on this front.  I don’t subscribe to Biblical accounts of creation any more than de Chardin did and I can definitely relate to his view of the cosmos.

For de Chardin (and science, for that matter) there is ‘immortality’ in the universe in the sense that matter and energy are not lost, but are constantly ‘reconfiguring’ and ‘reconstituting’ themselves.  As the saying goes, we are the stuff of stars.  The matter that makes up my body has always existed and always will.  The particular configuration of matter that is me is transitory, but the matter that is me is eternal and immortal.  So, in a sense, I ‘believe’ in immortality.  Humans, however, aren’t generally satisfied with such an abstract idea of immortality.  No, we want something more tangible such as the soul upon which to hang our hopes of individual immortality.  We really want to be ‘ourselves’ eternally, as if our deaths never happened, cavorting and enjoying ourselves in heaven with our earthly companions and with God overseeing everything like a cosmic party host.  This is a picture of God as very human like and of humans as very god-like. For de Chardin, God has no specific connection with the human species.

For de Chardin, God is the universe, the Omega as he called it.  That is a far cry from the story of creation in the Bible, but if our denial of death is as profound a drive as Ernest Becker suggests, the fall from grace symbolized by the eating of the forbidden fruit and the subsequent split of humans into our symbolic and material selves whereby our symbolic selves are immortal and our material selves are mortal makes more sense.  Our bodies are our own worst enemies.  They die.  They betray us at every turn.  They are fundamentally evil.  It’s our symbolic side that is good, pure and immortal.  So the story of creation in the Bible is idiomatic.  It metaphorically concretizes the goodness of the power of the universe, the abstract power we cannot understand and from which all life emanates, and the badness of matter which at every turn bleeds and dies.  The interesting thing here is that people get caught up with the Bible’s literal explanations and don’t, as de Chardin did, see the story of the unfolding universe in the Genesis code.  How long we will need to bend to metaphor and idiom rather than face the reality of the universe full face is anyone’s guess.  More on this later.

None of this is surprising.  In the simplest of biological terms, living organisms, particularly the sentient ones, ‘want’ to continue to live.  It’s a basic drive.  Becker’s book, Escape From Evil, published shortly after his death by his wife, Marie, and his publishers, expresses this beautifully in its first few pages.  We are driven to fight the two pillars of evil in life: disease and death.  Disease injures our potential to enjoy life, to revel in a good meal, an excellent glass of wine, or a particularly spectacular sunset.  Death takes away everything, all enjoyment, all time, all everything.  What greater evil can there be?  So we devise elaborate schemes to make us feel like none of this will ever happen to us?  Not to humans.  We are the chosen species.  We are not like other animals.  We are special under the sun.  And if anyone dares say otherwise, well, that’s most unfortunate for them.  They must be dealt with in the harshest of terms because if our death-denying ideologies are proven to be weak or just plain lies, then we die…forever.  Aboriginal cultures everywhere, when faced with the power of colonialism, abandoned their traditional practices and took on the beliefs of their captors and colonizers.  Why continue to put faith in an immortality-ideology that failed to protect them in their most trying moment?

Now, of course, the most powerful immortality-ideology is capital accumulation and wealth.  But we know that this kind of ideology, no matter how powerful cannot promise us immortality.  Still, there are many people today who live and die for ‘freedom’ to accumulate capital to get rich.  They are, in fact, willing to kill the very planet they occupy so that they might live forever.

This short post barely scratches the surface of the importance of Becker’s work.  I’ll come back to Becker over and over again in posts to come.

We ‘relate’ to animals, animate things, especially if they’re young, cute and cuddly.  When we in the West find out that some people in China and Korea eat young dogs, preferably St-Bernards, we find it hard not to gag or throw up.  We know that ‘veal’ really means baby cow but we try not to think about it. Lamb is the same, baby sheep.  So are weaner pigs, that is, pigs that have just been weaned.  We know killing happens.  We wouldn’t be able to eat steak, bacon, roasts or ham without the killing. It’s just not right to think about it or bring it up in polite conversation.  The fact is that humans slaughter millions if not billions of animals every year (for food or as ‘pests’), sometimes by specialists like in the West, but by lots of non-specialists in Africa and other ‘poor’ parts of the world too.  People all over the world realize that they like to eat their food dead and somebody has to do the dirty deed.  Now, isn’t that an interesting way of putting it: do the dirty deed?  Of course you’ve heard that.  To do a dirty deed…ultimately means killing someone or something. The reference to dirt we’ll come back to.  But for now, let’s face it.  Although we don’t like to admit it, death is really important to us.  But of course death is important to us not just in terms of the food we eat.

If things didn’t die, things couldn’t live. If people didn’t die, there would be standing room only on the planet in very short order.  We think there’s a lot of people on the planet now!  If people didn’t die, I’m not sure how they would be born, but that’s an issue for another post.  So our underlying unquestioned assumption that life is good and death is bad is patently ridiculous.  Not that we’ve ever shied away from espousing ridiculous ideas.  No, people need to die so others may live.  The problem is all about the quality of death and dying.  We know that we are born at one point, grow up, mature and then die, at least on a ‘normal’ trajectory.  There’s lots of variation in the length of time we live.  For instance, in some parts of Africa an individual is lucky to live to be 37 years of age.  Here in Canada we’re looking at a normal life span getting into the eighties.  In the ‘poor’ countries, many children die very young.  We think that’s a shame, really. But we don’t like to think about it too much.  We see the starving children in the OxFam or whatever commercials and cringe a little, but it’s not really our problem.  Distant death is barely death at all whether we are talking about time (as in death centuries ago) or space, (as in death in Somalia or Mali, far away in Africa).  We have some vague sense that many people die in Canada every year, but we don’t really know how many, nor are we particularly interested.  But death gets more interesting the closer it gets to us, especially so close that we just can’t deny it.

When my cousin’s daughter was murdered on Halloween night last year, I was shocked and angry.  She was just at high school graduation age.  Some very disturbed young man -who’s since been caught and faces first degree murder charges – killed her that night and she’ll never be coming home. Many other thousands of people died that same day all over the world, but that doesn’t matter.  What matters is that someone in the family met a very tragic, unnecessary death.  I didn’t know Taylor Van Diest personally.  She lived a long distance from where I live on Vancouver Island.  My uncle Denis (my father’s brother) moved his family (including Taylor’s mom) to the Okanagan Valley decades ago.  He’s since passed away.  That broke the tie that kept our families in close contact.  Since then we’ve had large family reunions, but I haven’t attended many of them.  Too busy working most of the time.  Families drift apart.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  It’s just the way it is in a world that encourages radical insularity and downplays family except for ideological purposes.  Still, when a family member meets such an untimely death, it hurts.  For the immediate family the pain must be almost unbearable and it doesn’t wane.  The passage of time does little to heal the still gaping wound that is the absence of Taylor.  But, like I said, death is only meaningful to us when it’s close and it’s importance to us is inversely proportional to it’s distance to us in time and space.  What I’ve found in my career is that there isn’t just one kind of death.  There are many kinds of death just as there are many kinds of life.  Taylor’s death is not the same kind of death as the death of the pig that made it possible for me to eat bacon this morning.  One seems senseless, the other necessary.  We are horrified by Taylor’s death, rightly so.  When my father-in-law lay dying at Burnaby General Hospital twenty-three years ago, I was struck by the traffic noise, the talk in the hallway, the realization that death matters little to most of us most of the time.  The world doesn’t stop every time a person dies even though we think it should when that person is close to us.  No, we are really little affected by death.  Our systems of death denial are very  strong indeed making it all the more horribly distressing when the experience of death is so personal that our usual systems of death denial no longer work and we have to face it unmediated by ideology.  The experience is soul destroying and extremely isolating.  The visceral reaction of most people in this situation is to reach for meaning anywhere it can be found.  No search for meaning is entirely satisfactory.  There is always a residual emptiness.

To finish this up, I want to just say that death is not the opposite of life.  Living and dying are one in the same thing.  Distinguishing between the two is the result of a feeble attempt on humanity’s part to deny death.  To be blunt about it, the moment we are conceived we are on a death trajectory. How can we live with that realization without effective ideologies of death denial?  More on that in the next post.

Skip to the keyword of your choice. Link around. Enjoy the hypertextual landscape.

Posthumanism and jet crashes:
The University of Waterloo copy of PlayerOne–Coupland’s 2010 CBC Massey Lecture–opens with two surprises. First: inside the hardcover is a soft cover, with a photo of a plane, a view from inside the cabin windows.*

Second surprise: the book opens with posthumanist debate, which takes the form of inner monologue for 3 characters: Karen, Rick, Luke. (A fourth character is described as barely human. She is “player one”. I won’t describe her in detail yet. I’m not that far into the book.)

1. Karen: sitting in a 747 on her way to a long-distance internet-dating hookup, she wonders if time stopped and the “humans” vanished, what would be left on the seats? Answer: “hair extensions, toupees, jewellry…dental veneers, crowns, pacemakers, metal pins left from bone surgeries,” (Coupland 3). She goes on into a debate about what is individually unique, or not, at the molecular level, but I wanted to stop here to draw attention to these extensions and modifications of our bodies.

These may not be highly intellectual extensions like language is to Wolfe. Nor are these particularly good tool-extensions, of the prosthetic nature Steigler discusses. But we talk about those a lot. This list is interesting because so many of the items on it are taken for granted, are supposed to appear “natural” or not be apparent at all (e.g. permanent wire retainers behind our teeth). However, all of these things are artificial means of reshaping our physical selves to redefine our mental/internal images of ourselves as members of a particular culture and time, one that denies time (aging, especially) and death, according to Becker.

2. Rick: “Humans are special because humans do all things. There is no emotion possessed by any other creature on earth that is not also experienced by humans,” (Coupland 16). This struck me as an interesting line of argument because Agamben would probably disagree. Agamben’s Open focuses more on what we cannot do, as humans: what can we not perceive? We are limited by our embodiment not only because we die, but also because we can only experience the world as humans, through a particular set of bodily senses and resulting cognitive biases that mean we cannot know exactly what another creature experiences and feels, even in terms of “instinct” (as explained in the example of the tick). The take-away: we must be careful to avoid generalizing and assuming that we understand other species well enough to fully and conclusively articulate our difference from them, our cosmic specialness (another term from Becker).

3. Luke: “He knows that what makes human beings different from everything else on the planet — or possibly in the universe, for that matter — is that they have the ability to experience the passing of time and they have the free will to make the most of that time. Dolphins and ravens and Labrador dogs come close, but they have no future tense in their minds. They understand cause adn effect, but they can’t sequence forward. It’s why dogs in dog shows have to be led from task to task, because they’re unable to sequence. They live in a perpetual present, something humans can never do, try as they may. And the reason Luke is thinking about time and free will is because he believes money is the closest human beings have ever come to crystallizing time and free will into a compact physical form…Cash allows you to multiply your will, and it allows you to speed up time. Cash is what defines us as a species. Nothing else in the universe has money,” (Coupland 21-22).

This ties to many Necromedia readings. The first that came to my mind: we are being toward death (Heidegger); and, the birth of the human in forethought comes with the anxiety of knowing we’re mortal (Stiegler).

Now the fun visuals.

Coupland has produced a series of paintings with carefully selected colours that work as black-and-white, producing functional, large-scale, lovely QR codes. In an interview for TimeOut magazine in Shangahi, Coupland explained the role of mortality salience in his Memento Mori series. Each artwork bears a cheerful title like “100 years of Joy”, but when you scan the QR code, the messages are dark, prone to triggering death anxiety. For example, “100 years of Joy” corresponds to the QR-spawned message: “‘You’ll be dead before I write these words. I tell you, you are going to miss a world of wondrous changes,’” (qtd. in Gaskin’s interview, TimeOut).

You really must read the whole interview. It’s a goldmine for Necromedia students. Coupland explains that he’s moved from generational to inter-generational perspectives because we’re all becoming homogenous, as our perceptions change due to new technologies, especially phones. He also talks about how constant interruptions affect our perception. It all reverberates in the same key as Carr and Dreyfus. Read the stuff. Your brain will be abuzz, alive with the tickle of making connections, seeing relevance, and seeing some pretty significant Canadian art, too.

Should you wish to partake of my weird, beautiful, only slightly morbid intellectual feast, here’s where you need to look:
-For the philosophy: Sam Gaskin’s interview with Coupland re: QR code art in Shanghai
-For the concrete: Current Coupland exhibition in Toronto
-For the literary: PlayerOne (yes, it’s about a very special person who folds her life into her avatar’s world, as “player one” in a video game).

*For literature nerds: These motifs, the jet window and the single hand in this position, come up a lot in Coupland’s work. The jet crash–>central plot point in the setup of the novel Miss Wyoming. The hand–>D.C. used to (maybe still does) autograph books with a small drawing of a human hand, in an upright, fingers-together position similar to this. 

Death comes for a young man 1856

You might be pleased to know that we are winning the dying game.

According to Peter Martin: “We are less likely to die-at any given age- than ever before”. This sounds dramatic but we are merely delaying the inevitable demise and we must still die. Martin’s article reveals our societal denial of death  with the ‘good news’ being that a young girl born this year will live into the next century.

It is not surprising that the article speaks about winning the dying game for we are accustomed to fighting disease and resisting death.  In contrast to the many stories about birth and babies there are few stories written about our inevitable demise for it is confronting and there are no cute photos shots to include. But seriously why do we celebrate our ability to live until we are 100 years or more? Is it really so wonderful that the young girl born today may live on into the 22nd century? Will the world be a pleasant place for her to live out her long life or will she be living in a depleted and dangerous world?

This article celebrates and upholds our western consumerist existence. We always want more. Why must we live longer and longer lives? Why isn’t sixty years enough?

It is not the sacred known as Nirvana, Yahweh, Atman-Brahman, the Dao and such that Taylor seeks to “save” so much as another which he believes may be said to be a worthy successor to them in “our secular age.” …For present purposes, Taylor seeks to outline the nature of a “minimal religion,” a religion that seeks to be honest to the new order of scientific knowledge upon which our world rests — the “immanent frame” that contains our life and thought — but which also resists the sense of enclosure that comes with “scientism.”

I sent a friend a link to the essay. Here is part of his response: 

Religion, more often than not, is where people of faith believe they are staking their lives and immortal “souls” on an idea. They are deeply invested with it. It’s hard to be egalitarian in the ordering of such values. If they can be made to feel they’re wrong, without replacing the error with something of equal value and gravitas, then their life is placed in serious psychological jeopardy. No one participates in that kind of disorientation willingly or without strong resistance. Therefore, getting them to change their mind through “civil” discourse is an overwhelming challenge to whatever belief they’ve formed. If the conversation becomes coercive, even under the enlightened label of shared ideas, it’s unlikely that anyone, who has devoted the lion’s share of their thought process to what they believe constitutes the central meaning of their lives is going to trade off their own version of reality for someone else’s,  unless they can be rationally conned. As the old saw goes, you can’t be reasoned out of a belief you weren’t reasoned into.  To attempt it is to part from reason. How much civility can you ultimately find in that scenario?

My friend has a point. Clearly, most of us are too invested in our worldviews to engage in the kind of civil discourse that Charles Taylor envisions for what he calls our new “immanent frame”—our secular, open society. Ernest Becker and the Terror Management Theory (TMT) researchers got it right: these worldviews are not just intellectual constructs that we readily revise as new evidence becomes available or superior arguments are presented. Rather, they are our lifeline to a sense of meaning, without which our whole narcissistic enterprise of victory over death may collapse. No threat to them—whether coercive or discursive—can be taken lightly.

Whatever our particular worldview may be, it includes scripts for heroism large and small. These scripts tell us how to make a meaningful contribution—how to achieve something for which we will be remembered, whether it’s dying in battle, faithfully following a body of religious teachings, flawless performing a Mozart sonata, or just getting the kids to soccer practice on time. Our reward for these achievements is self-esteem—a precious and fragile commodity that many of us, alas, value more than life itself. Woe unto anyone who suggests that our sense of self-worth is undeserved, that we screwed up, or that our heroic scripts have led us down the path toward error.

Nor should anyone dare suggest that our worldview, which manages all these scripts and the rewards for following them, is factually or morally flawed. Any challenge—even the mere presence of someone who sees things differently—can imperil our self-esteem and the success of our immortality projects. The more vulnerable we feel, the more fearful, defensive, or even aggressive we may become. So we surround ourselves with people who not only validate our views but reward us for validating theirs. We obsess over ideological “purity” and may stop at nothing to cleanse our cohorts of dissent. “I believe” becomes the password for admission into the fold. Proofs and professions of faith may be required to assure our continued inclusion there.

This vision of the human condition—extreme as it seems in places—will not sound exaggerated to anyone who has moved between open, pluralistic societies and closed ones. It describes all of us, but particularly those who subscribe to dogmatic political or theological schemes that offer “salvation” of whatever sort we require—eternity in paradise or a lasting monument to our significance, a statue in the public square. Never mind that the penalty for apostasy may range from social opprobrium to eternal damnation. The rewards are worth the risks, and all that is required is submission.

I am of course expressing my bias, but I’ll go ahead and own it. Accepting one’s own mortality brings a certain measure of relief from the pressures of immortality projects—all of which entail some level of cognitive dissonance and alienation from reality… because, after all, we will all die and eventually be forgotten. This alienation may be extreme in the case of religious beliefs about resurrections and eternal life, slight where we attempt to cheat death through fame or public service, and slighter still where our only project is to pass on our genes. None of this is necessarily problematic, and much of it contributes to human flourishing. But problems arise when death denial requires elaborate delusional schemes that actually harm our chances for survival. I can think of no clearer example than our current ecological crisis, which continues to be upstaged by religious end-times scenarios that are without any basis in reality. Scientists are warning of civilizational collapse by the end of this century if we do not reverse global warming trends immediately. To look at this event is to look at our own deaths, and so we do not look. Instead, we switch to the Bible Channel for something a little more upbeat—a childish apocalyptic scenario in which we are eternally rewarded and our enemies are eternally damned. And meanwhile, global temperatures continue to rise, the seas become more acidic, and the world’s glaciers recede, creating the conditions for unprecedented water crises in many regions of the world.

One of the reasons I am drawn to the secularist/materialist worldview—besides the fact that it seems rooted in reality—is that it removes eternal life from the equation. Secular humanists do not go chasing after immortality in the literal sense, and if we happen to have understood the nature of secular immortality projects, we may ”lighten up” on those as well. All this amounts to what some have called “practice in dying” (not quite like practicing so that we can get to Carnegie Hall…). While such realism offers less “comfort” than religious worldviews, it also removes a very large impediment to seeing the world as it is. Our survival beyond the present century will depend on clear vision above everything else.

“But is it necessary to be so aggressive?” is a question often put to secularists. I can propose two answers. First, characterizing another individual’s behaviors as “aggressive” sometimes reflects a cognitive bias of the type, ”I’m thrifty, he’s a tightwad” (where the behaviors are identical). Is the behavior really aggressive, or is it only assertive and self-affirming? In some communities, lesbians who walk down the street holding hands are accused of being “in-your-face” though they are doing nothing that straight couples do not also do. And second, aggressive responses are sometimes appropriate. Some worldviews contribute to human flourishing, while others do not. Some heroic scripts have proven their value and deserve to be propagated, while others are toxic remnants of ancient tribal societies or medieval feudal ones and have no place in a modern pluralistic and democratic society. When Pat Robertson declares that the Haitians are themselves responsible for a powerful hurricane that has devastated their country, he is drawing scripts from ancient tribal beliefs about a vengeful god. These scripts and his decision to use them deserve our strongest censure. When Iranian clerics sentence an adulterous woman to hanging, every civilized person should protest. 

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” said Voltaire.

If you believe selective pruning is possible, then perhaps there’s no need to hack down the whole tree. But many skeptics wonder what would remain of Catholicism or of Islam if all their absurdities and their failed and dangerous practices were eliminated. What would a Catholic any longer “be” without saints, popes, miracles, guilt, homophobia, and bans on contraception? Would he or she look like a Congregationalist or a Unitarian? And would we even recognize Islam if all its odious tribal, patriarchal, and misogynistic elements were removed?

Okay, remain a Catholic, but please support deep reform of church doctrine pertaining to papal authority, clerical secrecy and celibacy, contraception, homosexuality, sex education, and the ordination of women. Your silence and your financial support of the Church are interpreted as assent or indifference.

Okay, be a Muslim, but please speak out against female genital mutilation, forced marriages, stonings, persecutions of homosexuals, fatwas against writers and artists, and promises of virgins in paradise to young men who martyr themselves. Your silence about these horrors is interpreted as assent.

And if either of you claims you can’t do any of these things because God, Allah, tradition, or the Bible forbids, then I have a few remarks about the authority you’re citing.

You see, one begins pruning and soon one is poised to cut down the tree at its base. “One cannot be just a little bit heretical,” says Christopher Hitchens.

Upping the ante to a challenge about bedrock faith is sometimes unavoidable in conversations where someone’s positions about real-world matters are uniquely faith-based, or where personal faith is the fall-back position, the argument of last resort. Dismissing or critiquing another person’s most closely-held personal beliefs has long been considered taboo. However, the strong emotions and sensitivities associated with these beliefs do not constitute an argument; the victims of religious beliefs also have their feelings. “God is not an object of inquiry,” one blogger recently cautioned me, as if to say, “Back off. You’re approaching the Sacred” (which, like the Pope, does not grant interviews). But the stakes are too high to back away. There are too many casualties. The fortress may need to be stormed—discursively, of course, provided the conversants are willing to remain in the conversation.

We have good reason to hope that the secular open society can continue to manage all these tensions as it has done in the past. If civil discourse sometimes seems stretched to its breaking-point in its secular frame, we must at least recognize that it will not flourish for long in any other one.

We die the moment we’re born. I’m not being morose, don’t get me wrong. I’m the first one to hide my head in the sand and look for a distraction: cup of tea, shower, maybe staying in bed a little longer, read or finish last night’s video, start thinking about the day ahead, plan once activity or another, worry about old business, scheme about new stuff. Anything but face the fact that this moment, this breath, could be my last. The ego, the self, just won’t have it. It refused to contemplate its own surmise. Yet, if work at hospice can teach me one thing, it’s that very few people are ready and resolved to die–everyone else puts up “a good fight” to stave off the inevitable.

As Shakyamuni Buddha is said to have said:

I am of the nature to grow old.
There is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to have ill-health.
There is no way to escape having ill-health.

I am of the nature to die.
There is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love
are of the nature to change.
There is no way to escape being separated from them.

My actions are my only true belongings.
I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.
My actions are the ground on which I stand.

… and Woody Allan: 

“It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

p.s. I wrote this before I went to the monastery for a week’s silent retreat. Back on December 15, unless …