What
Collapse Feels Like, Part 4 of 5
Despair: Every Hour Offers A Choice
By
Carolyn Baker
21
October, 2013
Every
day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a
decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to
those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your
inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the
plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become
molded into the form of the typical inmate.
~Victor
Frankl~
Similar
to our siblings in the animal kingdom, we humans react instinctively
to stimuli that we perceive as threatening. The heartbeat speeds up,
blood pressure elevates, muscles contract, and we are poised for
fight or flight. If we are bombarded with this kind of stimuli
repeatedly over time, such recurring stress pummels the nervous
system, and we are usually worn down into depression, despair, or
both. While our physiology is similar to that of other animals, our
nervous systems are more sophisticated, and in spite of the plethora
of ways in which we have reprehensibly applied it, we do possess more
complex consciousness than other mammals. While other life forms
experience despair as unequivocally as humans do, in most cases,
humans have the capacity to choose how they will manage despair, and
other living beings do not.
But
what is despair? Most dictionary definitions offer “the loss of
hope” as the ultimate answer to this question. As I have
written many times in many places, “hope” is one of the most
seductive and loathsome soporifics of modern culture. In a majority
of instances, hope is the last holdout of the human ego which says,
“Oh, I don’t have to stare reality fully in the face. I can hold
onto ‘hope’.” Clinging to hope is indicative of abdicating
agency and is often one of the most perilous bulwarks of the denial
infrastructure.
Why
We Need Despair
However,
when we consider issues such as the collapse of industrial
civilization or Near-Term extinction resulting from catastrophic
climate change—our role in it and how we might want to respond it,
the first order of business is that we lose all hope. In the context
of collapse, hope is personified in things like the notion of
technology as our ultimate savior, shale oil as the antidote for peak
oil, Bill McKibben as the answer to climate change, Barack Obama as
Messiah (with “The Audacity of Hope” in tow), the agenda of
Progressive Democratic politics as a feasible alternative to Tea
Party politics, and geo-engineering as a panacea for global warming.
If we prefer to keep one foot in Disneyland denial, then any or all
of these are an option. If, however, we are committed to facing and
telling the unmitigated truth of our predicament, then all hope must
be eviscerated and as quickly as possible. Hope serves to prevent our
descent into the only state of mind that offers any possibility of
making sense of our predicament, namely despair.
Notice
that I am purposefully reviling the word “hope.” Hope, that
‘waiting for Santa Claus’ chimera of the subservient subjects of
industrial civilization, is, however, very different from “options,”
“responses,” or “resilience.” The latter result not from
civilization’s refusal to come to terms with a tragic sense of
life, namely, that all things have a beginning, middle, and end.
Rather authentic options, responses, and resilience embrace the
tragic sense of life alongside utter hopelessness.
When
we engage in exercising options, considering possible responses, and
creating for ourselves and our communities a state of resilience, we
are doing something besides allowing despair to kill us on a variety
of levels. We clearly understand that longevity is not the ultimate
objective. Our bodies are guaranteed to die, but choosing to develop
resilience is choosing not to die just yet. And why would we want to
do that? Because despite how it feels, despite the suffocating,
cloying blackness of despair, some part of us knows that there is
some possibility of meaning in it. In that regard, we are not alone;
we stand alongside millions of other human beings throughout history
who have written, spoken, composed songs, and made all manner of
art—and meaning, in the face of their despair.
So
if you want to insist that life is meaningless, which by the way even
Nietzsche did not believe, you probably should stop reading right
here. If you want me to convince you that life isn’t meaningless,
well, I can’t do that, nor do I want to. It’s really none of my
business, but if you have some inkling that it’s possible to
find/make meaning in the throes of despair and that doing so matters
in any way, you may want to continue reading.
My
ultimate heroes and she-roes are the men and women who survived the
holocaust and were able to write about their experiences afterward.
One of those is Victor Frankl who gave us a treasure-trove of insight
and inspiration as a result of his hellish ordeal. For Frankl it was
all about discovering the rich and wrenching textures of his inner
life. In fact, he considered “the intensification of inner life”
to be one of the principal gifts in the nightmare he endured.
All
human beings are victimized at some time or countless times in their
lives. Repeated victimization carries with it not only the emotional
pain of the victimizing experience but conditions the nervous system
and psyche to expect and become tragically familiar, even comfortable
with, being victimized. Over time, people can develop a victim
consciousness in which they may become incapable of discerning their
personal adult responsibility, that is to say, “one’s part” in
a particular situation. Or conversely, one can become so enculturated
in victimhood that one begins to despise humanity in general and
one’s own humanity in particular. Despair and victim consciousness
often travel together, and it takes a great deal of self-love and
commitment to one’s own inherent value to avoid the pitfalls of
self-loathing and humanity-hating vitriol. If one intends to weather
the storms of planetary demise, this perspective will not serve. Nor
will the commitment to meaninglessness as one’s “true north.”
Says Frankl, reflecting on his Auschwitz experience, “Woe to him
who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore
no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.”
What
will serve (which is not synonymous with staying alive) is a
commitment to finding/making meaning in one’s predicament.
Victor
Frankl repeatedly emphasized our capacity to choose how we want to
meet suffering. Specifically, he wrote:
Every
day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a
decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to
those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your
inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the
plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become
molded into the form of the typical inmate.
Frankl
recognized suffering as an “essential piece not only of existence
but of the meaningful life.” If there is meaning in life at all, he
wrote, “then there must be meaning in suffering. Suffering is an
ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering
and death human life cannot be complete.”
As
you know, dear reader, industrial civilization does not prepare us
for adopting this perspective. It fosters Victim-Tyrant relationships
and constantly sends us beautifully engraved invitations to claim one
or both roles, and sometimes we find ourselves alternating roles from
moment to moment. But real suffering—the kind produced in
holocausts, the collapse of empires, and extinction events compels
the people weathering those to choose whether or not they will find
meaning in their suffering or not. Or as Frankl writes: “Everywhere
man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something
through his own suffering.” The “something” that we have a
chance of achieving is to be found in whatever “something” we
choose to live for. Frankl tells us that in the camp, the people who
were the most resilient were those who found some very small thing to
live for each day. And yes, it was our friend Nietzsche who said, “He
who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”
But
in fact, according to Frankl, the years in Auschwitz taught him
something more fundamental than the meaning of life:
What
was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward
life. We had to learn ourselves, and furthermore, we had to teach the
despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected
from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop
asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves
as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly. Our
answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action
and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility
to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks
which it constantly sets for each individual.
As
I sit with the possibility of Near-Term Extinction (NTE) and Frankl’s
words, I am driven to fall on my knees and make a conscious,
heartfelt amends to the earth community—not once but many times. I
prefer this practice to berating and beating up myself and my fellow
earthlings for our multitude of sins against Gaia. If this feels like
an absurdly useless activity to you, ask yourself if generalized
contempt for the human race is any more useful.
Yes,
our species has collectively participated in murdering the planet,
but that is not all of who we are. According to Frankl, “Is it
surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities
which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil? The rift
dividing good from evil, which goes through all human beings, reaches
into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the
abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp.” Indeed there
is a Goldman Sachs CEO and a greedy fracker in all of us. Until we
accept that, we are still ingesting “hopium” into our veins.
There is also within us a Beethoven, a Van Gogh, a Joan of Arc, and a
Helen Keller.
To
embrace unbridled nihilism or eschew those who speak of creating joy,
beauty, humor, and moments of caring community is to enlist in the
armies of the high priests of religious fundamentalism who flagellate
themselves with whips of caustic cynicism and grandiose self-censure.
If you think I’m talking about “feeling good” or “being
happy,” you’re absolutely not hearing me. None of this is about
being happy in hell, but it is all about working to keep one’s
heart open in hell.
Anyone
committed to nihilism and reveling in cynicism has not done the work
explained in the last segment of this series of articles on “What
Collapse Feels Like,” entitled “All Roads Lead To Grief.” In
fact, grief work is one of many tools for living with and through our
despair.
While
none of us welcomes despair and most of us seek to dispel it as
quickly as possible, let us learn from people like Frankl and his
death camp peers. I believe that on the one hand, we need to open to
being taught by our despair and at the same time, we must alleviate
it by taking action. Edward Abbey declared that action is an antidote
to despair. Indeed, let us take action, but at the same time
understand that the horrific experiences of Frankl and others are
sublime “teachers” bearing “lesson plans” for exquisitely
facilitating our wholeness and spiritual evolution.
Are
we willing to be taught by our despair? Taught what exactly? From
Frankl’s perspective, not so much what the meaning of one’s life
is, but who is asking the question. “In a word, each man is
questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering
for his own life; to life he can only respond by being
responsible.”
Two
things sustained Frankl and tens of thousands of others in death
camps: Love and humor. Love expands far beyond the physical being of
the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in the inner self of the
other, whether or not that person is actually present, or even if
that person is not alive at all.
Frankl’s
love for his wife gave him an invaluable sense of meaning:
We
were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us; grey was the
sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in
which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces. I was
again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling
to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last
violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed
my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend
that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a
victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an
ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant
farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the
midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. “Et
lux in tenebris lucet” — and the light shineth in the
darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard
passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved.
More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I
had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my
hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there.
Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just
in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the
ditch, and looked steadily at me.
Most
people reading this article are not living with hardship even
remotely approaching the hell of Auschwitz which Frankl describes.
Yet we live daily in the emotional and spiritual hell of empire and
the concentration camp of Near-Term Extinction where, as Guy
McPherson writes, “Only
Love Remains”:
The
privilege to be here, on this life-giving planet at this astonishing
time in human history, is sufficient to inspire awe in the most
uncaring of individuals. At this late juncture in the age of
industry, at the dawn of our day on Earth, we still have love: love
for each other, love for our children and grandchildren, love for
nature. One could argue it is all we have left.
Frankl
speaks of humor as “another of the soul’s weapons in the fight
for self-preservation” because it allows us to rise above any
situation if only for a few seconds.
Indeed
it is possible, according to Frankl, to practice the art of living in
a concentration camp even though suffering is omnipresent. In his
poem, “Peace Of The Wild Things,” Wendell Berry famously reminds
us of the most profound antidote to despair, intimate connection with
nature:
When
despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the
least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may
be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on
the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild
things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I
come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the
day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in
the grace of the world, and am free.
What
does it mean to “come into the presence” of these members of the
earth community? I believe that it means developing an intimate
relationship with them by allowing ourselves to feel them, listen to
them, witness them, smell, taste, and touch them. I also believe, as
Berry assures us in the last line of the poem, that in moments when
we experience this level of intimacy with these beings, it is
impossible to be engulfed in despair.
Die
Before You Die
An
adage attributed to Mohammed and also to the mystical poet, Rumi,
“die before you die,” is an essential perspective for the human
species that is most likely living in a hospice situation at this
moment as we confront catastrophic climate change and the horrifying
repercussions of the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011. All
resistance to facing the deepest truths of our predicament results
from an unwillingness to grapple with our own mortality. Modern
humanity refuses to confront the likelihood of Near-Term Extinction
(NTE) produced by human-produced climate change. More recently,
humanity cannot bear to own the frightening realities of Fukushima
and what that tragedy ultimately means for the termination of life on
this planet.
Nearly
all non-industrial cultures in the world, and many industrial ones,
are willing to deal with death. Overwhelmingly, this culture is not.
Yet I notice that when people are able to do so, their capacity for
confronting the larger issues of our predicament is expanded. In my
work with groups and individuals, I sometimes invite people to
participate in a “die before you die” exercise in which I slowly
and carefully accompany them through the fantasy of their own death.
The experience is profound on many levels, and without exception, I
have never witnessed a person who after the exercise was not more
capable of addressing the myriad catastrophes confronting the earth
community. In fact, what people essentially report is that after they
have consciously pondered their own demise, they feel freed up to
mindfully deal with what is. At the conclusion of a “die before you
die” experience, one man said, “I’ve deeply confronted what my
own death might be like, and after that, I can talk about anything
because in full awakeness I have confronted the worst that can
happen.”
Many
Buddhist monastic communities practice contemplation of dead or
decaying bodies. The purpose of the practice is to instill a profound
consciousness of one’s own mortality and allow that awareness to
inform how we live our lives. Absent a deep awareness of death, we
are less likely to make sense of our lives, nor are we likely to
offer love and service to other beings. Buddha suggested that we
think of death with every breath and that contemplating a dead body
teaches us that when we look at another person, we are seeing only
externals and that the essential person is eternal and beneath the
outward appearance.
The
principal task of anyone residing in hospice is preparation for
death, and paradoxically, that may include living more fully,
mindfully, and generously than one has ever lived before. It often
means savoring every human connection and every physical sensation
with more awareness and appreciation than one has ever experienced in
one’s life. Living in hospice means that because we are so attuned
to where we’re headed, so poignantly conscious of our ultimate
fate, we cherish every experience on a cellular level and take
nothing for granted. Often in hospice, people discover the full
spectrum of their aliveness for the first time.
Few
human beings understand how deeply the fear of death runs in us. On
the one hand, we live in a culture that refuses to deal with death,
but at the same time, for the human ego, anything that does not allow
it to remain in control of life, directly or indirectly represents
the threat of death. The losses of our lives, from the most frivolous
to the most momentous stir in us a fear of death because with each
one, the ego diminishes a bit. Thus, in order to actually discuss and
consciously prepare for one’s own literal death, the ego is
required to surrender more territory than it prefers. For this
reason, spiritual practices that teach us how to surrender or temper
the ego in deference to the deeper or sacred self are profoundly
useful in emboldening us to confront our mortality.
In
addition, allowing ourselves to balance our left-brain tendencies
with what our hearts and emotions naturally seek in times of both ego
and literal death is crucial. Now is the time for reading and writing
poetry, speaking it to another person, composing and sharing music,
creating works of art, dancing, drumming, cooking a nourishing meal
for a friend, and engaging in all manner of ritual, whether
spiritually-based or rituals of our daily routine that we savor with
unprecedented gratitude.
Thus,
as we confront catastrophic climate change and planetary
game-changers such as the ever-widening implications of the Fukushima
disaster, it is increasingly likely that humanity is already
inhabiting hospice. As tempting as it may be to leap into the left
brain and begin arguing that we are not inhabiting hospice and that
the notion is absurd, it may actually be more useful to notice the
potential benefits of imagining such a scenario.
While
hospice may be a place of profound grief and mourning of losses and
missed opportunities, it may also be the context for plumbing the
depths of one’s own soul as well as discovering for the first time
one’s full capacity for generosity, giving, and service to others.
Hospice patients often report an enhanced quality of relationships,
an unprecedented savoring of even the most mundane experiences, a
previously-unimagined depth of love, the capacity to appreciate humor
in the face of their demise, and an aura of gratitude unlike any they
have ever known. In other words, hospice may be, not unlike
Frankl’s description of his time in Auschwitz, a convergence of
both heaven and hell in the same moment—an energy field in which
abject suffering and ineffable joy co-exist and illuminate the
innermost regions of our humanity. Perhaps the poet Rumi asked the
most compelling question: “
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