Ojo de Pato

Le soleil ni la mort ne se peuvent regarder en face
(You cannot stare straight into the face of the sun, or death.)

FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, MAXIM 26

I was going through a difficult period of my life. I just had lost whatever at the moment I considered valuable in my career. It was in that profound despair when a friend of mine introduced me the books of author Irvin D. Yalom, a San Francisco-based psychologist who, as I later discovered, masterfully blends philosophy and psychology. I read his book “When Nietzsche wept” and, with delight, I could witness Yalom’s deep but accessible approach to the intricate and tumultuous world of the German philosopher and the world of psychotherapy, characterized by psychologist Josef Breuer. Although a fictional story, it is a great synthesis of Nietzsche’s philosophy and the developing knowledge on psychology of his time. After finishing reading it and eager to know more about the writings of the author, I started to devour another of his books “The Schopenhauer Cure”. Reading that mixture between the power of group therapy and the hardcore of Schopenhauer’s teachings was a powerful antidote for my turmoil state of soul.

Years passed since then, until last week, when I went to my local bookstore, wondering what title I could attack and trying to avoid the soreness of the easy-reading novels. Suddenly I remembered Yalom and, triumphant, found and bought his book “Staring at the Sun. Overcoming the Terror of Death”. Not other better choice I could have had: the book brought to me the most fascinating topic of all, the ruthless consideration of our own death.

The author starts his first chapter with this bittersweet statement: “Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality.” We, humans, have the most developed form of intelligence in the known universe and, precisely because of that, we know that we will have an end and that life is just borrowed time. This precariousness is a thrilling fact and, I would say, that is what makes life so interesting because we are permitted to live a cycle that will have its period of growing, climax and decay. There is no such thing as an endless story or a “never-ending story”. Limits in a story are appropriate to be able to be understood. The essential structure of a cycle –and this cycle could be an essay, a musical piece, a human life- has generally these basic elements: introduction, exposition, development, recapitulation, conclusion, and these elements constitute the frame in which knowledge, action and drama occur. No-end would derive in dullness and world-weariness.

The author of the book asks a decisive question: “Why, you may ask, take on this unpleasant, frightening subject? Why stare into the sun?” (…) I believe that it will help you stare death in the face and, in so doing not only ameliorate terror but enrich your life.” So, Yalom suggests that the whole exercise of thinking about this subject and put ourselves in front of the cold fact that “I am going to die”, will bring another perspective of your present life; a different light that brings up unexpected angles, unseen sides of an object –our life- that we were only used to see from the unreal perspective of our vain desire of being eternal, and, as a result of such exercise, the understanding of our reality will grow and, therefore, our actions will be according to this decisive truth.

Death anxiety and religion

People get anxious because they know they will die. An interesting phenomenon that Yalom points out as a consequence of death anxiety is religion. “Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude. God, as formulated transculturally, not only softens the pain of mortality through some vision of everlasting life but also palliates fearful isolation by offering an eternal presence, and provides a clear blueprint for living a meaningful life.” Religion is a palliative, an answer-at-hand to the “unanswered question” of death. Thus, religion is, in his view, is a body of ideas that resulted from the effort to help ourselves to overcome our anxiety of death. Yalom’s religious view is that of an agnostic and he declares that “the belief in an omnipresent, omniscient personal God watching you, protecting you, providing you with a life design, is incompatible with the core of my existential vision of humanity as free, mortal, thrown alone and randomly into an uncaring universe.” Nevertheless he does not consider that the commodities such as meaning, wisdom, morality, and living well, are dependent on a belief in God. He doesn’t need religion “to supply a moral compass.” There are different ways to palliate our fear of death. Religion views work for some people; human-generated doctrines for other people –and Yalom is among the latter. I, personally, find myself into the first group as Christianity has given me so much enrichment in a deep level of my understanding of the world. Nevertheless, I also count myself into the second group too as my searching for meaning includes whatever has been thought by humanity and I, as humble disciple, listen and learn.

Although the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us

“A dialectic expressed by Heidegger, the twentieth-century German Philosopher, clarifies this paradox. He proposed two modes of existence: the everyday mode and the ontological mode (from onto, “being,” and the suffix –logy, “study of”). In your everyday mode, you are entirely absorbed in your surroundings, and you marvel at how things are in the world; whereas in the ontological mode, you focus on and appreciate the miracle of “being” itself and marvel that things are, that you are.” Heidegger proposes the consideration of death as the idea that saves our life from being submerged into the everyday mode and, absorbed, without the correct perspective to choose and make the right decisions. “There is a crucial difference between how things are and that things are. When absorbed in the everyday mode, your turn toward such evanescent distractions as physical appearance, style, possessions, or prestige. In the ontological mode, by contrast, you are not only more aware of existence and mortality and life’s other immutable characteristics but also more anxious and more primed to make significant changes. You are prompted to grapple with your fundamental human responsibility to construct and authentic life of engagement, connectivity, meaning, and self-fulfillment.” I consider this the hardcore of this meditation. Literary examples abound: Ebenezer Scrooge, from Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, and his “awakening experience” after seeing the future and the consequences of his life; Ivan Ilych, from Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilich”, that realizes that he is dying so badly because he has lived so badly. The awakening experience for us comes when an event occurs in our lives –school and college reunions, estate planning, birthday and anniversaries, death of a family member, make a will, even dreams- and brings us back to the definitive questions: What am I doing for the people I love? Whom I love? Who will miss me? To whom I should be generous?

Yet, Yalom explores arguments from ancient thinkers that help to overcome the death anxiety and, one of his favorites is Epicurus. Epicurus’ three best-known arguments to alleviate death anxiety are: 1. The mortality of the soul; 2. The ultimate nothingness of death; and, 3. The argument of symmetry.

Regarding the mortality of the soul Yalom explains that “If we are mortals and the soul does not survive, Epicurus insisted, then we have nothing to fear in the afterlife. We will have no consciousness, no regrets for the life that was lost, nor anything to fear from the gods. (…) In his second argument, Epicurus posits that death is nothing to us, because the soul is mortal and is dispersed at death. What is dispersed does not perceive, and anything not perceived is nothing to us. In other words: where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not. Therefore, Epicurus held: ‘why fear death when we can never perceive it?’ (…) Epicurus’ third argument holds that our state of non-being after death is the same state we were in before our birth. (…) Of the may who have restated this argument over the centuries, none has done so more beautifully than Vladimir Nabokov, the great Russian novelist, in his autobiography, Speak, Memory, which begins with these lines: ‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence in but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm that the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).’” To me, Epicurus’ perspective not only does not alleviate my fear of death but is makes it even more frightening: the post-mortem future completely hopeless.

Talking about death is, thus, talking about how we are living our life, about our happiness. To that end, Schopenhauer contributes with a triplet of essays on what we have, what we represent in the eyes of others, and what we are. “Basically the essays emphasize that it is only what an individual is that counts; neither wealth nor material goods nor social status nor a good reputation results in happiness. (...) Wealth is like seawater: the more we drink, the thirstier we become. (…) The opinion of others is a phantasm that may alter at any moment. Opinion hang by a thread and make us slaves to what others think or, worse, to what they appear to think –for we can never know that they actually think. (…) Our greatest goal should be good health and intellectual wealth, which lead to an inexhaustible supply of ideas, independence, and moral life. Inner equanimity stems from knowing that it is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of things.”

The old search for the ataraxia, the peaceful state of mind, is still present in everyone’s life. In the world of today, stress is one of the most common sources of illness and decay of human life. Stress comes as a result of a desire of material wealth and from worry about what other people think about us. Ataraxia is the intra and inter-personal intelligence: love ourselves and love others in the cultivation of our beings, our thoughts, and our souls. That is the conclusion of Mr. Scrooge after those visits awoke him to a realization of his finite condition. To realize that he is, celebrate it and construct an authentic life of engagement, connectivity, meaning, and self-fulfillment.

* All quotes are taken from: YALOM, Irvin D., “Staring at the Sun. Overcoming the terror of death”, Jossey Bass, 2008-2009.

I just watched "Deliver Us from Evil" a documentary by Amy Berg, released in 2006, about the story of one of the Catholic Church's pedophile priests, Father Oliver O'Grady and the harm that he did during 30 years of priesthood covered by the bishop who just kept changing him from one parish to another in Central California without applying straightforward discipline. The Bishop's conduct was clearly motivated by both, his own interests in terms of his promotion within the church hierarchy, and by defending the image of the Catholic Church. He did so without thinking on the harm implied to the children and their families. This pattern was repeated in numerous dioceses and cost the Catholic Church in America 1 billion dollars in settlements to over more than 100,000 victims.

The documentary shows how two of Fr. O'Grady's victims went to the Vatican and wrote a letter to the Pope in order to tell their stories and avoid these situations in the future but they were not allowed to enter and hand-in the letter to the Pope.

The conclusion of the film: there is not such thing as the church as a mother. The church is a body of corruption that does not want to hear their own children cries and problems. The warmth that a Catholic parishioner experiments in their parish, is betrayed by the conduct of his/her church authorities and it is reduced to a well mounted paraphernalia with no soul nor trust.

I couldn't avoid to think on what Hannah Arendt regards as to be the main forces that lie behind any totalitarian system: ideology and terror. Ideology, as the service of the people to an idea, and terror, as the fear that paralyzes any reasoning and force people to act awkward and erratically. The ideology, in this case, is the idea of system. The catholic hierarchy serves to the idea of the system so it can be alive: a body that has to survive despite the harm of some of its own children. On the other hand, the fear is filtrated in the very nerve of the decisions and causes reasoning mutilation, lack of perspective, myopia in front of the damage that the victims suffer from the "sinners and repented priests".

To me, the message of Christ remains pure and the catholic doctrine, valid. The causes of the undesirable results are in the very origin of a dirty gestation of any totalitarian system and, the Church, that follows a monarchic model, is not immune to these effects.