The near death test
March 24th 2007 12:44
Brief extract.
Brief comment.
Well, living with passion and without fear I can celebrate. It's carpe diem. Shyness is no virtue, but a great sin, especially against oneself.
But is it true that stress reveals one's true nature, or that imminent death reveals one's true desires? Do people have true natures or true desires? Or are we products of the situations in which from moment to moment we find ourselves?
Do death-bed regrets reveal what you should have done?
By Jacinta Tynan:
| A friend, facing death after falling down a crevasse while skiing, found herself calling for the man she loved.
Not the man she was due to marry in two weeks, with the invitations gone out and the dress fittings complete, but her ex-boyfriend -- the guy she’d broken up with three years earlier, convinced he wasn’t The One. He wasn’t ambitious enough, she’d decided, and the way he always checked the map when she was navigating drove her bonkers. But when it became apparent she might be on her last legs, all that became extraneous and what she was left with was pure love and clarity. After being hauled out alive, she drove directly to the home of her jilted lover to share her epiphany. He, luckily, concurred, and the wedding went ahead with the first bloke, not the intended. Had she not slipped down a crevasse and been confronted with lights out, she would have married a different man. Let’s live with passion and without fear. When we’re faced with imminent extinction, I bet that what really matters will show up in stark relief. |
***
Brief comment.
Well, living with passion and without fear I can celebrate. It's carpe diem. Shyness is no virtue, but a great sin, especially against oneself.
But is it true that stress reveals one's true nature, or that imminent death reveals one's true desires? Do people have true natures or true desires? Or are we products of the situations in which from moment to moment we find ourselves?
Do death-bed regrets reveal what you should have done?
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Comment by Wendi
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
So I don't know that near death experiences necessarily give people a clearer point of view. Near death makes you protective of life, aware of the fragility of life, but also (I'd suggest) gives you a sort of tunnel vision, in which you only concentrate on the immediate future.
Comment by Wendi
Yup, I hadn't looked at that side of the coin. Good insights!
W
Comment by Uula Limanski
Thinking The World
as in your comment (when you talk about time remaining), i think the problem is that people tend to understand the carpe diem thing badly...
Good to see you back. Cheers.
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Not entirely back yet; still trying to get my shit together
I think a similar problem arises in the case of carpe diem -- why should a day be the meaningful unit of time instead of a year, or a moment? Or should the maxim "Live for the day" be replaced by something like the Nietzschean "Live as if you were doomed to repeat every moment endlessly".
Comment by Fredda
I live in the Philippines which, before the Spaniards came, did not have words for minutes, hours or seconds. the smallest units of time were morning, afternoon, "hapon" (from 4-6pm) and night. I guess the secret is to change you r view of time and just live with the SEASONS, with nature's natural cycles.
Living with the idea that time is passing by and we are getting closer to death is so stressful. But this is what we live with day in and day out as we become Westernized, and ever since we have been colonized by the Spaniards.
Studying pre-Spanish Filipinos esp. myths and folklore I could see that they did not see TIME the way Westerners did. They did not think they were alloted 100 years on the planet and that it is divided into days, months and years. They did not see "it" or the world or reality or the universe as something separate from time. They lived and flowed WITH IT, which is why they did not see it as something that "passed" them by.
Comment by Greg Willis
I would like to comment on the near death revelations experienced.
Extreme conditions can cause altered perceptions. Many people try to emulate this with mediation, drugs etc with varying degrees of success. But it is these moments of clarity which can change the world.
Having the ability to focus on a single topic or none at all and see what floats to mind is an amazing skill or experience. These can happen in the moment (whether minutes or days) or can happen long after a turning point.
Mine came after. At the time I chose with my head not my heart. I was not fortunate enough to have experienced extreme deprivation in an icy crevice but can happily justify the decision I made at the time.
We must always think with our head but be open to messages from the heart. Listening to the heart we risk sorrow, anger, despair but we have the possibility of amazing joy and love. Nothing compares to these.
If we only acted from the heart there would be no consistency, only what we felt at the time.
Would there be any morals (collective agreement on accepted behaviour)?
Comment by Nonymous
Philosophy Blog
Thanks for the comment!
I'm afraid I don't have much to say in response to it, but I think part of what you're pointing towards is the difficulty of formalizing a decision-making procedure. One can't use head alone, anymore than one can do logic without extra-logical premises -- but on what basis does one decide how much head and how much heart, and when to trust one over the other.
Regarding moments of clarity, perhaps one could be cynical and say that these are often moments of conditioning. For instance, lives change in the wake of trauma, -- "I swear before God that I'll never go hungry again." -- Is this really clarity, or is this circumstance?
Dear Fredda,
A very interesting and useful comment!
I think there's a lot of reasons Westerners are stressed about time (even though modern technology is full of "time-saving" devices).
Factors would include various sorts of genetic and conditioned behaviour and desires, including acquisitiveness, drives towards security, drives towards power, competitiveness with others ("success" usually means, basically, beating others), and the so-called "hedonic treadmill" -- allegedly, the desire to experience a certain level of happiness can push you to run faster and faster -- if one approaches the wrong way, one needs more effort to experience the same high, like needing higher and higher doses of heroin, as the brain acclimatizes to the greater buzz.
Mind you, just because one thinks in terms of mornings and not minutes needn't make one's life less stressful. -- You might still worry about using the morning as efficiently as possible, and might worry, in turn, about using days, weeks, months, years, lifetime as efficiently as possible.
Division of time into small units might contribute to some extent to stress (because then the "minute" becomes an object of thought -- you can think about how you're using your minute). But I want to suggest that it's focus on the fact of limitation that's important, not the time interval per se.
I suppose Westerners look at life as a whole, and there's various ways they set out life plans. For instance: (1) they could have various desires they want to satisfy -- either various things they want to do before they die (marry, visit India, have kids, own a sports car), or various ongoing projects that keep them busy (like increasing their intelligence, building a corporation, creating art); (2) they could want to maximize some quality -- maximize the amount of pleasure they experience over a lifetime or the help they can give to poor people or the welfare of their children; (3) they could view life as a work of art they want to embellish in particular ways.
Now, I think it's true that on all of these models the fact that death limits things is a problem (although, on the third model, it's also a good thing -- it provides the frame for the art). Time becomes a precious resource you have to use as carefully as possible.
There is especial anxiety if one doesn't believe in life after death.
What plan of life are you suggesting in contrast (where time is not as important, and one doesn't focus on limitations)?
Well, I think you're basically suggesting something like a duty- or right-based approach where one doesn't worry about time because one doesn't worry about the whole of life, the "big picture". Rather, in whatever situation one finds oneself, there is a right thing to do -- a "natural" thing, as you put it. This idea has Confucian echoes, and perhaps some Jewish people and Christians (monastic ones in particular) might live this way (if you do believe in life after death, and the point is to get into heaven, then maybe as long as whatever you're doing is not evil, you're basically satisfied with yourself).
If it is possible to speak of the "correct" way to live life, a duty-based approach might well be correct. It's an interesting fourth alternative. Though I should mention here that, on adopting this approach, you're then faced with difficult questions of determining what is the right thing to do in any situation.
I think in this part of your comment you could be interpreted as making the claim about right thing to do at any moment. But you also seem to be suggesting the idea that humans should see themselves as part of a whole -- and that if they do so, they will be less stressed in terms of their own lives.
Well, (1) part of the argument in the Monty Python galaxy song is that "human life is insignificant in the scheme of things, so don't worry about what you do with it". The Stoics used the same argument -- Marcus Aurelius emphasizes this time and again. And Aurelius also (2) wants people to focus on the good of the whole, and not of the individual person, and this also, he thinks, takes away fear of death and the stress of making decisions regarding one's life.
Personally, I'm not persuaded by either of these arguments. As for the second, I don't know that focus on the whole takes the stress of one's own life -- you might still worry about how best to serve the whole. As for the first, I think it only works if it's true that people believed, in the first place, that (1) their lives were important in the scheme of things, and (2) that therefore they should worry about how to spend it. The first might well be true (most people think they're special), but I don't think they base the importance of making decisions about their life on the fact of this specialness.