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A GENTLE
DEATH IS NOT TO FEAR
The
Story
This
is a very ordinary little story: but it contains a problem.
It begins on the afternoon a month ago when I visited
my old friend Tanner in her big old house in central London. She was
especially pleased to see me - although she is actually always pleased
to see me - because her conservatory roof was leaking; and because
I might be able to advise how to mend it. I have a reputation for
this sort of practical genius.
For my own sake, I was also happy to get away from
Oxford, where I seemed to do little but produce endless variations
on my argument that children learn best if they are taught to question
every argument as if may be wrong.
I was getting very weary of this task. It was clear
that no-one had ever taken this idea seriously before - especially
not in mathematics - and I was running clean out of new ways to present
it.
To be able to look down on the conservatory roof
from above - thus to give my opinion on how it might be repaired -
Tanner took me to her bathroom on the third floor, overlooking the
courtyard. Then she left me alone for a while.
From this height I could actually see very little
of the conservatory roof except that she had resourcefully placed
a black plastic bag over the leak, and had held this down, even more
resourcefully, with two short flat pieces of wood.
I had not noticed her bathroom before. A salle de
bain would be a more proper name for it, since, whilst it certainly
held a bath, it also had a fireplace, a fitted carpet, one of those
big old cupboards that the English call a press, in which linen sheets
can be laid on long flat shelves after being ironed so that they do
not crease, and a bookcase full of books. Just at waist level as I
stood at the window was a long set of slim volumes in identical pale
blue and white patterned covers. These were obviously the output of
some intensely active, but possibly also rather tedious, mind.
My interest had certainly sharpened on seeing all
these potentially absorbing volumes, but as just I was about to reach
up to take one down, my friend, who was with me, always aware of my
struggle to convince so many different people of the same simple fact
- preferably with only one formula instead of many - reached out a
hand, plucked out one of the set of books from closely wedged line
of pastel coloured covers, and, showing that he was just as familiar
with their contents as their titles - they were printed along their
spines, but from this angle I could not read them - he flicked it
open at once and, with what can only be called triumphant confidence,
held it under my nose.
There was only one page - on the right - with text.
On the left was a photograph of a pen and ink sketch of two ladies
in the stifling fashion of a hundred years ago - they were wearing
broad-brimmed hats, with veils, in an elegantly furnished room - and
there was man there too. I had only time to notice a black coat, a
thin moustache, pince-nez, and that he was holding a cup.
But my friend obviously did not expect these people
to mean anything to me at all; and they did not. The lines that he
wanted me to read, right there in the centre of the page, were very
different.
‘A powerful idea,’ I read, ‘communicates
some of its strength to him who challenges it. Being itself a part
of the riches of the universal Mind, it makes its way into, grafts
itself upon the mind of him whom it is employed to refute, slips in
amongst the ideas already there, with the help of which, gaining a
little ground, he completes and corrects it; so that the final utterance
is always to some extent the work of both parties to a discussion.’
“Good Heavens,” I said - I do really say
things like that when deeply moved - “but that’s exactly
what I have been saying!”
“It is exactly!” replied my clever, confident,
knowing friend.
“But who wrote it?” I wondered.
Turning the book over in my hand I was able to read
the title on the front. It was volume one of ‘Within a Budding
Grove’ by Marcel Proust.
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
wrote the seven parts of his enormous novel À la recherche
du temps perdu from about 1910 to 1922. It really is a novel, although
I had always supposed it was biography. When first translated into
English it was called Remembrance of Things Past. Later this was corrected
to In Search of Lost Time. The first translation, the one I read,
filled twelve of those slim volumes with their identically patterned
pastel covers.
The truth is, of course, that whatever title his
great work may have had, I have never had the slightest interest in
M. Proust. If I had read the title, I would never have taken it off
the shelf. It was my clever, knowing friend who had so instantly reached
out to take it from its eleven sisters, who had had flicked it open
and held it, with such glorious assurance - an assurance that I could
feel - under my nose. ‘Read this!’ was his command; and
what I read was exactly what I had been writing for ages past. 1
Now I was no longer alone. Now I could say that
‘the greatest novelist of the twentieth century’ - for thus
has Proust been described - perfectly understood that children can
be taught an argument best by arguing against it themselves.
But that is not the problem.
The
Problem.
The
problem is that you were not introduced. Had you noticed? The fact
is that I could not introduce you. In the house that afternoon there
was only me and Tanner; and Tanner, at the time, was somewhere else.
So who knew those lines - and where to find them?
Whose hand reached out to take that volume out of twelve; turned to
that page; directed my attention to just those lines?
Obviously it was my hand which reached out to take
that book, my fingers which turned to that page, and my eyes which
found those lines.
But why was I so surprised?
The house was built in 1770. I have asked Tanner
if it has any ghosts. Actually I would be much sorrier for the ghost,
if they met, than for Tanner. She would probably exorcise it at once
with some oven cleaner. I have also asked her to estimate how many
books there might be in the house. Her first response was: “Oh,
about eight thousand.” Then she revised this downwards: “At
least five or six.”
But I am avoiding the point.
All my friends have told me: “Oh, Colin! This
is just another simple case of ‘the prepared mind’! - understood
by science! - obvious to sceptical minds! - there is no mystery: this
is just unconscious self-deception! Of course you saw those lines
instantly - of course, you also saw instantly that they correspond
with your own ideas. But this is entirely typical of 'the prepared
mind'. I expect it happens to you all the time!"
This was also Tanner's response. It certainly is
an experience I am very familiar with, and it has occurred many times.
But rarely, if ever, has it been as abrupt, as unexpected, as comic-book
simple, as much like a conjuring trick - but, above all, as complete
and perfect as this.
In reply to her explanation, I proposed an experiment to prove it
true. I would take any book at random, open it, and within a very
short time, if not at once, from previous experience I could virtually
guarantee that I would find myself something relevant to our discussion.
She sent me to her bedroom, where I would be unfamiliar with any of
her books. There was a full bookcase beside her bed. I bent down and
I selected a paperback in the gloom; then brought this back to her
brighter sitting room. When we saw what I had selected, we both burst
out laughing. I had taken a famous book by a friend of hers which
had won a famous prize. I knew of it, but had never read it.
Now I sat down and opened it at random. I looked.
On the first pages: nothing. On the second attempt: nothing. Once
again: nothing. And again: nothing. And again, a longer pause: nothing.
This time I was expecting to find something relevant.
But after five attempts it was clear that the experiment had failed.
The point is that all these reasonable explanations
make perfect sense to those who do not know their own minds very well.
And they do not know their minds very well because they have never
been sceptical enough. They have allowed themselves to be persuaded,
by those they trust, and also by those they do not trust, that their
essential identity is external first and internal only afterwards.
It is as if their identity is something that they wear; but also that
it is something they are conscious of having to wear; that their external
identity really defines who they are.
Think of a soldier wearing his uniform; of girl
in her confirmation dress. Both are made to feel very conscious of
the identity they have put on. This identity, of course, is not who
they really are. But it is not trivial. The soldier may lose his life
in that uniform; the girl's confirmation will last her lifetime -
and is meant to.
But you must also know that very many young children
are sure they have protective companion? Usually this belief endures
until they can be persuaded that their companion is not real. But
does it really go away? Do they all lose their companion?
Before Judeo-Christian beliefs turned them all into
demons, the early Greeks recognise two types of these companions:
the good and the wicked; the eudaimon and the kakadaimon.
Socrates claimed to have a daimonion, a small harmless
daimon who only warned him against mistakes, but who never told him
what to do. He claimed that his daimonion was more accurate than any
of the forms of divination practised in his time. Dæmons appear
also in Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy.
His dæmons are souls of humans which accompany them from childhood,
and which finally settle into their true form when the children reach
puberty.
It is thus both a very old and a very new idea. 2
In 1964 two German neurologists at
the University of Freiburg made a perplexing discovery about the way
people decide when to act. They called their discovery a Bereitschaftspotential
or a "readiness potential". This is a distinctive activity
in the brain which appears just before the brain orders a movement.
There is nothing odd here. Of course the brain must
prepare to make a movement before the movement is made. What is unsettling,
however, is that this activity appears from one to one and a half
seconds before the owner of the brain decides to make the movement.
Does the owner of the brain make that decision;
or is there some other identity in the brain which tells the owner:
'Now decide this.'?
Then other questions tumble over one another: Does
that other identity matter more? Is it more in control? Does it know
more? How much more might it know?
These are surely questions that the Greeks were
attempting to answer with their notions of daimons. There is no doubt
that Jesus believed that our external identity is a hindrance to being
aware of God. "To see [as] the son of man," he declared,
"take off your clothes and trample them as children do, and you
will see unafraid."
And what are these 'clothes' except external show,
our external identity?
Once again, and far more famously: "When you
pray, do not babble like those who think they will be heard because
of their many words. Your Father knows what you need before you ask
him."
To me it appears that all of this is of a piece
with my own experience.
I have a daimon. He is a he. I wish he were a lady,
like Socrates' Diotima, who taught him that Eros, the daimon of love,
connects gods and man.
If mine was loud and bullying, telling me of spies
and dangers, and of my worthlessness, urging me to do violence to
myself or others, then I would know - at least I hope I would know
- that I had become a schizophrenic.
But my daimon has never urged me to do anything
at all. He is very quiet and unobtrusive; if he speaks, which is rare,
it is almost inaudible. But he is always there.
I think that he is my real identity. Long before,
years before, I learnt anything of what I have just written above,
it seemed to me that he is just who I really am, with none of the
signs by which others know me. Except for a kind of austere approval,
he appears to have no human emotions. It is only the external identity
which is caught up in the emotional interaction with others. The real
identity - that which is within - can only act as the conduit of love,
pure, undemanding, sufficient in and of itself, unchanging.
I find that this he, this daimon of mine, is also
the portal through which I receive, whenever I ask for it, that flood
of joy that I believe so many want from God, and which their own confusion
about who they are makes it so very difficult for them to receive.
He is, very probably, just a creation of my mind. But all the perceptions
that I make of the world are also just creations of my mind. This
does not mean the sun does not exist. It only means that I only perceive
of it what I am able to perceive.
He is, in any case, my trusted counsellor, to whom
I turn when in despair, and he receives my thanks - which he always
declines - whenever I succeed. Perhaps he does occasionally prepare
me to make decisions. Perhaps it is the case - as with this discovery
of Proust - that sometimes he actually makes the decisions.
Most important is that I believe he will be the
gate through which the last of my awareness will leave this world.
What is on the other side, I really do not know; but I believe there
are many other worlds waiting for us.
But if all of this is true, then here is a truth
that those who benefit from war will have tried for millennia to keep
secret. It is simple; but many will find its consequences terrible.
Here it is: in order to pass through that portal, it is necessary
to have learnt to detach oneself at will from the external identity,
and to merge with one's daimon.
This is not difficult to do. It is what most religions
teach, as a matter of fact, although often in a sadly garbled form.
But it requires some practice; and, more to the point, it requires
learning a certain detachment from one's external identity. It also
requires, when needed, a few moments of detachment in time.
The consequence is that those who die in a welter
of violent emotions, whether they are of hatred or of fear, or of
greed or of pride - of any kind of attachment to their external identity
- will be held back from reaching that portal and passing through
it. They need to move in the now, but they are anchored by the past.
And if then they die - then, just as their external identity is being
destroyed, and just as this tangle of emotions is being destroyed
- so are they destroyed: completely.
This is why several religions have made the practice
of learning detachment central to their teaching. This is why priests
give absolution - if they can - to those who are dying quietly: for
even if they have not recognise the possibility before, there may
still be just time enough for them to abandon their external identity,
to recognize the portal, to reach and pass through it.
This is why we should all cultivate our daimon.
And there is nothing to be afraid of in this. Socrates made it very
easy for anyone to recognise the good from the ugly. "My daimon,"
he said, "never incites me to do anything."
That is the difference. Learn to listen to your
own quiet calming counsel. It will never tell you to do anything.
If you are being incited to do anything, whether it is by some internal
impulse, or by some other people, and especially if the incitement
is to anger and to violence, you are in very grave danger: for those
who die violently, and especially for those who die in anger, their
'now' ends in that instant, and so do they. This may indeed be called
an 'ultimate sacrifice', but I doubt if many realize just how ultimate
it must be. Heaven cannot be very crowded.
There is a terrible tendency for modern thinkers to suppose that what
they believe must be more true than anything others have believed
before.
In some fields, especially of the sciences, I agree
with this. But when it comes to observations of the self, of the mind,
of existence, of whether life has purpose, then I do not agree. In
these cases the ancient thinkers were sometimes far more free and
in this sense objective than we can be today.
As we have seen, they believed in two types of these
companions: the good and the wicked; the eudaimon and the kakadaimon.
What might happen if the kakadaimon took charge instead of the eudaimon?
Every daily newspaper will tell of personal violence
or depravity. But consider the reply of Wilfred von Oven, personal
assistant to Adolf Hitler's propaganda chief, Dr Josef Goebbels, to
the question put to him by the historian Laurence Rees in 1990:
"If you could sum up your experience of the
Third Reich in just one word," Rees asked, "what would it
be?"
Rees confesses that Oven's reply - the response,
he recalls, of 'this intelligent and charming man - astonished him.
It should astonish us: "Paradise!"
But then Rees has also recorded the response of
'one of the toughest and bravest survivors of the death camps', who
was most frequently asked of his experience: "What did you learn?"
And his reply?
"I'm only sure of one thing - nobody knows
themselves." 3
Rees describes his repeated surprise that monstrous
criminals - like Rudolf Hoess, for example, commandant of Auschwitz,
who organised and directed the gassing and the burning of over a million
people - could seem 'a normal person.' 4
If old cultures recognise this possibility better
that we do today, it did not stop the organisation of the massacres,
the pogroms; the witch hunts and the burnings; the public tortures
and executions as entertainments. And we remember the instruction
of the Papal Legate to the Albigensian Crusade, when his Crusaders
asked him how they should distinguish heretics from good Catholics
in the city of Beziers, which they had taken by direct assault: "Tuez-les
tous, Dieu reconnaîtra les siens."
This was at the beginning of the 13th century. But
when the brave young men of the United States and British Air Forces
turned every town and city in Germany into crematoria at fearsome
cost to themselves they were required to be just as indifferent to
the people being incinerated below.
It is clearly part of the human condition that ordinary
human beings have the capacity for appalling cruelty and for extraordinary
sacrifice and kindness. Unless we recognise that we are all of us
capable of either, we do not know ourselves.
Now, at the beginning of our 21st century, it is
surely time to recognise that by far the more dangerous kakadaimon
is not the psychopathic impulse to hurt others for one's own enjoyment.
This is just insanity, plain and simple. Equally afflicted, often
just as dangerous, is the schizophrenic obeying his bicameral voices.
5
But always on an immensely greater scale: far more
impersonal; far less obvious; offering a position which can be represented
as morally courageous, self-sacrificing, constructive, even noble,
is the determination to believe that there is no personal moral choice
- that this 'normal person', or this 'intelligent and charming man',
must be entirely obedient to the implicit or declared will of the
crowd.
In this case the social identity still has a past.
Obviously it still has the slippery awareness of our senses that we
call our present. It may believe that it still has a future. But being
entirely dependent on its external awareness, its infinitely more
precious 'now' is lost. If its awareness of this now has lost its
contact for too long with its daimon, it is most unlikely to regain
it in extremis. And then, when the senses close down, its awareness
has no anchor.
There is no portal. There is nowhere for it to go.
For a while it may wander. The Tibetan Buddhists tell long stories
of its possible adventures. Most are terrifying - as they are meant
to be. Their main point is that without careful, thoughtful preparation,
over time, the awareness that we think of as our real self, not the
self which people think and say we are, but who we really are, will
certainly be lost.
I think this is what is meant by: "Many are
called, but few are chosen."
Perhaps the few are chosen, because few choose.
1
It reads even better in the original. "Une idée forte
communique un peu de sa force au contradicteur. Participant à
la valeur universelle des esprits, elle s'insere, sa greffe en l'esprit
de celui qu'elle réfute, au milieu d'idées adjacentes,
à l'aide desquelle, reprenant quelque avantage, il la complète
la rectifie; si bien que la sentence finale est en quelque sorte l'œuvre
des deux personnes qui discutaient."
2
Wikepedia 2008
3
AUSCHWITZ Rees, 2005: he names the survivor as Toivi Blatt
4
The comment is actually by the American lawyer, Whitney Harris, who
interviewed Hoess at Nuremberg: "He was just a normal person,
like a grocery clerk." In his memoir, before being returned and
hanged at Auschwitz, Hoess wrote of himself: "I had to do all
this because I was the one to whom everyone looked. … I had to
appear cold and indifferent to events that must have wrung the heart
of anyone possessed of human feeling. I had to watch coldly, while
the mothers with laughing or crying children went into the gas chambers."
Kommandant in Auschwitz, Hoess, 1958.
5
The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind,
Jaynes, 1976.
Colin Hannaford,
27/07/05
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