In 1973, Ernest Becker wrote Denial of Death, positing that the inability to confront our mortality was the hidden basis of most aspects of culture. This includes a broad spectrum of human activity: the pursuit of status and wealth, creating works of art, science, and any kind of monument that seems to have a kind of perpetual life or symbolic immortality. Becker’s book won the Nobel Prize for literature. A decade later, several psychologists took these ideas further, organizing them into a system of Terror Management Theory. This presents the specter of mortality center stage as the core cause of literally all human suffering.
This “death anxiety” is seen as the basis of self-esteem itself—which they defined as how well an individual is living up to their cultural values. But this terror is also implicated as the motivation behind religious values, national identity, striving for posterity, cultural sex values, laws, and every manner of belief system. If an individual is tied to the social self, the Persona, this is all quite plausible.
From a different perspective, one more tied to our core self, our Essence, we might have an alternative conclusion. Victor Frankl, the holocaust-surviving psychiatrist, had already described his awakenings regarding mortality in his best-selling 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning. He perceived that it is meaning, not happiness nor power, that provides true human fulfillment, resetting our understanding of the brevity of life. The responsibility to find meaning in every situation is what give rise to inner freedom. By “meaning,” Frankl included a spectrum of motivations, including selfless love, creativity, the appreciation of beauty, and what today we call presence. His book might more accurately be called the “search for being” rather than meaning.
Coming from another very different perspective, the influential Greek-Armenian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff finished his monumental 1,238-page tome All and Everything in 1950, which he concluded with a startling statement. In this extremely dense and profound allegorical tale, Gurdjieff ends absurdly by stating his simple solution for awakening people from a state of “waking sleep” and destroying the egoism that now defines human life. He wrote that the only remedy for an individual is a continual death awareness, pondering the “inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests.”
Of course, these are only contemporary forays into the very long look at impermanence and its close cousin, renunciation. Confronting the transient nature of life is a central feature of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Stoicism (memento mori), and Sufism, among others. And philosophers and thinkers from ancient times to Nietzsche, Sartre, Ken Wilber, and Irvin Yalom have weighed in on the subject, quietly or with vehemence. Enough has been written about it to fill many a library, in many a language. Impermanence has been pondered, meditated upon, and contemplated enough to mold the thought patterns of entire cultures, this way or that.
Fundamentally however, there are only two views of the evanescence of life, and they are in stark contrast. One side sees death-fear as the motivating factor for every kind of hiding, distraction, manipulating, running for cover, compensations, surrogates, and human busy-ness. The other sees the poignancy of mortality with clarity and presence, propelling one to make every moment count, to be creative and valuable in word and deed, to love and live fearlessly, even as we watch the richness and the horrors of life arise and fade away before our eyes.
These polar views deeply impact our entire civilization. The majority, believing that their identity lies within the culturally fabricated Persona, the false self, the socially constructed ego structure, naturally fear the loss of all that supports that artificial “I.” Others may live encapsulated by the seeming antidote to fears: false hopes and wishful thinking. They flee to promises of heaven and bliss eternal, or New Age, spiritual, or idealogical utopias. However, living from the core, from the Essence, means facing the dragon—and the pearl it clutches; the pearl of centered awareness, naked being, beyond the trappings of hope or fear.
But even when faced squarely, impermanence is the ultimate double-edged sword. Renounce family, friends, possessions, status, and comfort, and see if this outer shift purifies the inner heart. Or live “in the world but not of it” and walk through the wonderland and wasteland of suffering and luminosity, on the tightrope of unknowing, without attachment. A wrong assumption about life’s evanescence might throw one into nihilism, despair, and meaninglessness. Or it may be the impetus for an open mind and heart: suffering “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” while watching something being forged inside. Born of forbearance, courage, struggle, compassion, and conscience, this immutable wholeness begins to move and breathe inside passing time yet outside of it.
As I age, it becomes more and more occasional that someone asks what motivated me to abandon my profession, my successful career, my friends, my relationship, and my beloved collie, Tuffy, to enter a three-year, three-month Vajrayana meditation retreat. I answer without hesitation: it was the constant meditation on impermanence, the fleeting nature of all phenomena, that kept me sitting on the cushion. And when times got really rough, which was often, I would check (energetically) to see what was keeping me there. Most days it was a small sliver of my being that held me there, while 99 per cent of my totality was ready to hop the fence.
That minuscule piece of “beingness” is still here with me. I can feel it now, just as I did then. The only difference is that now I know exactly what it is. So dear reader, I am inspired to pass something on to you, a flow chart that I drew some 40 years ago—both the original and my updated computer version—in the humble hope that it may also be useful for you during the ebbing and flowing of time and experience. It was my motivator, along with the advice of my first great mentor, Dr. John Laplante, who described beingness this way: “Keep your feet firmly planted on a moving point.”
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