Metaphysical Bases of Psychiatry (1974)
Perhaps I should first explain that I have been involved with psychotherapy for years, and talking to the staffs of psychiatric institutions has been one of the main things I do. Something that has constantly worried me about almost all the schools of psychotherapy is what I’m going to call a lack of metaphysical depth, a certain shallowness that results from having a philosophical unconscious that has not been examined. Now, I’m a philosopher, and as a philosopher I am grateful to some of the great pioneers in psychotherapy like Freud, Jung, and Adler, for pointing out to us philosophers the unconscious emotional forces that underlie our opinions. In a way, I’m also a theologian, but not a partisan theologian. I don’t belong to any particular religion because I don’t consider that to be intellectually respectable. We are grateful for their showing us how our unconscious and unexamined emotional tendencies influence the ideas that we hold. It’s a very valuable insight. Be we, in our turn, are interested in the unconscious intellectual assumptions that underlie psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy is a product of the philosophy of nature of the nineteenth century. From my point of view, that is not an exact science but a mythology that is taken for granted. The philosophy of nature of the nineteenth century has become the common sense of the twentieth century, and is widely accepted in the medical profession, in the psychotherapeutic professions, and in sociology. From the point of view of a physicist or an advanced mathematician or biologist, however, there is a serious question as to whether psychiatry is a genuine science, and even whether medicine is a genuine science. These professions have not caught up with quantum theory and are still holding Newtonian views of the universe, thinking about their subjects in terms of mechanical models. We hear constant reference to “unconscious mental mechanisms.” What on earth are we talking about? Psychoanalysis is to a very large degree psychohydraulics—an analogy or model of the behavior of the so-called psyche based on Newtonian analysis of the mechanics of water—and so we hear of a basic notion of psychic energy as libido. Now libido means “blind lust,” and it operates according to the pleasure principle that comes into conflict with something else called the reality principle. One of the difficulties of the human being is that the whole length of the spinal cord separates the brain from the genitals, and so they’re never quite together. …
We are looking at the basic models underlying the practice of psychotherapy. There are exceptions to this and you must always understand that I’m going to make exaggerations and outrageous generalizations for purposes of discussion rather than laying down the law. Our practice is based on the world view of nineteenth-century scientific naturalism, which has as its fundamental assumption that the energy that we express is basically stupid—blind energy, libido—and it’s called the unconscious. The assumption of this philosophy of nature was that the psychobiology of human nature was a stupid mechanism, a fluke that had arisen in a mechanical universe, and if we were to maintain this fluke and its values, it would be necessary for us to enter into a serious fight with nature. Scientific naturalism was in fact against nature, believing nature to be foolish and blind, and therefore in need of being dominated by our intelligence that, paradoxically enough, was the product of this foolishness. But the fluke had happened.
Let’s go back into the history of this idea. Western man, whether he was a Jew, a Moslem or a Christian, had always considered the natural universe to be an artifact, something made, and a child in this culture very naturally seems to ask its parents, “How was I made?” To make something is to create an artifact; you make a table out of wood or a sculpture out of stone. This is the basic mythology underlying our common sense. We are mostly unconscious of the basic images in which we think. That is why I say that we have an intellectual unconscious. We are mostly unconscious of the basic belief systems within which we think and behave. So here is this basic belief system—we are all made. It would be unnatural for a Chinese child to ask, “How was I made?” He might instead ask, “How did I grow?” The idea of our being manufactured objects is basic to almost all Western thought. In the course of history, when we got rid of the idea of God as the maker, we were stuck with the idea of the universe as a mechanism.
People today who believe in God don’t really believe in God; they believe that they ought to believe in God, and therefore are somewhat fanatical about it because of their doubt. The strong believer always profoundly doubts what he believes and therefore wants to compel other people to believe, to bolster up his own courage. A person who truly believes in God would never try and thrust the idea on anyone else, just as when you understand mathematics, you are not a fanatical proponent of the idea that two and two are four. … Nevertheless we have been stuck with the assumption that the universe is a mechanical construct.
Now, what is the difference between a mechanism and an organism? A mechanism is an arrangement of parts that are put together, gathered, as it were, from separate places and assembled. No organism comes into being that way. An organism starts as a seed, or a cell, a little small … I’m at a loss for words, because I won’t call it an object, and I won’t call it a thing, and I won’t even call it an entity. All these words misdescribe what an organism is. Anyway, it starts tiny, and it swells, and as it swells, it becomes more complicated, not by the addition of parts that are screwed on or welded together, but it has this marvelous capacity of growth … and that’s how we came into being. An organism is incredibly intelligent, and its intelligence surpasses anything we might call mechanical intelligence. In physics, where there are millions of variables, we manage to understand them by statistical methods and then predict what will happen. But in the ordinary situations of life where we are dealing with perhaps several hundred thousand variables, we haven’t the ghost of a notion how to handle them.
For example, you can’t possibly keep up with the literature that you need to know in the field of psychotherapy. It’s endless, and most of it boring. We all become scanning lines, because conscious attention is the brain’s radar, and you know how radar works. It is the propagation of a beam with a bounce factor in it that feeds back to the scope, and you keep scanning the environment for changes. If a rock should come up, if a storm should come up, if another vehicle should come up, the radar picks it up. Our conscious attention is only a minimal part of our total psychic functioning, because the brain as a whole, the nervous system as a whole, regulates and organizes all kinds of psychic and physical functioning without thinking about it. You don’t know how you beat your heart. You don’t know how you make a decision. You don’t know how you breathe. You may, if you’re a physiologist, have some idea of it, but that doesn’t enable you to do it any better than somebody who doesn’t know. All this incredibly intricate functioning is carried on unconsciously. Oh, we say, it’s by the brain. But what is the brain? Nobody really knows.
One of my great friends is Karl Pribram, who is a professor of neuropsychiatry at Stanford. He has a marvelous understanding of the brain, but he is the first person to admit that he doesn’t really understand it at all. He’s fascinated, and he shows us most amazing things—how the brain creates the world that it sees. If you want a simple explanation of this, read J. Z. Young’s (1960) book, Doubt and Certainty in Science. He begins with the brains of octopuses, which are very simple brains and fairly easy to understand, and then he goes on to the human brain and shows how we are what we are by creating the kind of world that we think we live in. The brain, the nervous system, evokes the world, but is also something in the world. What an egg-and-hen situation that is! He is stating in very sophisticated language some ancient philosophical problems. When Bishop Berkeley explained that the world is entirely in our minds, he had a very vague idea of the mind. Everybody used to think that the mind was something like space. It had no form of its own but was able to contain forms, like a mirror that has no color but reflects all colors, like the eye lens that has no color but is able to see all colors. This was a vague idea of the mind. Now the neurologist studying the brain gets a very precise idea of the mind. He can say it has all these neurons, dendrites and what have you, pathways. But in the end, he comes to exactly the same thing. He’s saying, the world is what your brain evokes. So we’re back where we started, only in a more complicated and more rigorous way. Nature is assumed to be complex. We say, the world is complicated, not only in its biology, in its geology, in its astronomy, but also in its politics, its economics. Actually the world isn’t complicated at all. What is complicated is the attempt to translate the world into linear symbols.
What I’m developing is the idea that what we are physically is far more intelligent than what we are intellectually. Behind our minds and our books and our schedules and our laws and our mathematics, there is something far more intelligent than anything we can record. So naturally, when you get into the practice of psychotherapy, you have first of all gone through school, and you’ve read a lot of textbooks, and you’ve seen a lot of procedures and heard a lot of explanations. Incidentally, do you know what “explained” means? It means “to lay out flat, to put it on a plain.” It’s like those slices people take of fetuses, and enlarge them and so on, to see what a fetus really is. You’ve got it explained. But a fetus “laid out flat” is no fetus, just like blood in a test tube is not the same process as blood in the veins—because it’s out of context. Blood in the veins is in a certain situation. It is what it is because of its relationship to a vast system. But in a test tube where it’s isolated, it’s not the same thing. A thing is also where it is.
Let us begin to realize that we have identified ourselves with a process of mentation or consciousness that is not really ourselves at all. Let’s have the humility to see that. We don’t trust ourselves because of this, and therefore scientists are sometimes saying today, “Human civilization has come to the point where we’ve got to take our own evolution in hand. We can no longer leave it to the spontaneous processes of nature.” Well, these people are idiots. Like a conference of geneticists that I recently attended: they summoned for advice several philosophers and theologians—that showed they were pretty desperate—and they said, “We have just realized that we’re within reach of the power to control human character by genetic manipulation. We want to know what you people think about this. What sort of human character should we produce?” Wowee! There were various views offered, and I said, “Of course you can’t know, because you yourself are genetically unregenerate. You yourself are the product of the random selection of nature, and therefore by your own showing, you must be a mess. You, as a mess, cannot decide what should be the proper order of things. The only thing you can do is to ensure that there be as many different kinds of human being as possible.”
We don’t know what kinds of human beings we need. At one period, we need people who cooperate and who are good team-workers. At another period, we need rugged individualists who have their own ideas and go ahead and persuade everybody else to follow them. We’re in a teamwork situation right now. Everybody is always looking out of the corner of their eye to see what everybody else is doing. What is the right way to proceed evolutionarily? We haven’t the faintest idea. We all seem to agree that we should survive. I’m not at all sure about this. There are two schools of thought about life. Take the analogy of fire: some people think a good fire is a colossally bright blaze that is a flash, like lightning. Other people say, “Oh, no, no, that’s a waste of energy. Cool it. Keep it down to a dull glow that goes on for a long, long time, so that ‘this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.’ ” What should life be? Suppose you were confronted with a choice: you could spend one night with the most beautiful woman imaginable, or man, and have the most incredible orgiastic experience, and then die. Or, you could be with some rather indifferent, not very exciting companion for a long, long time, so that you would be bored. Which would you choose? We find that very difficult to decide. In the ordinary way, we are not really aware of life because we’re using our conscious attention too much. We think we are our opinion of ourselves, our image of ourselves, and therefore feel reduced to linear symbolism, and that’s a kind of strung-out, skinny thing. It’s starved. It’s all skin and bones and no flesh. When you think of yourself as your ego, as your personality, this is an entirely fictitious account of yourself, lacking in richness; if you are identified with that, you feel impoverished, and you have to go to a psychiatrist. You say, I feel frustrated. Of course you do. The psychiatrist also feels frustrated, because, by and large, he has the same opinion of himself; he thinks he’s an ego.
Freedom is the only thing that works. If I don’t trust you, I can’t live with you. I’ve got to make the gamble, even though it will sometimes be betrayed. I’ve got to make the gamble of trusting you. I can’t go out of my door without a fundamental sense that I can trust my neighbors. So in the same way, I cannot make a single decision without the fundamental sense of trusting my own brain. If I don’t know how my brain works, how the hell do I know if I’m not crazy? I have no way of determining. I may be absolutely nutty as a fruitcake, but nevertheless, I have to trust my brain. The trouble with most people we call crazy is that they can’t trust themselves. Clinically, one has somehow or other to get these people to trust themselves again. You can’t do that if you’re uptight. If you, in the company of a so-called crazy person, feel ill-at-ease, and feel that you’ve got to get this person to conform and do things according to the book, you’re going to get nowhere. You’ve got to be able, yourself, to be as crazy as a crazy person in order to be a therapist.
The therapist must, above all things, have a basic trust in life, in the unconscious. The unconscious shouldn’t be a noun. It’s a verb, the unconscious aspect of process, of nature. If you don’t trust it, you get clutched up in the situation where you can’t really do anything. Our technology is basically a mistrust of nature and, clever as it is, it’s not going to work in the long run. Our technology is going to destroy us, unless we upend it, and base it on trust in the processes of life.
The basis of what we’re going into is what I have called the intellectual unconscious. Nowadays it’s customary, especially in psychological circles, to put down intellectual considerations. Such words are used as being “overcerebral,” as being on a “head trip,” as dismissing it all as “a lot of talk,” but the fact remains that those comments on intellectualization are an expression of a philosophy—and at that, an unexamined one. You will often come across a type who says, “I’m just a practical businessman. I don’t give a shit about philosophy. I’ve got to get things done.” And so that fellow is advertising himself as a member of a particular philosophical school called pragmatism. He doesn’t know this, and because he doesn’t know it he’s bad pragmatist. He says, “I want to get things done.” Or, he’s the sort of person who says, “You can’t stop progress.” But what is being practical? This is a very, very undecided question, and for a lot of people, their only idea of what is practical is what enables them to survive. Well, this can be thoroughly called into question.
I mean, is it a good idea to survive? Most people have never thought about that at all. Albert Camus (1960), in his book, The Myth of Sisyphus, starts out by saying, “The only serious philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide.” Now, in your profession, suicide is a major evil. I once went to a conference held by the American Academy of Psychotherapists on the subject of “Failure in Psychotherapy,” and various papers were presented. The first paper contained a case study of someone who had been under therapy for five years and then committed suicide. So I said, “This is rather a funny case because, after all, you kept the guy alive for five years, and in the treatment of cancer that would have been counted as a cure. The statistics on cancer treatment always reckon five years’ survival as a cure. What’s so bad about suicide? After all, we’re overpopulated, and if someone doesn’t want to be around anymore, that’s their privilege. All I’m saying is that that assumption is questionable. Furthermore, what are you afraid of about death?”
This is a real hospital hang-up. We don’t know how to treat dying people. The literature on the psychotherapy of the dying has only just begun to come into existence, and a doctor is in a very tough position because he’s supposed to keep you alive, at all costs. The most heroic measures are used to keep people alive, and there they suffer, linked up with all kinds of tubes and kidney machines and various systems—because at all costs while there is life there is hope, and often while there is life there is pain. The doctor is sort of out of the role when he knows in his heart that the patient will not live, and then all kinds of lying starts up. He may tell the patient’s relatives that the case is hopeless, but he says to them, “Don’t tell the patient.” For some reason, knowing that you’re going to die is supposed to be bad for you. It’s supposed to depress you. It’s supposed to perhaps cut down the recuperative forces of nature that are at work in your organism.
But the most important thing for anybody to know is that he’s going to die. Oh, we can put it off and say, “Well, we’ll think about that later.” But we don’t realize that the certainty of death is an extremely liberating experience. I’ve never been a doctor of medicine, but I’ve been a “doctor of divinity” … under rather strange circumstances. I’ve often been called in when people are dying, because when the doctor gives up, he calls the clergyman, and the clergyman feels in role at this point, although he may be a silly idiot and make all sorts of consolations and tell you about heaven and hell and such things. But that’s not the way to work. Dying is a splendid opportunity, and the sooner one can realize fully the certainty of death the better.
The hospital is, by and large, a terrible place, although its intentions are very good. But the last place I would send anyone is to a mental hospital, and if possible, not even to a physical hospital. I had a friend recently who was dying of cancer—he had a brain tumor. And here he was in a Kaiser Hospital, in the most horrible surroundings. You know what hospital rooms are—colorless, healthy, hygienic, awful. And here he was, you know, he could hardly look out of the window even. And I said to him, “Harry, listen, I don’t know, I haven’t talked to your doctor, and I don’t know what your condition really is, so don’t take anything I say about your condition as being true, but let’s just suppose for the sake of argument that it’s hopeless. Suppose you’re going to die. You may not be, but suppose it is so. Now you know enough, because you’re well educated in Oriental philosophy, to realize that the best thing that could possibly happen to you is to lose your ego and be liberated. After all, that’s what you’ve been concerned with all your life, the sense of transcending the narrow bounds of self-consciousness and feeling one with the universe, with the eternal energy behind all this, and the only way to get that feeling is to give yourself up.” I said, “Here’s the opportunity. There’s no question of holding on to yourself anymore, because it’s going to go away, and nothing can stop it, so get with it. Just give up, and get out of this place, and rent yourself a beach cottage and look out at the ocean, and stop all this concern to hang on.”
Hanging onto oneself is self-strangulation. It’s like smother-love. When a mother hangs on to her child too long and doesn’t let it be independent because of her concern, or alleged love, the child becomes warped. Well, it’s the same, you can smother-love yourself. You can hang on. You can be full of anxiety. I know and you know, for many people this is a regular program. They’re anxious because they don’t have enough money, and they think, If only I could double my income, everything would be okay. And they succeed. They do it. So they have plenty of money. Then the next thing they worry about is their health. They go to the doctor and they get a complete medical examination, and the doctor says, “As far as I can see, you’re all right.” Well, they think there’s something probably wrong, because this person is a born worrier and maybe should go to a psychiatrist. So he looks you over and yes, “I can’t see anything wrong.” Well, then, you worry about politics. Is the revolution coming? Are the tax people going to take away all your money? Will you be robbed? I mean, there are endless contingencies you can worry about.
And finally, death. Am I going to die? Of course. How soon? Does that matter? What are you waiting for? There’s a song, you know, which used to go … “There’s a good time coming, be it ever so far away,” and everybody thinks there is one far off divine event to which all creation moves, and maybe that’ll turn up between now and your death … or even perhaps after death. Everybody’s looking for that thing somewhere else than now. But if you accept death, a funny thing happens—you discover how good now is, and that’s really where you’re supposed to be. Very often people may get into these states when they’re threatened by death, when they’ve given themselves up for dead, or sometimes, too, in convalescing from a long illness. In those transformed states of consciousness in which we see this, there’s a sudden enlightenment about now.
When you see that the whole point of life is this moment, most other people seem objects of pity. You’re rather sorry for them. Because they are rushing around, madly intent on something. They look insane on the streets. Going somewhere. Wow, it’s important to get there. And their noses seem to be longer than usual, sort of prodding into the future, and their eyes staring. They rush about in cars. Looking out of the window I see all these cars streaming down Lake Shore Drive into Chicago. They’re intent on something. What? Well, we have to go to work. Why? Well, to make money. Why? Well, I mean one must live. You must? If you say to any spontaneous process—and life is a spontaneous process—“You must happen,” it’s like saying to someone, “You must love me.” But we all do that to our children. The basic rule for bringing up a child—which every child learns—is, “You are required and commanded to do that which will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily.” That is known as the double-bind. So we say to our spouses “You must love me,” and if I don’t feel like loving my spouse anymore, I’m made to feel guilty, and when I feel guilty, I feel I have to make an effort to be loving—but nobody wants to be loved on purpose. I don’t want to be loved out of somebody’s sense of duty. I want them to love me because they can’t help loving me. Then I feel okay.
Ever so many people are thoroughly confused by being commanded to do that which is only any good if it’s natural—and living is such a thing. If I say to myself, “I must live,” then life is a drag. Or I say, “I must live because I have children and I’m responsible.” But then all I do is teach my children to have the same feeling, and they will teach their children to have the same feeling, and life will continue to be a drag for everybody concerned. So life can only not be a drag when you understand it’s gravy. That is to say, it happens unnecessarily, not under orders, but for kicks. Then you are free from the oppressive duty to go on living. And so the physician, and especially the psychiatrist, should be the first person to understand this. Jung once made a joke, “Life is a disease with a very bad prognosis. It lingers on for years and invariably ends with death.” … So, death is most important, but of course, Westerners, particularly, are scared of it. It’s the one awful awful that mustn’t happen, because, well … why are we afraid of it? Some of us say, “It’s not death I’m afraid of, it’s dying.” Well, that makes sense, but then medicine doesn’t help: medicine prolongs dying. It doesn’t really prolong life, I mean, it does sometimes, but for old people particularly, it prolongs dying. Terminal cancer is prolonged dying.
Still, there is something real spooky about death. Even if you’re not religious and you don’t believe in an afterlife that might be awful, I mean, who knows? But supposing death is like going to sleep and never waking up. That’s quite something to think about. I find thinking about death is one of the most creative things one can do. To go to sleep and never wake up. Fancy that. It won’t be like going into the dark forever. It won’t be like being buried alive forever. There’ll be no problems at all; there’s nothing to regret. It will be as if you had never existed at all, and not only you, but everything else as well. It never was there. No further problems. But wait a minute. I seem to remember something like that. That was just the way it was before I was born. And yet, here I am. I exist, and once, I didn’t. Nor did anything else, so far as I am concerned. And I always figure in life that a thing that happened once can always happen again. So I came out of nothing. But we say, “You couldn’t have done that, because there’s nothing in nothing to produce something, and we believe in the Latin precept, ex nihilo nihil fit, which means ‘out of nothing comes nothing.’ ” But it’s not true. It’s a fault in our logic. If you had Chinese logic, you would see it differently. You would see that you have to have nothing in order to have something, because the two go together.
Well, isn’t that obvious? Where would the stars be without space? There would be nowhere for them to be … and they shine out of space. Physicists are just beginning to realize that it is precisely space that is the creative matrix, the womb of creation. So in the same way, look at your head. What color is it? I can’t even find mine. You all have heads, but I don’t: I can’t see my head. And I also don’t feel with my eyes that there is a back blob in the middle of everything I experience. It isn’t even fuzzy. It just isn’t there, although neurologically speaking, all that I call outside is a state of the optic nerves that are located in the back of the head. So I’m looking at the inside of my head. It’s pretty weird. So out of this nothingness comes my sight. Out of the space come the stars. So, you can regard death as the origin of life, for how would you know you are alive unless you had once been dead. Think that one over. We think we are alive, don’t we?—Something we can’t quite put our finger on, but we know there is such a thing as reality, as existence. We’re here. And everything we know is known by contrast. You know you can see light against a background of darkness, hot as compared with cold, pain compared with pleasure. So we know we’re alive. Obviously we must have once been dead. This seems to me very plain.
So, you say, “Well now, wait a minute. When I come back again, if this does happen again, this sense of existence, in what form will I come back?” I hope I could be a human being again, or an angel, but perhaps I’ll come back as a fruit fly, or a hippopotamus.” But be assured it won’t make any difference. All beings think they’re human. We don’t like to admit that because we think we’re top species, but that doesn’t follow at all. That’s just our opinion, and we’re very conceited. We say of somebody who is very ill, “Oh, it’s too bad. He’s just become a vegetable” … with the most extraordinary ignorance of vegetables. We think vegetables are unintelligent, unfeeling, but vegetables are highly intelligent organisms, and tests with electroencephalograms show that they feel. Now, if you came back as a vegetable, you would have vegetable consciousness, and you would think that was entirely normal … in fact, civilized, the usual thing, the regular thing. You would understand your fellow vegetables and the bees that visited you, and that would be the normal routine. You would think human beings were ridiculous. Human beings, in order to consider themselves civilized, have to accumulate enormous quantities of rubbish. They have to have clothes, cars, libraries, houses … all this junk. Whereas, look at us vegetables—our bodies are our culture, and we’re not ashamed of them. Look at the flower. Isn’t that something? Fish would have the same view. We think sharks are terrible, but they at least stay in the ocean. Human beings go everywhere, into the sky, into the ocean, and all over the earth catching their prey. But the civilized shark stays in the water at least. Look at the dolphins. Why, they are quite probably more intelligent than we. But they decided that our game was stupid. Stay in the water because the groceries are right there, and you can spend most of your time playing. And so that’s just what the dolphins do. They gambol all over the place, and, for example, they’ll follow a human ship and swim circles around it; then they’ll set their tail at a twenty-six degree angle and let the bow-wake carry them. No effort, see … just keep your tail that way and the ship will take you along. Where to? Who cares?
Everywhere is the place to go, to be at. It’s like a king. When a king walks, he is stately. Why? Because he has nowhere to go to. Because he is where he is at. He’s the place, wherever he moves. So he walks in a stately way. He doesn’t march, he doesn’t hurry—he’s there. Everybody must learn, then, to walk like a king. You can remember this because, in Sanskrit, your real self is called atman. Making a pun that scholars would deplore, that means the “man where it’s at,” and where it’s at is where you are. But we’re all under the illusion that we should be someone and somewhere else. So we’re not seated properly. That’s why, when you practice yoga, the first thing you have to learn is to sit in such a way that you’re really there. So, by the acceptance of death, one overcomes the necessity for a future, and that in both senses of the word is a present.
You can see this more clearly perhaps if you would imagine what it would be like to regress, as it’s called in psychotherapeutic language, to babyhood. And, here you are. You really don’t know anything about anything. All you know is what you feel. You’ve no sense of time. You don’t know the difference between who you are and what you see. You’re in what Freud called the “oceanic state.” You don’t know anything. You don’t know any language, no words in your head. Now consider what it would be like to stop thinking, stop talking to yourself, and simply be aware. You hear all the sound going on but you don’t put names on them. You see all these colors and forms buzzing at you, but you don’t call them anything. You just experience.
That’s a pretty crazy state of consciousness because there’s no past, there’s no future, there’s no difference between you and what you’re aware of. It’s all one, or none, or both, or neither—there are no words. You would be in a state that in yoga is called nirvikalpa samadhi, a very high consciousness in which illusions vanish—Eternal Now. Incidentally, a very therapeutic state of consciousness. But that is a kind of metaphorical death. It is the death of your self-image, your idea of yourself, your concept of yourself. Literal death, or the immediate prospect thereof, can bring a person into that state of consciousness. This state of consciousness is highly invigorating, because all the energy that you were wasting on worrying is now available for other things. All the energy you were wasting on trying to hold onto yourself is now available for things that can be done, and so people, paradoxically it would seem, are very pepped up by the acceptance of death in its various senses. So a hospital, where many people are in one way or another dying, should be a place of immense joy. But we don’t allow it to be that, because we have the fixed idea that people in the hospital are in trouble, and we show them by the way in which we attend and relate to them emotionally: “Yes, you are in trouble.” Well then, of course they feel in trouble. They have to play that role.
There is nothing that causes more trouble to people than helping them. There’s a famous saying, “Kindly let me help you or you’ll drown,” said the monkey, putting the fish safely up a tree. The moment you take this attitude of “You are sick,” people learn to eat pity, and thrive on it, and play sick as a profitable role for getting attention, sympathy, care, and to indulge in the masochism of gaining a sense of identity through being in peril, in misfortune. It’s like the phrase, “nursing a grievance.” I once had a woman come to me who had had a very serious tragedy. Her husband had died of a heart attack and a year later her son was struck by lightning and killed. She was beside herself with grief. Understandably. Well, at the time, I was a clergyman. And I took a look at this woman and I thought, I’m not going to give her any bullshit, she’s too intelligent. So I asked her to explore grief. What is it to grieve? Where do you feel grief? What part of your body is it in? What sort of a feeling is it? What images are connected with it? In every way we explored grief. And by God, she got over it. Because eventually, concentrating on it as a sensation, she stopped talking to herself and saying, “Poor little me, I’ve lost my son, I’ve lost my husband,” and repeating all these words over and over that hypnotize you and perpetuate the feeling of being important because you’re in a state of grief. And she became an extremely creative and active person.
So it seems to me that anybody in the hospital professions, the healing professions, must get the hang of this somehow, and stop running desultory institutions. There’s no reason why hospitals should be designed the way they are. Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick. Dying only happens to you once, so it should be a great event. Special sanitariums, not hospitals—“sanitarium” means “a place of sanity”—should be arranged for different methods of dying. How would you like to die? Do you want a very, very marvelous religious ceremony? Do you want to invite all your friends to a champagne party? Do you want to be among flowers? How would you like to die if you really had your choice? Would you like to be drowned in a barrel of wine? You could take an extremely positive attitude to death as the greatest opportunity you’ll ever have to experience what it’s like to let go of yourself … than which there is no greater bliss.
Camus, A. (1960). The myth of Sisyphus, and other stories. New York, NY: Vintage.
Young, J. Z. (1960). Doubt and certainty in science. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Reprinted from the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1974, 6(1), 19–31. Copyright © 1974 by the Association for Transpersonal Psychology. Used by permission of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology.