Ubiquitous Anxiety
Tim and I currently live in a tiny New England village with a population of around 1200 people, in a small apartment that we rent, right on the main street. We are supported by the small income that comes from DVD sales of What A Way To Go. Tim takes care of processing and putting the orders in the mail each morning. This gives me time to write in my journal, consult a new and quite amazing translation of the I Ching, and in other ways engage in deep reflection on daily basis. Sometimes I spend two hours at this. Few people I know have either the time or wherewithal to do such inner exploration.
I’ve joked that this could be called retirement in non-extraordinary times, or if I swam in the mainstream. But we’re not, and I don’t, so I’m calling this time “spiritual retreat.”
Once Tim returns from the post office we sit together many mornings to question the stories of the culture and to help one another confront and shed ego identifications, in order to open to what lies deeper. The new translation of the I Ching is proving to offer access to a wonderful teacher. On my best days I begin with an open-ended session in the morning reading, journal writing, meditating, and praying for help and guidance.
Over twenty-five years ago I attended a conference with M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled and The Different Drum, among others. Scotty told us that the most important two hours of his day were those he spent “doing nothing.” I was a mother with young children then and I could not imagine what it would be like to have that option. I’m now understanding what Scotty meant and why it was so important to him. And I’m beginning to define this time of “doing nothing” as my most important “work.”
I want to encourage others to engage in their own form of this kind of radical practice. The stories of the culture argue against such reflection. Those stories would tell us that, especially now, in this failed economy, we have to buckle down and work ever harder. But I don’t see it that way since I have redefined “work. ” The changes in the outer world that are upon us will require that we redefine just about everything. And if we have not become intimately acquainted with our inner selves, our ego structures and patterning, if we have not loosened our attachment to everything from our career identities to our roles in our extended families, the transformation that will be required will be difficult at best.
I have a good friend who just lost her job. She is very happy about that. She’s able to be happy because she’s been looking deeply at her inner world at the same time as she’s been confronting the confluence of crises in the outer world. She’s realized that her best preparation for all that is afoot is to have her inner world well-explored and to have a solid practice established to listen to her heart’s callings, as “crazy” as they might seems at times.  Reports are that many people feel frantic to hang on to jobs at all costs, even jobs they hate. My friend, instead, has surrendered to the freedom of the unknown. I’m happy for her that she’s gained such wisdom. She, too, has the freedom now to deeply reflect, to open, and to listen.
Of late, Tim and I have talked about death a fair amount. We’ve noodled about what dies, why the fear of death prevails in our culture, how much death we will witness in the coming years as the climate spirals out of control, as famine and pestilence stalk the planet, to say nothing of the likelihood of escalating human violence from neighborhoods to nations, as economies tilt and sway and drown.
Death frightens me less than ever before.  We watched Schindler’s List again the other night. I have to say that in a fascist meltdown I might choose to run straight at the guards, with the dare to take me down, rather than cower and cling to a life that contains no beauty, or opportunity to create such.  The behavior of people who fear death seems so bound, so limited, with so little meaning or purpose.  Our current culture, even without the barbed wire and armed guards, rests on that same fear, does it not? The anxiety that we will die if we don’t behave in certain ways drives so much of most people’s daily activity.
I have been reading an excellent book by Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity. He writes about the ubiquitous anxiety that pervades life in our culture. We live and breathe that anxiety to such an extent we don’t even notice it anymore. But it’s there, underlying everything.
The anxiety plays like this: If we don’t hang on to our jobs, our homes, our identities, then how will we feed ourselves, stay warm, stay safe, avoid death? In the last year I began to test the gods in these arenas.  I let go of my career and my home. I relinquished ego identifications as mother, therapist, and community member. I tried to “build a lifeboat†only to have it sink. Significantly, a few days ago, I turned down an opportunity to do some paid counseling work because it didn’t feel right.  Huh? I turned down well-paid work that I am good at, that I basically like doing?  I turned away from that identity as therapist? Just because it didn’t feel right? Am I losing it?
I AM losing it. I’m losing the experience of defining myself by the roles I play. I’m shutting doors and saying no to the ego’s insistent clamor for identity. Instead I am learning to tune into, and trust, what the I Ching advises is my “commonsense,” that inner gut knowing that follows no dictum of the collective ego and often appears non-rational. I know what feels right much of the time, if I just slow down and check in with that inner commonsense.
Physical survival, here, right now, is not an issue. I currently have a cushion, a couple of cushions.  Some savings. A house in another state that I own. Will I be so smug about “losing it” if all of that evaporates in a hyper-inflationary economy? I don’t know. But I’ve shifted my focus from “preparation for collapse†in activities like storing dry food or acquiring physical infrastructure, to a concerted intention to shed ego and cultivate connection with inner truth. It’s what feels right.
Ego is terrified of death. That is because ego is dependent on the idea of separation from all of life. Once one gains a greater sense of connection to all of life, and the sense of separation diminishes, and it is easier to experience one’s life and meaning as as essential quality which will not be lost with death. If the time comes that I face either meaningless struggle for survival, or the likelihood of death, or even the less extreme situation where I have nothing left of material substance and so am without that physical “cushion†of apparent safety, at least I will not be so bound by ego and all of it’s fears, that ubiquitous anxiety we all live with.
I’m considering taking a week or more on the river sometime this summer, part of that time alone, part of that time in deep dialogue with others, both human and non.  Also, Tim and I are beginning another documentary project that has no certain future or outcome. I can do these things because I’m learning to live without attachment to particular stuff, or even to particular people, certainly without a particular attachment to my own identity.  How many people give themselves the freedom to ponder this kind of thing? I feel quite blessed, that I can choose to stop all activity for a week or more, to ask the deepest questions, to open fully to life.
Is that what we fear about death? That we have not opened to life, fully, and permanently? Is it that we have become so identified with the ego roles laid out and cemented into place by our families, by our schooling, by the needs of the growth economy, by the whole of this life-denying culture, that we are terrified we will never really feel the deep purpose of our having been here? If so, then as we more fully open to life, as we shed activity driven by ego, we will experience more and more connection to life and purpose.  Then death will scare us less and less. When we are no longer afraid of death there is new freedom.
June 11th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Very interesting post. The bit about overcoming the fear of death reminds me of the jail scene in the film ‘V for Vendetta’.
I sometimes thought I was overcoming my fear of death until I came across the film ‘Flight from Death’ based on the book ‘Denial of Death’ by Ernest Becker. Is death is such a big thing that the only we can handle it is to deny it? Was my ego fooling me by letting me think I was becoming fearless when really ‘I’ was simply creating the identity of a fearless person? Krishnamurti is great one for drawing out these ways we fool ourselves.
I sometimes wonder about identities though. Why do we keep them? They take so much energy to maintain and reduce our choices making us less free. Is it death of the ego that we’re really afraid of, or just fear of the unknown? Who knows? Not me. I’m not so reflective these days, I’ve not even started with my dried food yet!
I feel the same about the importance of connection with nature. And as a city dweller I have to say it’s not an easy connection maintain.
Anyway great post (and great film). Glad to hear copies are still going out, it’s such a unique film. I saw ‘End of the Line’ a few days ago, a new documentary about the obliteration of life in the oceans through overfishing that imagine fans of ‘What a Way to go’ will probably appreciate: a closer look at one part of that mass extinction.
June 12th, 2009 at 7:43 am
Hi Sally,
Taking time for reflection is important. Living a treadmill existence leaves little time for it. When I went back to self-employment two years ago I “took off” for the summer and enjoyed more time with my wife, cats and our gardens. But since I don’t have a trust fund I did need to get back to supporting my family in the fall.
I think self-employment is the best way to achieve a “right livelihood” for oneself. You are basically responsible for what gets done or doesn’t get done. No managers, no organization. I do work in conjunction with several colleagues because there is some “strength in numbers” that I like, but it is not a formal “you must do this” type of relationship.
If I understand what you wrote, it would appear that The Gathering Inn “lifeboat” did not float that well and the fact that you and Tim are now living in an apartment in town would seem to confirm it.
However, I’m glad to know that you are working on a new subject for your next documentary. I think you and Tim showed tremendous talent in the writing, direction and production of WAWTG and I was hoping you would try doing another film.
Well the economy has been unwinding since the summer of 2007 and TPTB are desperate to keep things going in a BAU framework that I know will eventually breakdown. We have truly entered into the era of “peak everything” and there is no way to go but down. Documenting our descent as an industrial civilization might be an interesting project.
I was sorry to learn that one of the people interviewed in WAWTG, Thomas Berry, passed away earlier this month.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on dying and death. I’ve waded through that swamp a few times and I appreciated what you had to say about it.
All the best to you and Tim.
tim wessels
June 12th, 2009 at 8:55 am
I have no idea what i’m doing and with no guidance whatsoever have felt that giving up sex and ego (from a very decadent baseline) is fundamental to play my role in the coming struggle. May your god and mine grant us the strength.
June 12th, 2009 at 10:10 am
I realized the day I graduated from an ivy league school, that life was an ego assembly line I was not interested in becoming a product of. I’ve spent the last years flip flopping between developing a “new” character, different from the one I was on assembly line to become. It involved pattern breaking, but it seems I’ve developed new patterns. Regardless, my new patterns are productive in the sense they are not in line with a destructive culture. My new patterns are in line with what I believe inside to be right and wrong, not my enculturated version of myself, which rears it’s ugly head now and then. IN any case. My point is. If you drop off the assembly line, and reinvent oneself, it is indeed a luxury, and while the new invention may have ego, I would argue all ego isnt bad……its ego that associates with negative patterns that’s the problem. So the catch 22 of striving towards inner reflection and ego loss…..should not lead to a new incarnation of another ego maniac, or a personality afraid of death, that is pretending to be fearless….it should lead to a less ego driven person, that may still have ego, but patterned in a more productive way. If this makes sense.
Thanks for the blog, it’s fun to respond to.
June 12th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
http://verbewarp.blogspot.com/2006/07/entering-age-of-aquarius.html
.
“we are already dead, not yet in the ground.” john cale.
“sane fear”.
but .. this is sweeter.
.
(Tom Waits/ Kathleen Brennan)
The sky holds all our wishes
The dish ran away with the spoon
Chimney smoke ties the roofs to the sky
There’s a hole overhead
It’s only the moon
Will there ever be a tree
Grown from the seeds I’ve sown
Life is a path lit only by the light of those I’ve loved
By the light of those I love
Life’s a path lit only by the light of those I’ve loved
By the light of those I love.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:53 pm
T H A N K
Y O U
S A L L Y
I really appreciate you & Tim’s blogs. They mean a lot!
I have been working on a song called No Fear of Suffering or Death. Ironic.
Coming here really helps me to keep on a good path. Can’t wait for your next doc!
Love,
Jason
June 13th, 2009 at 1:27 am
As a long-time disciple of Quinn’s teachings, I study the inevitable collapse of our unsustainable culture with a mixture of anxiety and excitement. While I don’t believe there is any reason to fear death, I really don’t want to be dead and would like to make preparations so I (and my friends and family) don’t have to necessarily become dead when it all goes down.
Unfortunately, unlike any other culture that existed before ours, I was never taught how to survive. Maybe I’ll have time to learn everything I need to know, maybe not. Maybe I’ll get my yet unborn children set on the right path before it’s too late.
For better (or most likely worse) I see making money right now as a way to give myself a better chance at learning how to survive later, and perhaps creating an environment where survival is more likely. I am fortunate that I love what I do and I get to do it with people I love, but there will come a point where I will have to cut loose and strike out and go into survival mode. I hope my preparations are sound. I hope I make it out in time. I hope we all do. So don’t get too comfortable out there.
Survival - so easy a caveman can do it…
June 13th, 2009 at 8:21 am
Beautiful post, Sally. The combination of inner-outer work you’re doing right now is the real work that needs to be done, and you describe it with such elegance and quiet passion that you really manage to convey the living sense of it.
What you describe resonates with some of my own experience. I taught high school for several years, and after the fourth year of it began to discover that the miniature (and rather artificial) raft of open time that was summer vacation could become a fairly wondrous period of silence and clarification. I think it was the neurologist Oliver Sacks who once described sitting on a park bench after he had undergone some sort of surgery, and slowly lighting his pipe and observing and enjoying the day, and being unexpectedly pervaded by a powerful sense of peace and relaxation and serenity. He said the world appeared graceful and unhurried, and he experienced a profound inner silence, and, as I recall, was struck by the sudden realization, “I had never had leisure to light my pipe!” That’s the kind of epiphany I experienced during those summers, when I realized deeply, in a combined experiential and intellectual sense, just how rushed and harried I had always been, even during periods of outer quiet. The truth I had pursued during 15 or 20 years of spiritual reading and practice only began to seem really real and understandable during those periods, when I literally found pure bliss in just sitting down and doing nothing, or watching the trees or listening to the breeze and birds and sensing the same stillness positively radiating from the world around me, which of course managed to undermine my felt sense of standard personal identity in all kinds of interesting ways.
It was also instructive to notice how, with the resumption of each new school year, I could literally just “sit back and watch” as the spinning engine of my inner hurriedness began to rev back up, involuntarily, as the weeks went by. I did my job well and all that, and managed with some success just to observe the inner transition back to anxiety from a space of clarity, compassion, and detachment, but still, the return of that locked-in, clamped-down, strung-out feeling of frantic speed and pressure was apparently inevitable when the outer workaday circumstance reasserted itself.
Years ago I read with interest the description by Roshi Dennis Genpo Merzel of the two years he spent in a cabin retreat, after which he descended to the city and reentered the world in full confidence of the permanence of his deep inner stillness, only to find that he was rapidly overwhelmed by it all and had to flee back to the cabin. He said it took him awhile longer to learn to stabilize the stillness, and also to come to grips with the fact that at first he had just been sort of fooling himself by feeling so cocksure of his transcendence of all that anxiety. After my experiences with that summer stillness, punctuated by the nine-month school year of steadily returning and mounting pressure, I still recognize the importance of stabilizing to a point of stillness that endures amidst all circumstances (the “peace that passes all understanding”) but recognize more pointedly than before the real power, not as a matter of faulty spiritual effort but simply as a matter of brute fact, of outer circumstances to affect inner ones with a veritably gravitational pull. I hope to come to the point Eckhart Tolle writes about, where an increase of outer turmoil spontaneously results in an increase of inner stillness, but I also hope the breakdowns that are beginning to convulse the world around us will work in a kind of biblical prophetic sense of clear away the structures built on sand and leave space for a way of life that’s conducted in a more organic relationship to inner truth.
So these are all just reflections inspired by your post, which, again, is wonderful. Thank you for your ongoing missives to the world. I always look forward to them, and I wish you and Tim the best in your current work (and that includes the plans for the new documentary, which I’m pleased to hear about),
June 14th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Hi Sally,
You are getting there! Keep on the path.
Do not fear death. Fear the unlived life.
Bob & Lua
June 15th, 2009 at 9:36 am
Having gone through my own face-off with death this past year (in the form of breast cancer, now apparently gone), I resonate with your observations. More and more, I’m living my life. And less and less am I fearing death.
I must say, that last comment from Bob really makes me tighten up inside. There’s something about it that feels really discounting of you. As if there’s some “there” to get to, and that Bob knows what that “there” is, because he’s already “there”, or at least ahead of you, and so he can give you advice and council, which is to do what you are already clearly doing. As if he missed that.
I’m wondering if there’s something else that Bob’s really trying to say, but his ego got in the way?
Take care, Sally, and thanks!
Deb
June 25th, 2009 at 12:13 am
Hi, Sally,
I find your introspection curious. I don’t understand it and so, it seems curious.
I’ve been down on my hands and knees a lot lately, up close and personal with pieces of the earth and tiny vegetable plants pulling their competitors. “Why are the beets growing over here getting chewed on by something while the beets growing just over there are not?” “This little microcosm is the only place that I want to be right now - so much to learn.”
It seems that none of this has ever been about me or about you. Could conscious efforts to lose the ego be like trying to go to sleep? I don’t know - it just seems like there are much better things to focus on OUT THERE than IN HERE.
I ramble. You are an intelligent and thought provoking individual.
may you be among the survivors
~me~
July 11th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
What I posted on Sharon Astyk’s blog will have to do double-duty - it’s all I can come up with for the most part.
I will only add that, yes, I too am dealing with death from a spiritual orientation.
————————————————————————-
I was browsing your new book - ANOF - in the bookstore the other day. I am debating whether to buy it now (and Carolyn Baker’s) or wait till after I move - I am trying to get rid of a lot of stuff right now, you see.
Anyway, in the beginning, you have the obligatory “we-still-have-a-window-of-opportunity” statement. I was forced to stop and ask myself what exactly this means at this stage of the game.
For someone who devoted their entire adult life to exploring transpersonal psychology and esoteric spirituality and the higher potentials of the human brain/mind/consciousness, I would like to believe that there will be a New Dawn civilization on the other side of the Collapse, and that what we all do now will go toward creating that New Dawn. And, if I had kids, I would tell them about this Work.
Unfortunately, with every passing day, I become more skeptical that this New-Dawn-on-the-other-side-of-Collapse is possible. It keeps looking worse and worse every day.
July 12th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Ego cannot be overcome. Accepting its nature and learning how it works allows freedom from its dictates, but ego does not subside. Knowledge of ego’s workings is what allows them to be recognized without compulsion, and not implemented-what Carol K. Anthony and Hanna Moog’s translation of the I Ching appears to term ‘the inner No.”
What would overcome ego; would it not also be egotistical, and dualistic? What would say, “Bad ego!,” if not ego itself? Would you discard manure, or would you dig it into your fields?
Meditating, doing nothing except perhaps a meditation practice, is a route to knowledge of ego. It is helpful to have a friend to talk with about the work. Especially valuable is a friend who has had extensive experience in working with ego, and how ego subverts the work through proposing subtly egotistical diversionary side trips as it struggles to preserve itself, even with its drive to maintain the body.
But, joy of joy, the reported words of the Buddha, “Rejoice, the slave driver for whom we toil, day in and day out, does not exist.”
Thus the value of paradox, in leaving the strictly rational brain and knowing mind itself, which pervades all life.
July 13th, 2009 at 5:32 am
Wonderful posting Sally, with some interesting replies.Thought provoking - how I’d love to know you, people like you - though am blessed to have one particular friend with whom to share this exciting and curious part of our evolutionary journey.How to live, where to live. Am so blessed, and so perplexed!
Blessings on this cool, sunny racing cloud day in UK.
Susannah