Dealing With Anxiety, Impermanence, Death (Talk 4)

Dealing with the future,

Anxiety and death.

Why are we anxious?

What are the things that make us anxious?

In Buddhism there is an exercise called the five daily reflections.

I have found that these five daily reflections represent the whole of what people become anxious about.

They are as follows.

One I will get old.

Two I will get sick someday.

Three I will die someday.

Four I will lose all my possessions,

Everything that I have in life.

My friends,

My family,

Everything I own,

All things today will one day be lost.

And five I am responsible for my own karma and not the karma of anyone else.

So I will get old,

I will get sick,

I will die,

I will lose everything and I am responsible only for my own actions,

Not the actions of anyone else.

I came to understand that these five things are the things you worry about most.

Old age,

Illness,

Death,

The loss of friends,

Family,

Job,

Reputation,

Possessions,

Everything.

These are things you worry about.

What is within your control and what is not within your control.

Underpinning anxiety is something I call the fallacy of supreme human agency.

The idea behind this is that if I do A,

It will lead to B.

But the idea is that life does not work that way.

Sometimes when I do A,

It leads to B.

Then sometimes it leads to C or D or X or Y.

And sometimes things do not happen as you think they should.

There is something in psychology that actually talks about this that is called the cobra effect.

This is a story based in British India where at the time there was a problem with cobras.

The cobras were biting some people and you had too many people dying from these encounters with wild cobras.

So the British authorities put a bounty on the cobras.

For every dead cobra that you brought in,

They would probably pay a certain amount of money.

And it started to work very well where people started to hunt cobras,

Kill them,

And bring them in and collect the bounty.

The problem was that when they could not find any more cobras,

They still wanted a bounty.

So some people started to breed cobras.

They started to create little cobras that they would grow and then turn in for the bounty.

Once the British authorities heard and found out that people were breeding cobras,

They stopped the bounty right away.

They didn't want to pay anyone for these kind of homegrown cobras.

So these people that had all these cobras in their possessions and suddenly had no use for them.

So what did they do?

They released them right back into the wild.

So at the end of this exercise,

There were more cobras than there were before when it started.

So the idea is just because you do something does not always mean it will lead to the effect which you think will happen.

There is an interesting poem by Rumi which in my opinion encapsulated this from Baghdad or in Baghdad,

Dreaming of Cairo.

Either this deep desire of mine will be found on this journey or when I get back home.

It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away so that when I've gone and come back,

I'll find it at home.

I will search for the friend with all my passion and all my energy until I learn that I don't need to search.

The real truth of existence is sealed until after many twists and turns of the road.

As in the algebraical model method of the two errors,

The correct answer comes only after two substitutions,

After two mistakes.

Then the seeker says,

If I had known the real way it was,

I would have stopped all the looking around.

But that knowing depends on the time spent looking.

You fear losing a certain eminent position,

You hope to gain something from that,

But it comes from elsewhere.

Existence does this switching trick,

Giving you hope from one source,

Then satisfaction from another.

It keeps you bewildered and wondering,

And lets your trust in the unseen grow.

You think to make your living from tailoring,

But then somehow money comes in through goldsmithing,

Which had never entered your mind.

I don't know whether the union I want will come through my effort,

Or my giving up effort,

Or from something completely separate from anything I do or don't do.

I wait and fidget and flop about as the decapitated chicken does,

Knowing that the vital spirit has to escape this body eventually,

Somehow.

This desire will find an opening.

The Stoics dealt with anxiety by understanding what was within control and what was not within one control.

The things that were within your control were matters of the will,

Your judgments and your desire and your aversion,

And that all other things,

Power,

Fame,

Money,

Status,

Work,

Employment,

All these other things were considered external.

And the idea was that things that were of the will,

Things that were of your desire,

Things that were related to your judgments,

You proceeded with great caution.

But with all the externals,

Money,

Status,

Power,

You proceeded with confidence,

Stating that these things did not belong to me.

They were only externals.

With the externals that were under your control,

You did proceed with caution.

But all other things,

You felt that they were not what belonged to you.

As I mentioned in the previous talk,

The great Stoic metaphor was that a man's life was the same as a dog chained to a moving cart.

Wherever the cart will go,

The dog will be taken.

The dog's only choice is whether to run or to be dragged.

There is a strong emphasis on faith,

Both in Stoic philosophy and also in Confucian philosophy.

Mencius,

A Confucian philosopher,

Said something along the lines of,

When something comes about and nothing appears to bring it about,

It is heaven that brings it about.

So at one point,

A disciple asked Mencius,

Did the emperor Yao give the empire to the man named Xun?

Mencius replied,

The emperor cannot give the empire to another man.

The emperor can only recommend a man to heaven.

It is heaven that gives the empire to someone else.

And so the disciple responded in a cheeky way,

Well,

Did heaven leave detailed instructions for the emperor to follow?

And Mencius replied,

No,

Heaven does not speak.

Heaven reveals its words through its acts and deeds.

Heaven reveals its intentions through its acts and deeds.

And in the story,

Yao was the emperor and he had a son,

But he did not want to pass the emperor role to his son.

He wanted to give it to Xun,

Who he felt was a worthy person.

So he raised Xun up and made him kind of the second in charge.

When emperor Yao died,

Xun left and went south and basically underwent a mourning period.

And at the end of the mourning period,

That was when the time came to crown the new emperor.

And so instead of going back and trying to contest,

Xun actually just stayed away and stayed away from everybody.

And so when it came time to pick the successor,

The nobles,

Instead of going to Yao's son,

They actually went and found Xun and they brought him back to the capital and he was crowned emperor after that.

And Mencius commented that if Xun had just gone back and ousted his son,

That would have been usurpation.

Instead he waited and he was therefore given the emperorship by heaven.

In helping with anxiety,

It is necessary to accept the limits of certainty and begin to accept uncertainty.

The idea was you can put a big security system and put a moat around your castle and have all sorts of cameras and dogs and put alligators in your moat,

But the idea is there is no sense of complete security you can ever ensure.

There is always the unknown that cannot be controlled.

From a Stoic perception,

The idea is that the only security that you could ever possibly achieve that was lasting was being secure from your own desire and fear.

If you achieve security from your own fear and freedom from desire,

You will not feel anxious about anything.

Since most of us will fall short of that,

The next best thing is probably what is called detached action.

I believe in Taoism it is called actions action and it means the same thing.

Delegated action comes from a dialogue in the Hindu holy text that Bhava got Gita.

In this short book excerpt from a larger story called the Mahabharata,

Arjuna who is a prince is seeking guidance from Krishna who is the avatar of God.

Arjuna is a prince who is forced to fight in a civil war against his cousins who represent evil but he doesn't want to fight them because they are family.

He is at a great dismay of what to do when Krishna who is the avatar of God gives him advice and he talks to him about actionless action.

The famous passage he says is,

You have the right to work but not to the fruits of your work.

You have the right to work but not to the fruits of your work.

In other words,

If you do A to lead to B,

You have the right to A but whether B comes is not up to you.

You do not have the right to the fruits of your work.

And the idea,

And this is totally antithetical to how we do things and how we live our lives,

Is to not seek the fruits of your work,

To do things without any regard for gain or loss,

Success or failure.

To do things without any thought of those things.

And so what does that look like?

So I'll give a few examples.

Say teachers.

These days teachers sort of teach to the test and the idea is that teachers are graded and evaluated based on how their students do.

While this is good in some sense in that it helps enforce standards and can help measure how students are progressing,

Unfortunately people take these evaluations very seriously and it sometimes gives them great stress and it puts them responsible for things which probably are not necessarily within their control.

The idea is you can teach very well but if your students don't study or if they don't do a good job or if they have too many socioeconomic problems,

The students won't do well.

And even though you did a very good job,

You will receive a poor evaluation.

And so the idea behind detached action is to teach and to do the best you can teaching without caring how your students do.

Meaning there can be great meaning in what you do for your students even though they don't do very well on their tests.

So if you were a piano teacher for example and you had a student who just was not very good at piano,

Even though you went to them,

They came to you lesson after lesson and they just weren't very good at it.

They may not pass many tests,

They may not win any medals or honors or things like that,

But what if this child develops a love of classical music and that love of classical music persists for the rest of his life and it enriches his life because of it?

What if you were a soccer coach and your team lost every game in the whole season but as a result of that coaching and a result of your season,

Those children develop friends and they gain self-esteem and they gain all sorts of other benefits unrelated to victory.

There's an interesting story in a medical journal a few years ago about a psychiatrist who wrote about his experience going to work one day.

And he wrote something along the lines of,

One day he was walking to work in the middle of the city.

This was still during his residency,

His training period.

And as he was waiting there to cross the road,

He saw a man crossing the road early and this man was hit by a car.

And so everything stopped and he ran over to help and the man was standing there,

Was lying on the ground bleeding and he held his hand and tried to comfort him and that man died there right on the ground.

And a few months later he reflected on it and reflected on it and he came to write this article and he realized that the most important thing he was supposed to do that day was hold that man's hand and comfort him as he died.

That man was never meant to survive his car accident but he was supposed to receive comfort at the end of his life.

So another example is if,

Let's say you were a rescue worker and you had a child that fell down a well.

Generally you want a successful mission where you bring the child out alive and so you spend all this time talking to the child,

Comforting child,

Passing them food and giving them nutrition and things like that and keeping their hopes up.

But it turns out the child dies.

Even though you may feel like a great failure,

That does not diminish the fact that there may have been great meaning in what you did.

Meaning that child may have never been meant to live.

He was always meant to die that well.

But he died not alone.

He died with you providing him comfort.

So detached action means going through life and doing things knowing that regardless of success and failure,

There may be great meaning in what you do.

Some artists create art and it's never appreciated until 100 years after they die.

Some people write books and no one ever reads them but a century later they influence things in such a way that you could not have imagined.

So impermanence,

This is the theme of our talk with anxiety in the future.

So the idea is with the idea of impermanence,

Everything breaks apart.

Everything falls apart,

Everything is lost,

Everyone dies.

Your possessions will always be lost.

So whenever your possessions break apart or are stolen or are lost,

Understand that this was always their nature.

They were always meant to have some change there.

These are not permanent things.

And your suffering doesn't come from the fact that they are impermanent things.

Your suffering comes from seeing them as permanent when in fact they are impermanent.

There's a Zen flower story that my mother taught me.

Basically there was an abbot who raised flowers.

He really enjoyed raising these flowers.

One day the abbot had to go on a trip and so he left these flowers in the care of a younger monk.

And when the abbot came back one day after a trip,

All the flowers were dead.

And so he didn't yell,

He didn't scream,

He didn't scold the monk.

He just kind of made peace with it.

And someone asked the abbot,

You love these flowers more than anything else,

How come you're not angry at him?

And the abbot responded,

I raised these flowers for my pleasure and happiness.

I did not raise them for my sorrow and suffering.

These flowers were always impermanent.

The best way to look at your possessions in life,

Whether it be your money or your house or all the other things you own,

Is that you are simply the temporary steward of them.

Meaning you are only having these things for a temporary time and you are responsible for them and for the use of them in the most proper manner.

So the idea is,

You know,

You aren't supposed to sort of just waste and throw them away,

Even though they are impermanent.

You are the steward of them so that you are supposed to help utilize them in the most proper way possible.

Meaning just because you don't have a use for something,

If you are responsible for that item,

You are meant to,

Shall we say,

Find that item in owner or help it be used in its most proper way possible.

The Stoics had a great metaphor of the relationship with possessions and life.

The idea was that it was as if you were on a ship as a passenger and the captain told you we're going to stop at shore for a little bit of time and get more goods and things like that and you may leave the boat for a little bit of period.

The idea is while you were on shore,

You walked the beach,

You picked some shells and you kind of enjoyed your life a little bit.

But the idea was when the time came for the captain's call where you had to go back on the boat,

The shells that you had in your hand,

You had to let go of.

The idea is that the shells never belonged to you,

They were just things that you were able to enjoy for a certain period of time.

Those shells could represent your possessions,

Your family,

Your wife,

Your child,

All these different things.

But when the time came and you were called back to leave,

Not to be angry that these things would be lost,

But to be thankful that you were able to enjoy them for a period.

We come to the last part,

Which is of death.

The Buddhists have an exercise called mindfulness of death and it was supposed to sort of help you remind you of impermanence.

And so the way it was was when you woke up every day,

You were supposed to say this will be my last day alive.

So today,

If when I go to sleep,

I will pass away,

How do I want to spend this day?

And the idea is if it is your last day alive,

There are many things that if you got angry about,

You would not get angry about this anymore.

If you were shortchanged to the supermarket or if you didn't get this or if you didn't get that,

If you came to understand that it was your last day alive,

These things will not bother you anymore.

And in the same way,

It is you will look at your possessions in the most proper way.

I sometimes say it's akin to being in a foreign country the night before you're leaving the country and you look at your money thinking,

You know,

Tomorrow this money will have no meaning for me.

And so what do I do with it?

The idea behind this mindfulness of death exercise is it's supposed to remind you of what's truly important in life,

What conversations you are supposed to have,

What things you are supposed to do,

What things are truly important.

For the monk who was striving along the pathway,

It was supposed to add fire to your effort.

If today might be my last day,

Then I must make whatever effort possible I can to progress as far as I can before I die or if I can to achieve enlightenment.

It is said very often that people who come into contact with death sometimes come out of it and live much more fuller lives as a result of that.

So people who are diagnosed with cancer and they come to understand that they have an extension they may not have forever but they have some time left,

Sometimes they truly start to live life to the maximum as much as they can and they don't waste time getting angry over smaller things anymore knowing that their life will come to an end someday.

Socrates called fear of death the pretense of knowledge,

The pretense of knowledge with the idea that no one actually knew what happened after you die but your fear of death was a pretense that you knew.

Meaning if you got to see your ancestors again or your parents or people you once loved and could not see anymore,

Is that such a bad thing?

Most major religions have some form of reincarnation after dying meaning before you were born your soul existed,

It was sort of put into your body and when you die your soul continues onwards either to judgment and heaven and hell or else to reincarnation or something along these lines.

But the idea is it is only the death of the body but that something else continues onwards.

Otherwise the Epicureans,

Epicurus,

They looked at death in a more secular way but they saw it as the end of suffering and so fear of death or anxiety about death was a present worry over a future condition but when that future condition arrived you no longer existed so therefore it no longer mattered.

So anxiety of death was a total waste of time.

This harkens back to what we said about opinions and judgments as according to Stoicism so your judgments and opinions were one of the things that belonged to you and were under your control and the idea is that included even looking at death as either good or bad and so the idea was that if you looked at death as an evil you had to balance that with the fact that death was something you could not avoid and if death was truly an evil you could never avoid falling into evil someday and so the idea is that the Stoics did not regard death as an evil thing it was an external just like all those other things neither good nor bad.

In some cultures there were things that were worse than death.

In Spartan society for example the most important thing was honor rather than death and so soldiers who marched off to battle they were instructed to return with their shield or on it meaning you returned victorious or you did not return at all and all of their society was geared towards this idea so that if a Spartan mother was told that her son died and she died honorably in battle she did not put on mourning clothes she actually put on celebration clothes and she went around and received congratulations from everyone because her son achieved the highest honor that was possible for any citizen of that city.

At the same time if the son of a Spartan mother survived the battle by running away sometimes there were cases where the Spartan mother pulled a weapon on him and saying you cannot return you have disgraced us and the idea was that it was better to die honorably than to return in shame.

There is a stoic saying from one of the kings where it said something like if you had a chance to die honorably take it because one day you are still going to die but the chance to do it honorably will have passed sometimes.

In Taoism they look at death as the great transformation and so it wasn't kind of an end it was a transformation.

There is an interesting story about a Taoist man who lost his son and basically this man loved his son more than anything else and his son died before he did as the father and he did not mourn or grieve or any of these kind of things and so his wife asked him and said you loved your son more than anything else how are you not sad and grieving and all these things and the man responded before when I was younger I had no son and I lived life and I enjoyed it and it was it was fine then my son was born and I had a son now my son has died it is the same as before when I had no son so why should I grieve.

The Stoics saw death as the term they used was restoration meaning he was restored.

This is similar to kind of the Christian sense in that he was restored to the maker but the idea was they said this of all things not just the body so that when you died you were restored to kind of what you were originally but they also said this about possessions so that if you had something that belonged to you and it was taken from you you didn't say it was taken from you you said it was restored so the idea is you restored it to the maker who decided it was time that it belonged to someone else so the idea of all your possessions as borrowed meaning they all the things given to you are things that you have to return someday even if they're stolen from you that you are returning them to the maker who is now giving them to someone else so it was not the person who stole it from you who took it from you it was the maker and that if it was not meant for you anymore you had to let go of it because you were returning it.

There is an interesting passage in one of the Taoist texts which said something like all these things do not belong to you even your children do not belong to you they are like is as if you were an insect that has shed its skin and these are things you only possess for a certain amount of time meaning even your children these are things that you must return someday so those five daily reflections I will lose everything in some time maybe not now maybe not five years from now maybe not 20 years from now but one day it will be lost.

In the Hindu text there is the idea of it is not someone that kills another the thing that kills everyone is death so there was an interesting dialogue where a woman came upon the man that killed it was either her husband or her son and she says it was not him that killed him it was death and then there that the character of death comes about and says it was not me who killed him it was time and so time was the destroyer of all things time was the cause of all impermanence.

The Stoics also had the idea of looking that it didn't matter when you died the time was irrelevant and so while you mourn people dying young it is just quibbling over years or moments and so the idea is they looked at the expanse of time from the start of you know human history all the way to now or the history of the universe all the way to now and if you took that you know expanse of time and you compared your lifespan within it it was a mere speck and the idea is you were arguing about half a speck or a quarter of a speck or an eighth of a speck or a hundredth of a speck the idea was that your life was always going to end at some point and to quibble about how long of it was essentially irrelevant the idea was not that dying was an external you were meant to concentrate on the things that you could do while we were living which was your desire your aversion and your will i was asked once by someone at the end of a talk who stated that she loved someone and that person was dying and that how could she avoid suffering how could she remove her attachment i didn't really have a good answer at the time i think today i would answer that within your love your suffering is bound and thus a good chunk of it cannot be avoided when someone you love dies you are going to suffer the buddha once stated that the only type of love which did not lead to suffering was the kind of loving kindness meditation love where you had a universal love kind of a general love towards everybody this was the only type of love that did not have a deep attachment and as a result of suffering all other forms of love had suffering bound within them when socrates was asked about a similar thing at the end of the republic he said that you should love someone with the idea behind it that they are mortal to love someone knowing that they are mortal and that one day their lives would be lost and that you should not grieve excessively because it was sort of giving in to the appetite part of the body rather than being controlled by the mind and the spirit but that loving someone knowing that they were mortal the stoics felt similarly and they even had exercises where when you said goodbye to someone or whether it be a child or your wife or a family member that somehow you said inside that this might be the last time i see them and in this way you were preparing yourself for the eventuality that one day you would lose them one of the points was is that one day when you lost them there would be some immediate consolation when you first said to when the first thing you said was i knew that this would happen someday and so the difference between the philosopher and the layman was that both the philosopher and the lay person would both endure these sort of sufferings in life the loss of friends and family members and things along those lines but that the philosopher because he was mentally prepared and expecting these things to happen his suffering would be much less the lay person on the other hand because he did not expect this was always surprised and angry and felt that things were unjust or unfair and basically he would blame others for these losses when in fact that these were always going to be a part of life this will conclude my talk suggested reading the bhagavad-gita also from the stoic philosopher seneca consolation to marcia it's a letter consoling someone whose son died consoling a mother whose son died at a young age if you found this talk beneficial i ask you to do one deed one good deed for the world the deed is not bound by size but by sincerity thank you