
Crying in My Jacuzzi with Dana Balicki
Join seasoned Transformational Coach & longtime activist, Dana Balicki, for a wildride into the jacuzzi-verse to explore the ebbs & flows of living an examined life. Each and every episode invites you to explore the strange magic of humaning together in these wild times.™ With 13 years of coaching expertise, Dana blends irreverent reverence, spiritual insight, decolonial teachings, collective movement-building, high-woo, personal narrative, and grounded growth-oriented practicality for deep, thought-provoking conversations.
Sound editing and design by Rose Blakelock, theme song by Kat Otteson, artwork by Natalee Miller! Extra support by robot cohost Alex & robot producer (and part-time cohost) Janet.
Crying in My Jacuzzi with Dana Balicki
Whatever Can Die is Beautiful: Transforming Our Fear of Death with Social Psychologist Sheldon Solomon
Death anxiety lurks beneath virtually everything we do. Our capitalistic drive for endless growth, our political polarization, even our addictions to consumption – all stem from our desperate attempts to buffer ourselves against the terror of our finite existence! Dr. Sheldon Solomon, pioneering psychologist behind Terror Management Theory, explains how when death is on our minds (ie, during pandemics, live-streamed g3n0c1de, climate collapse, wars, etc), humans cling more fervently to cultural worldviews and become susceptible to authoritarian leaders promising security.
Death denialism explains so much about why/how fascism rises predictably alongside economic inequality and mortality salience. Yet facing our mortality offers profound liberation!
In this episode, which is part 2 of Season 2’s “Death Boop with a Side of Death Cult,” I finally interview Sheldon Solomon. Honestly, we have a great time together discussing death, aliveness, fascism, and the true delight in becoming radically inconsequential.
This practical invitation to turn toward our deepest fears, to embrace both personal transformation and systemic change, to confront the paradox of finding joy amid global upheaval, is perhaps to realize that our shared mortality offers the very foundation for building something more beautiful together.
~ RESOURCES ~
- Sheldon Solomon has no internet presence — AKA RADICAL INSIGNIFICANCE — and is a professor at Skidmore College, a co-author of In the Wake of 9/ 11: The Psychology of Terror and The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life.
- Free guided grounding meditation with Dana—a practice of calling your energy back/nervous system tending/reclaiming your attention) ~ (http://bit.ly/grounding-now)
- All Roads Studio
- How Your Story Sets You Free, with the Million Person Project
- Enter to win a free coaching session ~ leave a 5-star rating (only) and a written review, to be entered in a monthly drawing for a free coaching session. Email dana@danabalicki.com the review title + your review name to enter. Winner announcements will be made across platforms mid-month.
// sound-editing/design ~ Rose Blakelock, theme song ~ Kat Ottosen, podcast art ~ Natalee Miller //
@danablix on ig 😭 feeling the pull for coaching support? go to danabalicki.com for inner/outer transformation 🖐️⭐️ leave a 5-star rating & review to be entered in a monthly raffle for a free coaching session (details in show notes) 🎁 share this with your favorite boo-hooer 😭
Crying in my jacuzzi. Crying in my jacuzzi. Crying in my jacuzzi, crying in my jacuzzi.
Speaker 2:So there are a lot of ways that I process and understand, digest, internalize and try to make sense and sensation of how we got here, the timeline that we're on collectively, and I'm consistently inviting you to explore this with me. And the reason that I'm at all interested in how we got here is because I'm also thoroughly committed to exploring how we move forward together with courage, curiosity, compassion, my road dogs. You know, we have such connective tissue as humans and more than humans. Our connective tissue is an expansive mycelial network connecting us to all things in ways we can and many ways that we cannot see. But as a coach of humans, I with great honor receive and hold people's stories, their core pain points, their limiting beliefs, their deepest fears, and I have never once worked with someone who had a fear or experience that was truly unique, meaning that there was no other person I had ever worked with that had not had some core, similar, destabilizing, similar pattern that had emerged from whatever maybe the unique experience was. But really, like we are so profoundly connected Not in that, like we are all one kind of way, though, yes, and our most painful, destabilizing experiences are places that we can and must find each other, and when we meet there with compassion we can connect more deeply to each other, to ourselves, to the world around us and the worlds around us and within us, even to the worlds we can't see from here, to the people we'll never know or meet.
Speaker 2:And one of those biggest, juiciest fears is the fear of death. And to explore death and how we attemptedly process it as humans, I want to go find Sheldon Solomon. He's a professor of psychology at Skidmore College. He's one of the founding voices behind existential, experimental psychology, terror management theory. His work looks at how our uniquely human awareness of death impacts our behavior, our relationships and our sense of meaning and meaning making and how we relate to each other. He's been featured in documentaries. He's co-authored a few books. One of my faves, the Worm at the Core, on the role of death in life. During COVID I found his work on terror management theory. I made an episode about it last season. It helped me understand so much about being human and why we do what we do in the face of death or in our resistance in facing death, how we build our lives and our systems to protect ourselves from that inevitability and how in Western culture our relationship to death is fakakta and that's affecting all of us. I mean, you know me, I've said it before late-stage capitalism, colonialism, extensions of a long-running death cult, a desperate attempt to avoid death by destroying others and the planet, which, in my humble opinion, is not a super effective strategy. Last season we talked about it and this season, today, this episode, we are going to go to the source. So let's go find Sheldon. We can usually find him just walking around the block with his dog.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I hear you, like like what you were saying right before I hit record about the paradox of acknowledging, like, oh, in my life, the experience I hold it in paradox with what is happening in the world and the amount of pain and terror and fear and trauma-inducing events you know like, and I feel like we've been in this paradox training for well, maybe forever, maybe that's just part of the human condition, but certainly the past handful of years, and I'll say that I read the article in Sun Magazine, this Mortal Coil in 2021.
Speaker 2:That was the first time I ever came across your work and you and your partners, and just the broader scope of death awareness, death denial, terror management, theory, all of it, and it put a lot of puzzle pieces together, like it helped me really understand things that I had been seeing but didn't have all of the words for it, couldn't fit together or had my own projections of like well, yeah, people are full of fear.
Speaker 2:That's what they're doing, that's why all of this is happening, which is true, and when I started making my podcast not to talk too much, but just a tiny bit of context like, you were the first person that I ever thought of interviewing and I didn't get to, you know, to interviews until season three here, because of the work and just because of like, I feel like, once you sort of tune into death denial, death awareness, it's like you know, you're just, it's an ontological shift that maybe was already there and kind of allows us to to understand each other in a better way, like, even though we're understanding through it all the ways in which we pull back and double down on our cultural worldviews and dehumanize, there's something connective about it, there's something that actually, for me, like allows for a level of understanding of like, oh, and acceptance even, and inside of acceptance is maybe compassion.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I'm just I'm really grateful for the work and I love to hear you talk about and for us to talk about together, like how this, how the death awareness and death denial and I read the chapter you sent me, which was amazing affects us, and and what can we do? Not in just a solutionary sense, because you know, I'm interested in rebellion. I'm interested in, like, how we subvert the system, how we build new ones, subvert the old ones, build new ones, all the inner work needed. So yeah, you're, just for me, squarely in the middle of all of those things with this work, and you know, if it doesn't feel good to give your regular spiel about the work, that you do like say something else or tell another story, this space is really open.
Speaker 3:That was an awesome depiction of everything that we've been thinking about in my work with my buddies and, to be silly, perhaps not surprisingly, I agree with everything that you say and it has really mapped on to my own personal experiences.
Speaker 3:And, yeah, and so, if you don't mind, you know, let me do a classic comic book depiction of these ideas, because basically, dana, I think you've really captured my view of things, which is that the best way to understand ourselves and our species as human beings is that it is the way that we adjust to the reality of the human condition, and that's that we're finite and transient entities that determines the course of our lives and the structure of our societies. No notes, very worst, its malignant manifestations of death anxiety that make us likely to be the first form of life to be responsible for our own extinction. Read the news today, or, at our best, however you put it, it is. These ideas really changed my take on life, but I like the Kierkegaards and the Heideggers of the world, who point out that it opens up a mental horizon that can be both dreadful as well as awesome. So you good guys are bad guys.
Speaker 2:Depends on the century.
Speaker 3:And so the very same recognitions that can reduce us to psychic rubble are also, under slightly different circumstances, capable of eliciting the very best of each of us, both individually and collectively. So anyway, I was minding my own business as a young professor at Skidmore College. I got there in 1980, and I was walking in the library looking for a Freud book, because I was supposed to teach personality for the first time. And then I saw by accident these books by a guy named Ernest Becker, who I'd never heard of. He was a recently deceased cultural anthropologist and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 or four for a book called the Denial of Death. And right next to that book was another book called the Birth and Death of Meaning. I was like, wow, those are cool titles.
Speaker 3:I pull out the Birth and Death of Meaning and in the first paragraph Becker says I want to understand why people do what they do when they do it. I was like fuck, yes, me too. What a great way to put it. Why do we do what we do when we do it? And then the first paragraph of the denial of death. He just says look, we're like all other living creatures. We have the vast intelligence that is great and that enables us to imagine things that don't yet exist and then actually create them. It allows us to realize that we're here, which is sometimes very exciting, but we also recognize that very exciting, but we also recognize that, like all living things, we are ultimately finite. I don't want to ruin everybody's day. In English, it means we're all going to die someday and that we can die at any time for reasons we could never anticipate or control. And anyway, becker just said that that realization infuses us with potentially debilitating existential anxiety. And the way that we manage that anxiety is by embracing culturally constructed visions of reality that he called cultural worldviews that help us manage existential dread, by giving us each a sense that we're persons of value in a world of meaning.
Speaker 3:And so, anyway, basically, I was like well, wait a minute. In my gut I was like that struck me as quite right and reminded me that I've been really ardently disinclined to die since I was like eight years old the day that I realized it was going to happen. So for me, this was just as much personal as it was professional. I was eight years old the day my grandmother died. I was sad, but I was thinking about it and I'm like, oh man, that means my mom's going to die someday and that'll be bad because who's going to make dinner. And then a couple of minutes later I was like, oh fuck, that means I'm going to die someday. And that was kind of my first big existential crisis that I did bury under the bushes for a couple of decades.
Speaker 3:But anyway, seeing the Becker book and reading his really cogent depiction, which just basically argues that, whether we like it or not, we're fundamentally meaning-making, value-seeking entities and that we do that in large measure to minimize existential apprehensions. And while that can be good or can be bad, we're largely unaware of the fact that that's what motivates us each waking moment. We want to keep our sense of what matters intact and our sense that we're valuable contributors to what matters in place. Also, and when circumstances, either internal or external, challenge our sense of meaning and value, that automatically instigates a host of defensive reactions to restore confidence in our culture as well as faith in our value within it. So I hope that that makes sense. But that's basically the ideas that when I encountered them but I like how you said it earlier I was like wow, what an amazing framework to help me put into words things I had been feeling and thinking about vaguely since I was like sitting in the sand at the playground barely out of diapers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you telling that story had me reflect on a moment that I that I thought a lot about over time. And I think you know when I started to, you know, I read Worm at the Core and, like you know, as I was reflecting on this framework and this connective lens of death denial, I remembered back to when I was about I was like 14 or 15 years old and I was I was having a psychedelic mushroom trip with a bunch of girlfriends and we had this realization, I think we were like playing hacky sack and like smoking cigarettes or something, and in some parking lot in the San Fernando Valley and we realized collectively that we were all going to die, we were all just waiting to die. And it was so relieving, we were laughing, we were delighted, we just thought we had like, really figured it out, bart, did you see?
Speaker 1:anything else when you were under, just how we're all going to die that moment.
Speaker 2:Because I had a lot of mushroom trips and you know, some of them were just fun and some of them were deep, and this was one of those deep ones and it shifted something inside of me where that fear sort of evaporated for me, or I had a different relationship with it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, what you just said. Honestly, not everyone is fortunate enough to have those experiences on psychedelics, but and I say this, as you know, like a Woodstock throwback- You're a big hippie.
Speaker 3:You're a hippie, schmippy back as well, as you know, studying these things as a supposed academic. And the fact of the matter is, is that a single dose of psychedelics, even for folks that you know are not products of yesteryear, that have never had it? So the work right now? Terminally ill people, as well as younger folks with PTSD. Yes, sometimes psychedelics are radically transformative, and without any background in any of this stuff.
Speaker 3:When people describe those experiences, they almost invariably talk about a remarkable transformation in their conception of what it means to die. It is no longer perceived as an abrupt termination, as a result of total obliteration, so much as a realization of the fact that we're composed of these atoms that originated at the same time with the Big Bang, and we are, moreover, related. We're derived, we are all descended from the first living thing. That's not like an allegory, that's just literally true, right? Our atoms have been here forever. We are descended from the first form of life. We're therefore related to everything that's ever been alive, everything that is alive, everything that will be alive and after we are no longer intact in the body in which we currently reside of reality, to point out our cosmic connection to all that is over time and space and when, under the influence of psychedelics, there's the momentary realization of that fact. Yeah, I find that very comforting and very important.
Speaker 2:Truly, that moment really did shape me Like I can still feel it.
Speaker 2:I can still feel the realization.
Speaker 2:I had it in that moment and it never went away and I think that's part of also what, for me personally, it was so interesting about learning about this work was because I generally don't have, you know, like I feel, like I've investigated over time my relationship to death Not like I figured it all out, not by any stretch, but you know, but I've been curious for a long time, which I think that curiosity will open up and be maybe not a buffer, not the anxiety buffer, but maybe more towards like turning towards the anxiety and learning how to live with it right.
Speaker 2:A part of your work that I found so fascinating was like that, in this sort of doubling down on the cultural worldviews, and this explained a lot of what was happening. Doubling down on the cultural worldviews and this explained a lot of what was happening for, like anti-maskers and all sorts of I mean just so many things. When I first read the Sun article about people who, like the doubling down on our cultural worldviews, depending on what your cultural worldview is like, you will potentially hurdle yourself towards your own demise.
Speaker 1:My suicide mission's been canceled. We're replacing it with a go-for-broke rescue mission.
Speaker 2:And if you're doing that with a group of people, you're all doing it and I feel like, with the rise of fascism, like we are seeing this now on, you know sort of on steroids, like we are there, we are witnessing it, we are living inside of that, like hurtling towards our own demise right.
Speaker 3:Yes, well put. And so two things. One is, yeah, when death is on our minds, we tend to more tenaciously embrace our prevailing cultural values. Yeah, but what are our prevailing cultural values? We're narcissistic sociopaths taught that we have to be the best at whatever we do, and that we're.
Speaker 2:Manifest destiny, that's correct.
Speaker 3:We can only be judged by how much money and stuff that we have. Plus, we live in a world where our desires for money and stuff are insatiable. No matter what we have, we want more, all right, and so when death is on our mind, we just want to be better than the person next to us. We want to have more money and stuff. We subscribe to a worldview that believes in the inevitability of progress and that technology will take care of everything, and so here we are, accelerating the rate at which we're preparing the planet to no longer be fit for human habitation, and that, in turn, is related. Fire and fascism are related to each other, because when death is on our mind and right now, I'm not trying to ruin people's day- oh no, no, ruin everyone's day.
Speaker 2:This is great. We also. We love this.
Speaker 3:Yeah, let's be a little disruptive. You know we're at the historical confluence of a unique set of events. We are marinating in conscious and unconscious death, anxiety between the planet melting and the aftermath of the pandemic, with rising political polarization.
Speaker 2:I mean watching a live stream genocide in Gaza right in our faces, at every single moment.
Speaker 3:There you got it. So, basically, every single moment we're surrounded by intimations of mortality. We're surrounded by intimations of mortality and historically and this is it's combined with economic insecurity. But the rise of fascism is a predictable result of increasing levels of economic inequality. I'm not saying that as an opinion.
Speaker 3:There's a guy, peter Turchin, who wrote a book called End Times, where he just shows mathematically that that's the case. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Then they get miserable and angry, and their misery is physical as well as psychological. They get shorter in height, they get shorter in lifespan, and they either get depressed or pissed off or both. And so there's self-medication, to the point of being tranquilized by the trivial. And then, when a fascist ideologue comes along and says only I can fix it, they are prone to mindlessly adhere to a fascist leader.
Speaker 3:Mussolini defined fascism as he says. Let's call it corporatism. It's when corporate entities collude with morally corrupt politicians in order to, in Turchin's language, keep your foot on the wealth pump. In other words, what the fascist leaders do is to say to the little people we're going to make your life better, while in fact they turn right around and deflect even more material resources to fewer and fewer oligarchs, and so that's exactly what we have happening today.
Speaker 3:You don't have to believe me, but in this case you have the right to be wrong, because we've done experiments since 2004, where we show that death reminders have radical effects on people's political preferences. In 2004, people liked John Kerry more than George Bush in America, but if we reminded them of death first, they liked Bush more than Kerry. In 2016, americans liked Hillary Clinton more than Orange Hitler I mean Donald Trump and in a benign state of mind but when we reminded them of death first, their opinions of Donald Trump increased significantly. Where the pervasive death reminders make many of us cling to folks who are claiming that they're the only ones in a position to fix things, when in fact, they have no intention of doing so.
Speaker 2:I'm pillaging everyone, you included.
Speaker 1:Oh, hi, it's me Janet. This is an ad.
Speaker 2:Whether you're wandering through the high desert of Joshua Tree in Yucca Valley or wandering through the desert of the internet, stop at the Oasis. That is all Rhodes Studio. They're a studio workshop that creates decorative art and functional products, like my very favorite neon green plaid tea towels the perfect gift for any crybaby in your life. And they have the best snack selection in the high desert. Go to allroadsdesigncom and use the special code ALLROADSCRY for 10% off. So many of those. You know the corporatism aspect of it. You know it's like an equation, right? And we're just at a point in the equation of the turning towards the leaders, the corrupt leaders, that always binds with or overlaps with that corporatism or overlaps with that, like the addiction to growth or progress as growth. So there's always money involved. There's always some aspect of that right.
Speaker 3:Yes, so I love how you put it. I'm like hey, what are you know? Infinite growth, it's only good for malignant tumors and compound interest. There is no and compound interest.
Speaker 2:There is no other condition in which that would be. Oh, I'm wearing like the Venn diagram overlap of that right now.
Speaker 3:I'm being silly, but I think that that's one of the things that we need to make ourselves aware of that and this, again, is not my idea. I think it's Max Weber, dead German sociologist, who just said you know, there's something funky about humans, because at first we used technology in order to enhance our lives, but there came a point where things got reversed and we're now like hamsters on methamphetamine, just keeping the wheels of commerce turning. The wheels of commerce turning, but it's no longer for our own benefit, so much as to continue to produce infinite amounts of what turns out to be a worthless abstraction. Again, it bends my mind when I think about this. In other words, you can't eat money.
Speaker 3:I know you can't eat without it, but early on, you know, we did use technology in ways that seemed to enrich and enliven and, as Karl Marx pointed out crappy economist, but great psychologist and philosopher early on, the accumulation of money, what we call capitalism. That should not just be summarily dismissed as being purely malignant, because those of us that like things like trains and hospitals and schools should note that those are the kind of things that you need. A large pile of a worthless abstraction, terrible, nothing sweeping over the land, that being money, ah, money, money, money.
Speaker 3:The convert into projects of that magnitude that would be hard to do otherwise. So there's a good aspect to the way that humans have constructed an economic symbol that can be combined to enhance the well-being of all of us. On the other hand, there is something and this is where the faust myths come in in our culture the faustian deal with the devil, because somehow we got to the point where enough is never enough. If you're Jeff Bezos and you wake up and Elon Musk has more money, then you're a failure. And even Elon Musk wakes up every day saying I need more billions.
Speaker 2:Right, right or like. And then the fascinating thing which you know I don't want to spend too much time on this next moment, but just thinking about, like all of the like biohacking, which is really just diet culture, but like biohacking, overlapped with like a life extension, right and like you know, people doing what they're doing to like live even longer. It just it's like, it's like such a big flag of like I'm afraid of death.
Speaker 3:Absolutely no. I think, dana, that's a great and a really important point. I don't think it's an accident that the richest people on earth are spending trillions of dollars to avoid the conclusion of their lives. To avoid the conclusion of their lives, right, it is. They are both, I believe, to be unfortunate manifestations of an immature and ultimately, self and socially destructive take on our mortality Totally self and socially destructive.
Speaker 2:take on our mortality totally, and I think like that it came up in in actually a couple other interviews that I've done. I wish I could have everyone all together because in my mind yeah, and in the same room someday maybe right, a dream, um, because there's all these little pieces fitting together.
Speaker 2:But there's recognizing, like where we're at, and even though, like fair understanding though there's more to do always of like how we got here, right, you know, and I'm just thinking about that quote that's going around, the Timothy Snyder quote, that's like do not obey, do not obey in advance. And I'm always like I love that sentiment because of the rebellious nature and also, with this work of death, denialism, it's like, oh right, but so many people can't help but obey in advance. That's how they buoyed themselves to you know, how they buffer the anxiety. And so I'm so curious here, like how we, like I know part of it's about awareness, but I read in the article, the Sun article, and then, through you know, through various, all sorts of ways that I've been taking in your work, like like what's the medicine here? Right, like there's inner medicine, there's outer medicine, right, there's like how we, the work we do, like you know, inside of ourselves, and then the work that we do in community, to sort of do what we can to. I don't know if you'd call it like break out of the pattern of the of the anxiety buffering right, like turning towards death.
Speaker 2:But you've talked a lot about, like you know, we have to become more connected and interdependent. We have to believe we're in this together. You know I read work around one of your former students, work around studies, around humility, and you know the becoming nobody and, you know, becoming radically inconsequential. There's all these pieces, right. So I'd love to hear you talk about that. Like, where are we? How are we like, yeah, man, let's ruin everyone's day because this is just the reality. And like, and we're all gonna die. Don't say that, never say that. Coonies never say die and in that inevitability of our own extinction, we do get to choose how we want to be together. Yeah, right, if we can remember good, we can remember that we have agency.
Speaker 3:We get to choose yeah, all right, so ditto, um you, you just said it all. Well, probably not. No, no, you did, in my opinion. Um, there's a a guy his name's james row and he's a political scientist out west originally from canada, I think and he wrote a book a year or two ago called radical mindfulness I don't want to get the title right. Why transforming fear of death is politically vital. Have you heard of that one?
Speaker 3:yeah, I would contact him and tell him I say hello and that he would be somebody honestly dana. That that's the question that his work addresses, because he's like look we gotta. We can't be simpletons here. We have to operate simultaneously on all levels, working from the is represented in the structure of our political, religious and economic institutions. In other words, he points out that our Western worldview what I would describe right now as an uber-capitalist, christian, white nationalist take on things is sheer death denial.
Speaker 3:He has a great chapter about James Baldwin's work, and the novelist James Baldwin just said you know, the problem is, whitey doesn't want to die, and that's what makes us racist, that's what makes us fascist, that's what makes us cling to economic inequality. And the role point is that these kinds of institutions are demonstrably psychologically and physically destructive and of course, that's what the anti-woke people want to get us to ignore. You know, basically, the hysteria about wokeness. It's like well, what do we mean by woke? Well, what we mean is recognizing that there are structural factors that impinge upon us in ways that are not equitable, either intentionally or not, of that's the way that malignant manifestations of death denial are perfused through all of our institutions. And of course, so one way that we need to work on that is to focus on changing those institutions, ideally in a peaceful fashion. Well, but then he turns right around and he says well, who are the people that are most likely to be doing things that move in that direction? And his response, that we would endorse heartily, is it is the people who have come to terms with their mortality. And so this is not to say that we are no longer anxious or that we're never going to suffer, but it means that we have gotten to a point where we accept the reality of our finitude, and we know that this is associated.
Speaker 3:The positive psychologists tell us that when we have a sense of awe, that often leads in turn to a sense of gratitude If you slept in a bed last night, why aren't you really grateful? If you had breakfast today, and so on, you know. And that in turn, as you already said, makes us extraordinarily humble, which, in America, we see, is like gallons of pus pouring out of our face. Humble humility is not self-deprecation, again back to being a society of narcissistic sociopaths. Humility is realizing that we are inconsequential specks of carbon-based gas, born in a time and place not of our choosing, here for a tiny amount of time, but so what? That doesn't render us devoid of meaning, purpose and value, and so the point is that they're people who have genuinely come to terms with their mortality.
Speaker 3:What Rowe proposes is they're the ones that are going to see things more accurately and be in a position, both emotionally as well as intellectually and motivationally, to intervene in ways that alter the very social systems that are dehumanizing and reducing us to, you know, physical, psychological and financial rubble. I don't know if that makes sense, but what I'm really advocating for and why I think the James Rowe book is so compelling is, yes, simultaneous existential action at every level of existence, and what that will require, in principle, is for each of us to work both individually and collectively. I think it was the dead Indian dude, krishna Murthy, who said something like everybody wants to change the world, but nobody wants to change themselves. So yeah, that's, yeah, that's my joke to the skidmore students.
Speaker 3:I'm like yeah if you want to figure out why somebody else is an asshole, well, we can do that in six months. But if you want to look in the mirror and figure out why you're an asshole, well, that's going to take a little longer I mean, look, that's the business I'm in, you know, like inner asshole recognition yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2:Like, and like I love it Cause like I gotta, I gotta look at my own inner asshole all the time. And this is, and this is why, like I was an activist, um, and and really like quite active as a full-time activist and organizer through all the anti-war years, so, like, deeply familiar with the entire George W War on Terror administration cabinet, still have dreams about them, sometimes nightmares. But, and then I was really involved in Occupy Wall Street. I sort of burnt out from my activism work because there was no attention to the individual inside of these big movements. Right, I think that's changed now, I know it has. I'm at least somewhat. But you know, I went to then do my own spiritual work and found myself, found my found interpersonal relational work as like, ah yes, here's something really fascinating, right, here's here we're all people, like if we're movement building, we're all just individuals, right, so there is, there is the role of the individual inside of all that. And then I was involved in occupy wall street, which I watched really change perspective, or I would even say like a mass ontological shift of like around income inequality and financial inequality, and so it's like I can see where things have shifted. It feels always like little by little, then all of a sudden, but what you were saying too, and looking at our own inner assholeness and how I made that sort of my job.
Speaker 2:The Grace Lee Boggs quote that's been guiding this season for me. She talks about rebellion is a stage in the development of revolution. But it's not the revolution. But it's an important stage because it represents the standing up of the oppressed, and rebellions break the threads that have been holding the system together, throw into question that its legitimacy and the supposed permanence of existing institutions, and it disrupts the society. It does not provide what is necessary there to make a revolution and establish an entire new social order. To make a revolution, people must not only struggle against the existing institutions. They must make the physical, philosophical, spiritual leap and become more human, human beings, right. So in order to change, transform the world, they must change, transform themselves. Right, that's it. I feel like that's where we're coming to.
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Speaker 3:no, I love that. And again, james rowowe you should try and talk to him because he makes the same point very respectfully, but where he's like I'm really not trying to be annoying because he also has had a life as an activist and that it's the existential anxieties of the individuals that are causing a lot of our problems. Meanwhile, a lot of the people to be silly, you know wearing bedsheets and having silent retreats and doing yoga, and I mean that, I don't mean that glibly they're seriously attending to their own existential concerns, but they're blithely unaware of the structural impingements.
Speaker 2:Right that spiritual bypassing needs attention.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and all he's saying is we need to juxtapose and intersect that we need to and again you said it great we need to simultaneously move towards what we've been describing as existential maturation in order to have any constructive and enduring effects on social institutions that are now, at best, highly problematic. But you make a good point, dana, and that's that sometimes highly problematic but even poorly functioning institutions are To none at all. Do you know the Olivia Butler books? Do you know who I'm talking about?
Speaker 2:Oh, Octavia Butler.
Speaker 3:Yeah, octavia Butler. Yeah, I'm bad at names. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he makes the same point. Yeah, I love her books, by the way. But which is? We may take ardent issue with a lot of current institutions I do things like public education but that's still infinitely better than just the complete destruction thereof. I'm a bit mortified by some of the folks around me right now who are not particularly perplexed by what's happening before our very eyes and that is the dismant. Lot of attention and repair, but we're still exponentially better off with them in their current form.
Speaker 2:So you know we're and without them altogether.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we're. Yeah, we're getting rid of the agency that predicts the weather. We're getting rid of FEMA, the agency that helps us after disasters. We're getting rid of the National Institute of Health research on medicine, because I'm also a big fan of this idea of throwing a wrench in things rebellion to the point of disruption, but again, I really like the way you put it. That's the first step, not the end game.
Speaker 2:Right, well, the disruption you know so much of what in the death denialism, it's like the anxiety buffer and it's like, well, if we're always just trying to buffer, or like in my work as a coach, right, just coming down all the way to a very personal experience and personal work, it's like whenever we're trying to push something away, right, it'll always and resist it.
Speaker 2:Usually it's coming up because it was something that was initially rejected or resisted in our, in our lives, at an early age, and we will put, you know, we push it down into our shadow, which it will always come back up, and there's personal shadow, there's collective shadow, and I think what we're really experiencing is so much that has been pushed away, like the fear of death, you know, or the reality of our own mortality, like that we will push something away, it will always come back up, and so, on the interpersonal level, it's like the work is always to turn towards it. Now, that doesn't mean that we have to immediately like, run towards it and release all of our boundaries. There are really beautiful ways that we can start to turn towards our own fears. Right, and there's layers and layers of work. But it requires some disruption. It requires, like I'm so interested in, like the disruptions that we must do on the individual level and then the disruptions that we must do on the collective level.
Speaker 3:Right, no, you just made again an awesome point. We're ruining people's days in a fine way, because back in the day before you guys were around, there was a book called Briefing for Descent into Hell by a woman named Doris Lessing.
Speaker 2:I'm familiar not with that piece, I'm familiar with that.
Speaker 3:All right, but anyway it's a novel. But at the end of the book, Doris Lessing says look, we're in trouble in modernity because whenever we're anxious, we reach for a pill and that is going to potentially extinguish us as humans, because anxiety, while unpleasant, doesn't always undermine our well-being. And she doesn't refer to Kierkegaard, but Kierkegaard has an amazing take on anxiety. He's like, yeah, sometimes you're anxious because you're worried and apprehensive and you take flight, which is quite understandable, but and I forget the exact words, Dana but he's like yeah, but other times anxiety is yourself calling yourself to pay attention to yourself. Yes, and I love that. It's like wait a minute, fuck no.
Speaker 3:Taron Horney makes a similar point a century later in a book called Neurosis and Human Growth. Is that every once in a while, when we're anxious and apprehensive, if we sit still long enough, it's because we realize the yawning chasm between who we really are and who we're pretending to be. And Lessing's entire point is that, in a death-denying society where anxiety is seen as an annoying inconvenience that needs to be immediately addressed, no difference than when we need DoorDash to deliver 12 pizzas in the next five minutes that we are missing the vital role that existential apprehensions could, at our best provide that very disruption that you alluded to yes, I mean, that's what I always call.
Speaker 2:Like there is something asking for attention. There you go raising its hand, hello over here.
Speaker 2:No, you don't need the little zoom icon right, yeah, it's just that, like as we learn how to pay attention to those parts of us that are raising their hands and asking for attention, you know, and showing's like, you know, our deepest fear is moving up through our bodies, then up to our conscious mind, so that we can tend to them, right.
Speaker 2:So I just, I really appreciate this sort of kaleidoscope, or expanding and contracting conversation that you've held here with me, sheldon, because, conversation that you've held here with me, sheldon, because, and with everyone listening, um, as they will, of of this sort of the bigness of what, the enormity of what we're always as humans, it's like there's an enormity, our mortality, there it is, it is always there and as we learn and are willing, maybe first and maybe and then learn how to be in relationship with it and through, unfortunately, lots of folks are gonna, are gonna learn how to be in relationship with it because it's all crumbling and crushing on them and that's unfortunate, but that's, you know, where a lot of folks are and that, as we slow down, as we like can look at the ways in which we are being with each other and we can, you know, use death denial and death awareness as a lens to sort of even feel connected to each other, knowing we're all in this together right, and that we can find these, you know, know, maybe even just these small ways of of finding our humility or recognizing maybe, where we are trying to like buffer things and and there is that role for us individually and like what we're here doing, how we're choosing to be together yeah, um, again really best.
Speaker 3:yeah, no, yeah Again really.
Speaker 2:Doing our best.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no well put. You know, I feel sometimes silly saying some of these things because, again, I call it common sense masquerading as psychological insight. I love that be like all right dude, you know, pretend to be understanding people for years. You know what do we need to ensure psychological well-being, and you summed it up in two words relationships and connectivity. That we are not autonomous entities capable of even making it to lunchtime.
Speaker 2:Our not only interdependence, but cosmic connectivity.
Speaker 3:And I like. I think it's Oliver Berkman. I'm bad with names.
Speaker 2:Hi, you're doing great.
Speaker 3:But I like his ideas about these matters, and some other folks too, but no matter, and it's just like well, wait a minute. If we're all interconnected, then none of us are in a position to judge, ultimately, the effects of our existence. And so, and basically so, all right, most of us I'm not going to be Einstein, I'm not going to be Beethoven or Mother Teresa, and most of us aren't. But instead of, instead of assuming that that's a radical indication of your inadequacy, you don't have there's no need to think that way. Moreover, it's unconscionably wrong.
Speaker 3:So the example that I like using, because it occurs to me all the time is you know how, sometimes, like, you're walking on the street and you just momentarily meet somebody that you've never seen before, eye to eye, you don't know them, you'll never see them again, but you have one of those little nods like hey, I know, you know, we know we're here. Well, that, and we now know that a casual social engagement has monumental psychodynamic benefits. How do you know that that person wasn't walking to the nearest bridge to jump off and kill themselves? But your momentary acknowledgement of their existence changed their mind. And maybe that's the next Martin Luther King, or Jesus or Mother Teresa, next Martin Luther King, or Jesus or mother Teresa? So you don't know and nobody knows, but you fucking changed the world and I, and again you might think about this all the time too.
Speaker 2:We have very similar brains in this way.
Speaker 3:And my point is that that, but that that's really true. And if that's really true, then you have no right to say that this person won a Nobel Prize and therefore they are more fundamentally and intrinsically valuable and important than me I did nothing except a person who was struggling with their vision to cross the street but there's no basis for assuming that they're not equally meaningful, valuable and consequential.
Speaker 2:Yes, I love that. I love that so much I read that in your chapter that I've become enthused about viewing myself as radically inconsequential. It's not even just the acceptance of like I am radically inconsequential, it's the becoming enthused like oh right. That's correct, I am radically inconsequential and like that is like that is worthy of some celebration, right? I think so. That is like how beautiful does that make every moment, every?
Speaker 2:Exactly you know every interaction Like, then it's like, ooh, if the pressure of growth and progress right, which we're also trapped in together also progress, right, which we're also trapped in together. Also like if we just can shed it, even for moments at a time, right, that's that allows that to have less. When we make it conscious, right, instead of like fighting against it in our unconscious and wrestling and trying to push it away. Right, it's like we make it conscious and say, like I am radically, I am enthused about viewing myself as radically inconsequential like we're releasing the grit, the power that that system, internalized system, has on us. That's great, and it's just like we have to do it all the time. We have to do it really regularly, um, and, and it will become a new baseline for us Like we can I do believe like we can get there.
Speaker 2:I have no idea what the future is going to look like and I have the paradox, perhaps same as you and many of us, of like whoa, there's something really beautiful available about existence and being together, available about existence and being together, and and that inside of everything that's happening, right, that's that's happening in the world. And like, holding that paradox and allowing ourselves to like, just like, even for moments of a day release that grip on the way that it must be, on the growth, on the power over on all you know, on all of the all of that resistance, I know that it's possible.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, well put. And again, I think I mean this is a compliment crassly pragmatic is a compliment crassly pragmatic. What you're proposing, if I'm hearing you right, is that this need not be a 24-hour-a-day preoccupation. That requires that a radical abandonment of our current identity and role in our present society. Yeah, but we could carve out some proverbial minutes each day to attend to these matters. And again back to history every religious, philosophical, philosophical and cultural tradition that seems to be associated with stable and prosperous societies. That is the primary function of ritual and festival, which is to give us those kinds of experiences that, at our best, we then extend to day-to-day life. So, yeah, I like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that, thank you. Thank you, sheldon, this was so great. I have been looking forward to this for so long. What a delight. Just thank you for all of this, for your work, for your, you know, I hope someone, if I ever have a tombstone, puts crassly pragmatic on it and maybe also radically inconsequential, and then sprinkle a stardust right. So thank you so much. Just really, truly a joy and a pleasure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, me too, that's what.
Speaker 2:I'm taking from this, Like ah true joy and pleasure from this, Thank you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, me too. You have a great day. Bye, bye, crying in my jacuzzi.
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