TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the idea, an observation of mine, that some people just live too long. And that the idea of living as long as possible, by whatever means necessary, is actually in our society a very positive thing. I think many doctors do this. They just try to keep people alive forever, regardless of the person’s quality of life or lack thereof. I think a lot of family members want their older family members, or sometimes even younger family members, just to live forever. And often I see that as ridiculous.
Probably the extreme case, and it came into national attention in America, was the Terry Schiavo case. A young woman in her 20s who was married and had really severe bulimia. And because of her bulimia, I believe that’s what it was, she had a heart attack at like 27 years old. She lost oxygen to her brain and her brain shut down. She became brain dead by and large. She was in a persistent vegetative state. I think that was her diagnosis. I remember even in the news they said she is a wet brain. Her brain was just sort of shriveled and wet. Well, she couldn’t think. She didn’t know who she was anymore. She couldn’t move. Maybe her eyes twittered a little bit because that’s just sometimes what happens even if the brain doesn’t work really anymore.
Well, what happened is there became a big conflict between her husband, who said pull the plug. She was on life support. She had no more quality of life. He said just pull the plug, let’s move on, let’s let her go to the next place, whatever that might be. Well, her parents came in, “No, we’re gonna keep her alive.” And they fought. And it became a major legal battle to the point that it went, I believe, even up to the Supreme Court. George W. Bush, the president at the time, stepped in. He signed legislation to keep her alive. She has a right to live. Well, eventually they did pull the plug and she died. But I remember that as just sort of this ridiculous extreme case.
I remember watching both of my grandfathers becoming old, living with severe dementia, becoming decrepit, miserable, lonely, in terrible physical turmoil. One of my granddads couldn’t walk, couldn’t do anything, cried all the time, didn’t know who anybody was. And he’d been such a cruel guy, so nasty and violating and perverse that pretty much everybody in his life rejected him. And yet on he went living.
And then I remember maybe 20 years before talking to him and him saying, he was a very grandiose guy. He was a professor of psychology, incidentally. And he said, “Someday, Daniel, if I get older, my body and my mind don’t work too well, I’m going to see it coming. I’m going to take my shotgun, hit a shotgun, because I’m going to go back behind the house and boom, I’m going to blow out my brains. Because you know, like those Eskimos on the ice flow, when the old people are useless and can’t participate anymore, they know it’s time to go. They get on the ice flow and they go out and they freeze out in the sea. That’s what’s going I’m going to do to myself.” He was so proud of it. And it only went to show how little he knew himself.
Because as that time started coming and his back went out and he couldn’t get out of bed so easily, but his brain was still working, what did he do? He didn’t go and kill himself. Not that I think that that’s necessarily a good idea at all. But instead he took more and more pills to make the pain go away. And then as he started losing his mind and went into dementia, he saw it coming, but he fought against it and took more pills. He became a human pill machine, a garbage disposal, a composter for pills and pharmaceuticals and everything. And eventually his teeth fell out. He lost everything. And he just lay in bed and it went on for years and years and years. He died at 99 years old. And I thought, the last 10 years of his life, what value was this? And what cost to society, to his family, to the world? How much better those resources that went to him could have been devoted to so many other things?
It really made me question in my personal life. And I saw it with my other granddad, living in a home, isolated, lonely. My dad didn’t want his father anymore. The rest of my dad’s family, they didn’t want him. They forgot about him. When I went to visit him in this Alzheimer’s home, everyone’s like, “Why are you going? He won’t even know who you are. He doesn’t care. Better to just remember him like he was.” But no, I went there. He was strapped in a chair and he had all these health heads around him. He had urinated on himself and he was babbling. He didn’t even speak English anymore. And it was like, and true, he didn’t know who I was. And I thought, they’re keeping him alive, they’re feeding him. It’s like, kind of in a way, for what? What has our society become?
And so when I get down to it, it makes me question what is the purpose of life? And I think so often these people, who even when they were functional, my granddads for perfect examples, even when they had their brains and their bodies, they were so disconnected with so much of themselves. They were disconnected with their altruism, with their goodness. They were like traumatized children growing older and eventually becoming old men. They were stunted to very early ages because of the awful things that happened to them, and they never dealt with it. They were always living for comfort, living for external things, living for relationships and sex. Both my granddads were having affairs. My mom’s father, the one who was old and in bed and lived to 99, always having affairs. Everybody knew about it. People didn’t want to cross him by calling him out. I called him out on it once. Oh, he hated me. He threw me out of his house. It was terrible. It was painful.
Well, what I think is so often people aren’t really connected to who they are. They’re not really connected to the truth of their real selves. Instead, they live this false self on the outside. They’re not connected to the real true child within them. They’re blocked by their traumas from being connected to their real honest core of truth. They can’t work out what happened to them. And as the results of that, in a way, they’re really not even living at all. They’re not living true. They’re not living honest. They’re not living ethically. They’re not living in a way that’s really useful for the planet. Instead, with ics, most people are living for comfort. They’re living for distraction. They’re living for enjoyment. Or they’re just wallowing in their pain. A lot of people just go through their lives as victims, miserable, unhappy, but not grieving, not turning their misery, their unhappiness, their depression into something that’s of meaning.
Because to grieve, to really uncover what happened to us and to feel our feelings is incredibly painful. And there are consequences. It means going against society. But really underneath that, the fundamental society of the child, it means going against the family system. And that’s painful and that’s scary. But in my experience, having really profoundly broken away from my family of origin, I realized the sky is blue on the other side. Life is so much better for me away from my traumatizers. Even if they don’t or can’t traumatize me so much now that I’ve become independent, I still see the remnants of what they did to me. And I don’t want to be around those people. And this is true in general. I don’t want to be around toxic people. I don’t want to be around people who are very shut down and broken and have intimate relationships with them. I’d rather be around healthy people who are growing and real and much more honest.
And so when I think about this idea of so many people having this purpose of living forever, if possible, denying death, living in terror of death, what’s going to happen? I think really they’re not afraid of dying. I think they’re afraid of their false self breaking down. I think they’re afraid of feeling their feelings. I think they’re afraid of going back to the despair that they felt in childhood that they have blocked. And really what they want to do is keep those walls up, those internal…
Walls that keep their pain and their sadness and their rage and frustration and feelings of betrayal. They want to keep it away, keep it at bay. And maybe, just maybe, if they feel they get into the delusion or fantasy that they can live forever, they will be able to keep those feelings at bay.
I know so many people who, right to the end, are still denying the most basic parts of themselves. And then what’s so interesting is we have a whole medical field, even a world of religion, government laws that support this. That support putting so much money into people who often give so little when there are so many people who have so much more potential who get so little, maybe even get nothing.
And so for me, my goal in life is not to live forever. Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to live a long time if I have a great quality of life, if my mind is intact, if I’m being useful. But there is part of me that thinks, and I’ve experienced this, if I become ill and old and I’m not getting useful. There’s parts I’ve been very sick in my life physically at various points, and I’ve had to confront my death.
I’ve been out in the world, far away from America, from this first world country, from this beautiful civilization, which empire is really beautiful. I’ve been in places that, well, are pretty scary, countries that are pretty poor. But there’s a lot of illness where people do die regularly, and I’ve been sick there. And I’ve had to think, what if I don’t get well?
And there’s a part of me that thinks, Daniel, you’re here, you’re living, you’re giving so much meaning to your life. You’ve done so much work healing your traumas. You’re so connected to who you are on the inside. But actually, I found it again and again, I’m not so terrified of death. There’s been times where I thought maybe I could die, and there’s a part of me, there is a part of me that feels my mission is not yet accomplished, that I have a lot more to do yet.
But there’s another part of me that feels, damn, I’ve done a pretty good job at accomplishing my mission on this earth so far. And the part of me that’s accomplished what I wish to have accomplished so far feels I’ve lived present, I’ve grown, I’ve done such a massive job healing myself and being real and being honest and being an example of truth to the best of my ability.
That part of me feels that if it’s time for me to move on, to die, to go to a place that may not exist at all, or maybe is something even better, that I’m ready for it. And then there’s another part of me, and I think this is probably part of why I keep fighting back internally, even my immune system being connected to my psyche, that says, Daniel, you are going to get well. You have more yet to do, you have more to give, and so your body’s going to fight. You’re not going to lose your mind, your body’s not ready to go, you will protect yourself, and you’re going to bounce back.
And so far, that has been what has happened. But my hope for myself, and I believe it will happen, is someday, maybe in 10 years, 20 years, maybe 30 years if I’m lucky, maybe even 40 years if I’m really lucky, my time will come. I will move on, I will die, and I hope that I have the strength within myself to look back in my life and know that to the best of my ability, at great personal cost, I’ve become real.
I’ve become honest. I’ve spoken out against horrible things that happened to me. I’ve spoken out against my traumatizers and against traumatizers in general. And perhaps now, most importantly, the traumatizer that I became as the result of what my parents did to me. I had some bad years as a kid where I was really confused and lost and replicated what happened to me. Thank God in my 20s, I started to figure it out, started to work out those things, and I was able to manifest and not become a person like both of my grandads became, like my parents became.