for - definition - temporal conscientization - adjacency - temporal conscientization - Deep Humanity - poly-meta-perma-crisis - terror management - denial of death - Paolo Freire - denial of death - Ernest Becker - terror management - book - Critical Consciousness

definition - temporal conscientization - introduced by Paolo Freire n his book, temporal conscientization means becoming conscious of historical change, our - past, -present and - futures - For people to intervene in the movement of history, - people need to understand - how they got to where they are now, - the era that they are coming from, but as well to understand - the movements and potentialities of change that are leading to different futures.

adjacency - between - temporal conscientization - Deep Humanity - poly-meta-perma-crisis - terror management theory - denial of death - adjacency statement - Deep Humanity has always elevated the idea of knowing the past, present and future in order to frame meaning for navigating our future. - This is precisely the awareness of temporal conscientization. - Deep considerations of death, - and subsequently what meaning we can derive from life - is an integral part of the Deep Humanity exercise - A major theme of religions is the afterlife, or some continuation of consciousness after the process of death - In the context of temporal conscientization, - looking and - imagining - what our - individual and - collective future - looks like - the proposal of an afterlife is a terror management strategy to cope with our denial of death - Perhaps the emergence of the present poly-meta-perma-crisis is - a cultural indication to the collective intelligence of the human social superorganism that - the time has come to develop a mature theory of life and death that is - accessible to every member of our species so that - we can put the fragmenting, isolating existential question to rest once and for all

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    • ape-brained meat sack, taken from Elise's book

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  • comparable to Ernest Becker's description of the human condition
  • in his book The Denial of Death
    • quote:
      • "Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever."

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  • the comparison is apt as one of the goals of transhumanism is to use technology to conquer death
  • From this perspective, we might argue that transhumanist aspirations have been with humanity for as long as medicine has intervened to extend life and human wellbeing

• This is a very broad and sweeping statement.
  • While I agree with it,
    • what does "learning how to die" exactly mean?
    • unless we know in details, we won't have an actionable strategy

Sheldon Solomon on the connection between the denial of death and the Anthropocene

!- intrinsic fear of death : strong role in creation of a self illusion -Ernest Becker, David Hume, Shanti Devi all regard death as a major reason we create the self illusion - Becker cliams we reify the self as a bulwark against the terror of death - the fear of death is deeply wired in us - the story of a self allows it to posit a symbolic form of eternal life, hence resulting in immortality projects - we know we have fallen under the spell of the illusion of self when we can be insulted, when we get angry, when we feel shame - it is these affects which establish a self, hence why the self imputation is so strong and difficult to dislodge

• Social system currently dictate the overall direction of the Anthropocene.
• Voting, as a collective process within social systems enables the majority of votes to determine the collective action outcome of members of a social system.
• The final vote can be determined by a number of factors such as power, access and knowledge.
• In societies with large inequalities and political power assymetries, voting does not always lead to collectively beneficial results.
• Further, some social institutions can be harmful to individual and collective wellbeing.
• For example, authoritarian regimes are a prime example.
• Terror management theory (TMT) holds that there is a preponderance of social institutions that encourage psychological death denialism, an action that can lead to chronic psychological damage that can manifest in pathological social behavior.
• https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fernestbecker.org%2Flecture-6-denial%2F&group=world

Adam Smith thought that there were two sides to us, one side is our concern for SELF, that gets what it needs to survive but the other side is our empathic side for OTHERS, we cares for the welfare of others. His economic design theory distilled into THE WEALTH OF NATIONS was based on the assumption that these two would act in a balanced way.

There are also two other important and related variables at play that combine with Whybrow's findings:

1. Death Denialism (Ernest Becker) A growing meaning crisis in the world due to the waning influence of Christianity and significant misinterpretation of most religions as an immortality project emerging from the psychological denial of death

John Vervaeke's Meaning Crisis: https://www.meaningcrisis.co/all-transcripts/

Glenn Hughes writes about Becker and Denial of Death: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fernestbecker.org%2Flecture-6-denial%2F&group=world

1. Illusion of Immediacy of Experience Jay L. Garfield explains how philosophers such as Nagarjuna, Chandrakurti and Dogen have taught us to beware of the illusion of the immediacy of experience that consists of two major ways in which we mistaken conventional, relative reality for intrinsic reality: perceptual faculty illusions and cognitive faculty illusions. https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FHRuOEfnqV6g%2F&group=world

Here we find Kierkegaard, Becker and Socrates all in agreement. Both types of inauthentic existence involves running away from death and disallowing the fact of our own death from penetrating into consciousness, and avoiding our human existential condition.

This also prevents us from reaching the next stage of moral catharsis. Denial of death lay at the center of human inauthenticity.

Hughes closes by saying that an open embrace of life structured by death is embraced when perishing and non-perishing meaning co-constitute our conscious existence. This is similar to the Buddhist principle of the middle way and the Stop Reset Go maxim:

To be or not to be, that is the question To be AND not to be that is the answer

Kierkegaard seems to look at death the same way as Becker. If we are authentic, it takes courage, first, but then we recognize it as wisdom. We participate in both the changing, perishable reality as well as the immutable, unchanging reality. Most people are too afraid to reach this point and evade a life structured by death in two major ways of denial of death. First they can live and let live. Enjoy all pleasures today with no regard for tomorrow. Second they can fall into an immortality project

This is a good summary of Becker's findings concerning denial of death. * Mortality is an existential, perennial and persistent threat; * It generates a persistent anxiety, even terror; * We devise both individual and cultural ways to escape awareness of it as a means to deal with it; * Death denial is one of the basic drives of individual behavior; * One of culture's principal roles is to help individuals avoid awareness of mortality; * Suppressing awareness plays a crucial role in keeping us sane and functioning; * These cultural methods Becker calls "immortality projects" and they are powerful narratives that keep the fear and terror at bay; * This self-deceit comes with a high price, however, as we may not be truly convinced of the narrative and it can cause hatred, ingroup/outgroup and conflict;

• Title:THE DENIAL OF DEATH AND THE PRACTICE OF DYING
• Author: Huges, Glenn
• Date:?

Yes, long overdue!

Coming to terms with potential near term extinction of our species, and many others along with it, is a macro-level reflection of the personal and inescapable, existential crisis that all human, and other living beings have to contend with, our own personal, individual mortality. Our personal death can also be interpreted as an extinction event - all appearances are extinguished.

The self-created eco-crisis, with accelerating degradation of nature cannot help but touch a nerve because it is now becoming a daily reminder of our collective vulnerability, Mortality salience of this scale can create enormous amounts of anxiety. We can no longer hide from our mortality when the news is blaring large scale changes every few weeks. It leaves us feeling helpless...just like we are at the time of our own personal death.

In a world that is in denial of death, as pointed out by Ernest Becker in his 1973 Pulitzer-prize winning book of the same title, the signs of a climate system and biosphere in collapse is a frightening reminder of our own death.

Straying from the natural wonderment each human being is born with, we already condition ourselves to live with an existential dread as Becker pointed out:

"Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever."

Beckerian writer Glenn Hughes explores a way to authentically confront this dread, citing Socrates as an example. Three paragraphs from Hughes article point this out, citing Socrates as exemplary:

"Now Becker doesn’t always emphasize this second possibility of authentic faith. One can get the impression from much of his work that any affirmation of enduring meaning is simply a denial of death and the embrace of a lie. But I believe the view expressed in the fifth chapter of The Denial of Death is his more nuanced and genuine position. And I think it will be worthwhile to develop his idea of a courageous breaking away from culturally-supported immortality systems by looking back in history to a character who many people have thought of as an epitome of a self-realized person, someone who neither accepts his culture’s standardized hero-systems, nor fears death: the philosopher Socrates."

"Death is a mystery. Maybe it is annihilation. One simply can’t know otherwise. Socrates is psychologically open to his physical death and possible utter annihilation. But still this does not unnerve him. And if we pursue the question: why not?–we do not have to look far in Plato’s portrait of Socrates for some answers. Plato understood, and captured in his Dialogues, a crucial element in the shaping of Socrates’ character: his willingness to let the fact of death fully penetrate his consciousness. This experience of being fully open to death is so important to Socrates that he makes a point of using it to define his way of life, the life of a philosophos–a “lover of wisdom.” " "So we have come to the crucial point. The Socratic catharsis is a matter of letting death penetrate the self. It is the acceptance of the perishing of everything that will perish. In this acceptance a person imaginatively experiences the death of the body and the possibility of complete annihilation. This is “to ‘taste” death with the lips of your living body [so] that you … know emotionally that you are a creature who will die; “it is the passage into nothing” in which “a corner is turned within one.” And it is this very experience, and no other, that enables a person to act with genuine moral freedom and autonomy, guided by morals and not just attraction and impulses."

https://ernestbecker.org/lecture-6-denial/

Mortality salience for the masses - operationalizing terror management theory (TMT) and Deep Humanity BEing Journeys that take individuals to explore the depths of their humanity to make sense of the times we are in will play a critical role in contextualizing fear of death triggered by unstable circumstances and ameliorating these fears with the wisdom that comes from a living comprehension of the sacredness of our life and eventual death.

It is clear that through such a massive and unprecedented transition, a whole being approach must be adopted. This means dealing with the inner transformation of the individual in addition to the outer transformation. The hyperthreat increases the attention to each individual's mortality salience, their awareness of their own death. As cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker noted in his "Denial of Death", our fear of death is normatively suppressed as a compromised coping mechanism. When extreme weather, food shortage, war, pandemic become an unrelenting onslaught, however, we have no escape from mortality as the threat to our lives will be broadcast relentlessly through mass media. Inner transformation must accompany the outer transformation in order for the general population to emotionally cope with the enormous stress. Deep Humanity (DH) is conceived as an open praxis to assist with the inner transformation that will be needed for mental and emotional well being during these trying times to come.

This underscores the critical nature of dealing with the cultural shift of luxury lifestyle. It is recognized as a "hot potato" issue, which implies policy change may be slow and difficult.

Policy changes and new legal tools are ways to force an unwilling individual or group into a behavior change.

A more difficult but potentially more effective way to achieve this cultural shift is based on Donella Meadows' leverage points: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ which identifies the top leverage point as: The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises.

The Stop Reset Go (SRG) open collective project applies the Deep Humanity (DH) Human Inner Transformation (HIT) process to effect impactful Social Outer Transformation (SOT). This is based on the inner-to-outer flow: The heart feels, the mind thinks, the body acts and a social impact manifests in our shared, public collective human reality.

Meadows top leverage point identifies narratives, stories and value systems that are inner maps to our outer behavior as critical causal agents to transform.

We need to take a much deeper look at the pysche of the luxury lifestyle. Philospher David Loy has done extensive research on this already. https://www.davidloy.org/media.html

Loy is a Buddhist scholar, but Buddhist philosophy can be understood secularly and across all religions.

Loy cites the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, especially his groundbreaking Pulitzer-prize-winning book: The Denial of Death. Becker wrote:

"Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else."

But Loy goes beyond mortality salience and strikes to the heart of our psychological construction of the Self that is the root of our consumption and materialism exasperated crisis.

To reach the wealthy in a compassionate manner, we must recognize that the degree of wealth and materialist accumulation may be in many cases proportional to the anxiety of dying, the anxiety of the groundlessness of the Self construction itself.

Helping all humans to liberate from this anxiety is monumental, and also applies to the wealthy. The release of this anxiety will naturally result in breaking through the illusion of materialism, seeing its false promises.

Those of the greatest material wealth are often also of the greatest spiritual poverty. As we near the end of our lives, materialism's promise may begin to lose its luster and our deepest unanswered questions begin to regain prominence.

At the end of the day, policy change may only effect so much change. What is really required is a reeducation campaign that results in voluntary behavior change that significantly reduces high impact luxury lifestyles. An exchange for something even more valued is a potential answer to this dilemma.