There are many people in our time and region who think about the end of their life, and especially about the circumstances in which they want a doctor to end it. They talk about suffering, dignity, and fear of losing control.
You say you want to die with dignity. Why should dignity disappear when strength disappears? Why should dependence be undignified? Why should confusion, illness, or old age stand outside life?
It is the illusion that if you lose any of your faculties, you lose your dignity. We don’t even know what dignity entails. Is it a fixed state that slowly disappears?
These arguments seem to imply that some forms of life are beneath dignity, whereas I see dignity as belonging to life itself, not to a particular level of health, independence, or control.
I have less of a problem with people who reason their way to suicide because of unrelievable pain or unavoidable depression, but planning your own suicide by crossing off some boxes because you believe that what comes after these boxes is not life sounds…
We live in a time and place where we have the illusion of controlling our own lives. It starts young, when you choose a career, decide what color hair your boyfriend should have, and decide where you are going to live. Superficially, our lives seem to be a constant string of decisions of our own design, but unbeknownst to most, life is a constant stream of coincidences. You are just lucky that the car had an accident a few seconds later when you crossed the street; otherwise, your life would have gone a totally different way than you thought you had planned it.
You live to prepare yourself for the circumstances you encounter, and if you are lucky enough, or brave enough, you will learn to embrace fate, even if it means years spent staring at a ceiling on your deathbed.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Gay Science
Book four: Sanctus Januarius
276 For the new year.- I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum,. ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today, everybody permits himself the expression of his
wish ~nd his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year-what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation.3 And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes~sayer!
Hannah Arendt
The Human Condition
The Vita Activa and the Modern Age
There is another aspect of this matter which, as we shall see, will be of greater importance in our context. It is in the nature of the human surveying capacity that it can function only if man disentangles himself from all involvement in and concern with the close at hand and withdraws himself to a distance from everything near him. The greater the distance between himself and his surroundings, world or earth, the more he will be able to survey and to measure and the less will worldly, earth-bound space be left to him. The fact that the decisive shrinkage of the earth was the consequence of the invention of the airplane, that is, of leaving the surface of the earth altogether, is like a symbol for the general phenomenon that any decrease of terrestrial distance can be won only at the price of putting a decisive distance between man and earth, of alienating man from his immediate earthly surroundings.
page 251, The University of Chicago Press, 1998 edition. (https://monoskop.org/images/e/e2/Arendt_Hannah_The_Human_Condition_2nd_1998.pdf)
J. Krishnamurti
Freedom from the known
Fear is one of the greatest problems in life. A mind that is caught in fear lives in confusion, in conflict, and therefore must be violent, distorted and aggressive. It dare not move away from its own patterns of thinking, and this breeds hypocrisy. Until we are free from fear, climb the highest mountain, invent every kind of God, we will always remain in darkness.
Living in such a corrupt, stupid society as we do, with the competitive education we receive, which engenders fear, we are all burdened with fears of some kind, and fear is a dreadful thing which warps, twists and dulls our days. There is physical fear but that is a response we have inherited from the animals. It is psychological fears we are concerned with here, for when we understand the deep-rooted psychological fears we will be able to meet the animal fears, whereas to be concerned with the animal fears first will never help us to understand the psychological fears.
We are all afraid about something; there is no fear in abstraction, it is always in relation to something. Do you know your own fears – fear of losing your job, of not having enough food or money, or what your neighbours or the public think about you, or not being a success, of losing your position in society, of being despised or ridiculed – fear of pain and disease, of domination, of never knowing what love is or of not being loved, of losing your wife or children, of death, of living in a world that is like death, of utter boredom, of not living up to the image others have built about you, of losing your faith – all these and innumerable other fears – do you know your own particular fears? And what do you usually do about them? You run away from them, don’t you, or invent ideas and images to cover them? But to run away from fear is only to increase it.
One of the major causes of fear is that we do not want to face ourselves as we are. So, as well as the fears themselves, we have to examine the network of escapes we have developed to rid ourselves of them. If the mind, in which is included the brain, tries to overcome fear, to suppress it, discipline it, control it, translate it into terms of something else, there is friction, there is conflict, and that conflict is a waste of energy.
The first thing to ask ourselves then is what is fear and how does it arise? What do we mean by the word fear itself? I am asking myself what is fear, not what I am afraid of.
I lead a certain kind of life; I think in a certain pattern; I have certain beliefs and dogmas and I don’t want those patterns of existence to be disturbed because I have my roots in them. I don’t want them to be disturbed because the disturbance produces a state of unknowing and I dislike that. If I am torn away from everything I know and believe, I want to be reasonably certain of the state of things to which I am going. So the brain cells have created a pattern and those brain cells refuse to create another pattern which may be uncertain. The movement from certainty to uncertainty is what I call fear.
At the actual moment as I am sitting here I am not afraid; I am not afraid in the present, nothing is happening to me, obody is threatening me or taking anything away from me. But beyond the actual moment there is a deeper layer in the mind which is consciously or unconsciously thinking of what might happen in the future or worrying that something from the past may overtake me. So I am afraid of the past and of the future. I have divided time into the past and the future. Thought steps in, says, ‘Be careful it does not happen again’, or ‘Be prepared for the future. The future may be dangerous for you. You have got something now but you may lose it. You may die tomorrow, your wife may run away, you may lose your job. You may never become famous. You may be lonely. You want to be quite sure of tomorrow.’
Now take your own particular form of fear. Look at it. Watch your reactions to it. Can you look at it without any movement of escape, justification, condemnation or suppression? Can you look at that fear without the word which causes the fear? Can you look at death, for instance, without the word which arouses the fear of death? The word itself brings a tremor, doesn’t it, as the word love has its own tremor, its own image? Now, is the image you have in your mind about death, the memory of so many deaths you have seen and the associating of yourself with those incidents – is it that image which is creating fear? Or are you actually afraid of coming to an end, not of the image creating the end? Is the word death causing you fear or the actual ending? If it is the word or the memory which is causing you fear then it is not fear at all.
You were ill two years ago, let us say, and the memory of that pain, that illness, remains, and the memory now functioning says, ‘Be careful, don’t get ill, again’. So the memory with its associations is creating fear, and that is not fear at all because actually at the moment you have very good health. Thought, which is always old, because thought is the response of memory and memories are always old – thought creates, in time, the feeling that you are afraid which is not an actual fact. The actual fact is that you are well. But the experience, which has remained in the mind as a memory, rouses the thought, ‘Be careful, don’t fall ill again’.
So we see that thought engenders one kind of fear. But is there fear at all apart from that? Is fear always the result of thought and, if it is, is there any other form of fear? We are afraid of death – that is, something that is going to happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, in time. There is a distance between actuality and what will be. Now thought has experienced this state; by observing death it says, ‘I am going to die.’ Thought creates the fear of death, and if it doesn’t is there any fear at all?
Is fear the result of thought? If it is, thought being always old, fear is always old. As we have said, there is no new thought. If we recognize it, it is already old. So what we are afraid of is the repetition of the old – the thought of what has been projecting into the future. Therefore thought is responsible for fear. This is so, you can see it for yourself. When you are confronted with something immediately there is no fear. It is only when thought comes in that there is fear.
Therefore our question now is, is it possible for the mind to live completely, totally, in the present? It is only such a mind that has no fear. But to understand this, you have to understand the structure of thought, memory and time. And in understanding it, under standing not intellectually, not verbally, but actually with your heart, your mind, your guts, you will be free from fear; then the mind can use thought without creating fear.
Thought, like memory, is, of course, necessary for daily living. It is the only instrument we have for communication, working at our jobs and so forth. Thought is the response to memory, memory which has been accumulated through experience, knowledge, tradition, time. And from this background of memory we react and this reaction is thinking. So thought is essential at certain levels but when thought projects itself psychologically as the future and the past, creating fear as well as pleasure, the mind is made dull and therefore inaction is inevitable.
So I ask myself, ‘Why, why, why, do I think about the future and the past in terms of pleasure and pain, knowing that such thought creates fear? Isn’t it possible for thought psychologically to stop, for otherwise fear will never end?’
Click to access Freedom%20From%20The%20Known%20-%20J.%20Krishnamurti.pdf