Staring at the Sun is a book by Irvin D. Yalom, one of the founding fathers of existential psychotherapy. This is a brand of therapy that focuses on the human struggle of consciousness and how it relates to the fundamental realities of existence. This book specifically explores the concept of death terror. The use of the word "terror" is intentional, as the goal is not to completely quell the anxiety surrounding mortality, but to reduce it from terror to anxiety. Fear of death is part of the human condition, and overcoming it completely is an unrealistically high bar for anyone.
The reason I read this book is because I was grappling with my own sense of death terror. As with most people, anxiety on the topic has been consistently present, but when my grandfather developed dementia, it increased to terror.
It took me a long time to read this book. One reason was that it's a heavy concept and I'm not usually in the headspace to tackle it. But another reason is that part of me was worried that, if I got through the book and still hadn't achieved inner peace, I never would. So I felt like the longer I held out, the longer I had with at least the hope that I could find peace, which is perhaps the closest I would ever get to my relief from terror.
Well, I've finished the book and my terror is still present. Yalom gave the caveat that ideas alone do not heal, only when ideas are paired with relationship does it have that potential. So he threw out some hope for me that I can still heal.
Despite not achieving enlightenment, I still feel the book had value to me. I learned a lot about the differing reasons for death terror, I learned some history about the coping strategies offered in therapeutic settings, which was fascinating as a social service worker. I appreciated the acknowledgment of the importance of dream analysis, as it's often put down as pseudo-science, and it forced a lot of introspection from me. Also, it gave me a new entry for me reading list, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Tolstoy, which explores the concept of Death Terror.
Staring at the Sun is so named because the sun is something everpresent in our lives. It illuminates the world around us and evidence of its existence is everywhere, but it is so bright that to look at it directly is painful. The connection here is that the knowledge of death similarly permeates our lives and causes us to avoid focusing on it directly. But Yalom is daring us, the reader, to stare directly at the concept of death.
I was fascinated to learn that modern therapy doesn't focus on death as a subject, and apparently it's because Freud dismissed it as a potential cause for anxiety. His perspective was that people can only fear what they've experienced, and since no one has experienced death, it is only a false rationalization for anxiety stemming from somewhere else. It seems that even today, Freud's observations are the results of both good and bad habits in the field of psychotherapy.
Yalom challenges Freud's perspective, and says that the fear of death is not a mask for something else. He shares stories of people he's served as a therapist as they've worked through their own death terror. Despite the fear itself being a unifying factor of the human experience, different people have different reasons for it. Some people fear the life unlived, the loss of potential that comes with death, some fear the impacts it will have on their loved ones, and some fear the loss of meaning and purpose implied by the reality of death.
This forced me to confront the specifics of my fear. Unfortunately, I believe my terror stems from the latter explanation. I feel like it would be more "noble" for the fear to stem from my concern for others, and not my own personal loss of self-importance, but you don't get to choose your motivations.
My thing is that something only has value if it's remembered or continues to have influence. Even if my my death causes a stark end to my consciousness, my existence would still have value because of the cascading events my influence had, impacting my loved ones and their behaviour, which in turn would continue long after I myself was forgotten. This idea of continued influence past the erasure of your consciousness and the acknowledgment of others is a comforting technique that Yalom calls "rippling".
Unfortunately, it provides me little comfort. My thought is that, no matter how long it takes, everyone that knew you will also die. Even if your influence continues long past your memory, the sun will eventually expand to the point that it fries the Earth so that no human's existence ever had purpose. It doesn't matter if it's an incomprehensibly long time away, if something isn't eternal, it never existed. It would mean that even as I write this, experiencing the sensation of life, I currently do not exist.
The looming presence of climate change exacerbates this fear, as it implies the end of humanity's purpose may be much nearer than we thought. The growing sophistication of AI also challenges the relevancy of the human experience.
I talked to my therapist about this book, and he helped me realize that my fear doesn't come from a belief that life has no purpose, it comes from an intense feeling that life is full of purpose, but I can't justify that feeling to myself.
Oddly, one of the quotes from the book that offered at least some hope was one made by Freud. He said that life that passes in the fall has no knowledge of life that blooms in the spring, but it still supports it. Funny that a guy who claims death is irrelevant should feel the need to address the topic.
Apparently the Earth has experienced five mass extinction events, and every time, life has sprung back more sophisticated than the last. Perhaps we are contributing to the development of a life we aren't able to see from our vantage point, and in that way we have purpose.
A personal reflection I have is that, I can look at an ant and know that it can't comprehend what I am or acknowledge me as an individual. But I still know that the ant is alive. That makes me question why us humans think we're the end of the food chain, the only species uniquely capable of observing the universe. If I can understand the ant's incapability of understanding me, I have to admit that it's possible that there is some larger, more complex life that I cannot comprehend.
Of course there's no guarantee that some higher life has my best interests in mind.
Yalom's personal beliefs didn't feel reassuring to me, either. He's an atheist, believing that we are born by chance and that death is total cessation of consciousness. His fears stem from worrying about how his death will effect others.
At the time he wrote the book, he was 75 and claimed not to experience too much death anxiety. The fact that he was nearing the end of his life made him feel it was the right time to pass on his teachings regarding this life stage. Ideas that comfort him were that death is the opposite of life, so you will never be dead, because wherever you are, death is not. He also found comfort in returning to the state of being before he was born, as it's impossible to suffer in nonexistence.
My specific fear is not of suffering though, it's of the inevitability of purposelessness, so this only exacerbates my feelings.
Yalom spoke on an interesting session he had with one of his patients. The person he was working with was religious and believed in the supernatural. Yalom says that of all types of people that he's worked with, people who believe in things he can't rationalize are the most difficult. Eventually his patient called him out for seeming critical of his thoughts, and Yalom had to clarify his own beliefs. After the explanation, his patient continued to ask him what motivated him to do well in life. Eventually, the patient broke down crying. Yalom initially thought that his explanations had upset him, but he continued to say that he was crying from relief to finally find someone that was willing to speak to him so candidly about the important things in life.
The two later exchanged books regarding their respective life ideologies. Yalom said that the relationship improved, while his patient's belief in the supernatural remained intact. If just thought this was kind of nice, as it shows that you don't need to convert people to your way of thinking, you just need to help someone make sense of their own thoughts.
Yalom mentions that people who have close experiences with death paradoxically often feel relief from their fear of it. That would be an example of staring at the sun, since it's being forced to consider what most are unwilling to think about.
He also mentions that emphasizing connection with others helps, because of the rippling thing. This can be taken too far though, as he describes a person who felt the need for her son to have a child, as her working on her "immortality project". Keep having your genetic material pushed forward so in a way, a piece of you is always around. Obviously that's not healthy.
I really liked his emphasis on dreams. Some people believe that dreams are just random bits of information firing, or even just sensations that we rationalize into concepts on waking. It seems to me that dreams must have at least a literal relevance, as you see changes in the pattern of the content based on the person's history or current life circumstances. Even if it's just a rationalization, the material has to indicate something being on your mind. Yalom describes dreams throughout the book and offers interpretations.
I try to keep a dream journal, but it's really touch and go. I'd been having a particularly bad run this year. In fact, after finishing the book I managed to remember and record a dream for the first time since January.
In my dream, me, my mom and my brother met up with another family and we went to visit my granddad in assisted living. When I was there, I ran into three people I serve at WALES, my day job. Each one was in a different stage of dementia. Two were speaking rapidly to each other and not making much sense, while one person was laying on her back. She was silent, staring, and literally merged to the ground, her head, arms, legs, and torso all detached but somehow she was still alive.
Yalom emphasized the importance of paying attention to how the person feels in the dreams, not so much in the details. In the past I've not recorded my emotional reactions much, and my interpretations have been more like trying to figure out the symbolism of a piece of literature.
I think this dream was addressing my death terror. It was showing how dementia is presenting itself in both my family and work lives. It showed a fear of dying in "pieces" instead of all at once.
I told my therapist that I want to be aware of death when it happens. Most people I know say they want it sudden. They want to be at peace, have it happen while they're asleep and not even be aware of it. For some reason that terrifies me. The lack of awareness is the worst.
My biggest death fantasy is that after you pass, you return to some hub where you know everything about existence, or there's just some guy that's willing to answer with certainty your existential questions. I hate sleeping because relinquishing control and entering a state of visual and audio hallucinations, approximately 75% of which are negative, is terrifying. I don't know how people enjoy it.
I've sometimes seen it like, life is a story, and the best stories have good endings. Bad stories meander and go on forever. My therapist said that my fear of dementia and my desire for awareness sounds like I want to be around for the ending, which I think is fair.
In a weird way, my fear of dementia is like a return to an old comfort zone. My dad is schizophrenic, and so until I was 25 I was terrified of becoming schizophrenic (chances of developing it greatly reduce after 25). What's happened to my granddad is like a revisiting of my fear of losing my mind.
My granddad's got dementia, his mother before him got it. I'm worried my mother will get it. I did an ancestry test that said I had a slightly increased risk for it. I've got ADHD and diabetes, which both increase chances of developing it.
Usually I say that the most anxiety-provoking ages are near the end of a decade, or the first year into it. The early years of any age feel the least weird. I'm 33, which doesn't seem like a landmark year, but at some point I mentioned that 33.3 is a third of the way to a hundred, and that made me realize I'm a third of the way to being a century, and I'm not going to, not sure I even want to, make it to a century. Time is ticking.
Anyway, Staring at the Sun didn't cure me, but it gave me a lot of material to think about, and it's changed to way I record dreams, so I still enjoyed the journey it took me through
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