Cricket, Post truth, Storytelling, Death as experience and non-experience, Identities

The most intimate motions within the depths of our souls are not completely our own. For they belong also to our friends, to mankind, to the universe, and to the Ground of all being, the aim of our life. Nothing can be hidden ultimately. It is always reflected in the mirror in which nothing can be concealed… (Paul Tillich: The Shaking of the Foundations)

‘We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.’ (Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Letters and Papers from Prison)

‘Who tells the story of the self? That is like asking who thunders the thunder or rains the rain. It is not so much a question of us telling the story as the story telling us.’ (Paul Broks: Into the Silent Land)

The England cricket team are at present playing Australia in Australia for ‘the Ashes’, a trophy contested by these two sides since 1882. This time, members of the England team ran into members of the Australian team on a night out before the start, in Perth, and Jonny Bairstow of England introduced himself to Cameron Bancroft of Australia by head-butting him. In a friendly way. Bancroft confirmed that his own greeting of choice would have been a handshake, but that Bairstow’s eccentric alternative was more like a head-bump and was not malicious.

There are two things to notice here. First, that there are some men who just get things embarrassingly wrong in social situations. A ‘playful’ head-butt is clearly a bizarre extension of the playful punch on the arm, or a less intimate version of the ‘friendly headlock’. Bairstow plays for Yorkshire, where this sort of thing may reflect the tough masculine values of a hard, laconic county. And some suicidal impulse persuaded him that it would communicate to Bancroft what the Australians were up against in the cricket. In a friendly way. Sadly, he has instead given the Aussies priceless ammunition for their ‘sledging’. One of the aims of cricket is to induce in members of the opposing team, especially batsmen, a mental disintegration through the use of ‘banter’ or ‘sledging’ when they are about to face some aggressive bowling. Bairstow will get a hard time of it. I know, who would have thought it? The game looks so leisurely, decorous and innocent on the surface.

The other thing to notice is the old-fashioned way in which two alternative stories were brought together to produce the truth. On the one hand you had a physical assault; on the other you had an unusual but respectful salutation. The agreed conclusion was that this was a clumsily misjudged but friendly greeting.

In our ‘post-truth’ world this is unusual. Intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing versions of the truth in your mind at the same time, and it is becoming difficult to do this. People get very angry if their story is balanced against an opposing one. The internet has not prepared them for this.

Politics – e.g. Israel/Palestine - is about irreconcilable stories. Closer to home our relationships involve our stories converging with or diverging from other people’s stories. Our experience of ourselves is about what kind of story we tell ourselves (usually a self-justifying one). But dying, those stories I think drop away.

And this includes religious myths, at least a literal interpretation of them. I think one becomes aware that at death there is nowhere to hide any more. People say to people they disapprove of, ‘I don’t know how you can live with yourself’. But that’s what we all manage to do. We are storytellers – that’s how we do it. As for, ‘How can you die with yourself?’ though, that’s another matter. Death is not only the end of the story, it’s also the end of the storytelling. The curtain is coming down on the performance. The dressing-up box is finally closed. ‘Our revels now are ended’… (Prospero in Shakespeare’s the Tempest)

Here is Tolstoy on ‘the Death of Ivan Illych’, who has lived a wretched, selfish life. He is screaming with terror in his final days. But the beginning of his redemption is when he is able to give up the story he has told himself about his life, and after this he is able to ask for forgiveness from his wife and son:

‘For three whole days, during which time did not exist for him, he struggled in that black sack into which he was being thrust by an invisible, resistless force. He struggled as a man condemned to death struggles in the hands of the executioner, knowing that he cannot save himself. And every moment he felt that despite all his efforts he was drawing nearer and nearer to what terrified him. He felt that his agony was due to his being thrust into that black hole and still more to his not being able to get right into it. He was hindered from getting into it by his conviction that his life had been a good one. That very justification of his life held him fast and prevented his moving forward, and it caused him most torment of all.’

I’ve had three cycles of chemo now (each cycle consisting of two consecutive Fridays of chemo followed by one week off). This has been ok so far – a bit of physical exhaustion and temporary flaring up of ulceration pain in the mouth. The worst thing is the fasting – two days before the chemo, plus 24 hours after. Not only does this weaken me, but the state of my mouth is much more uncomfortable and dry (water tends to dry the mouth, whilst oils, i.e. food, lubricate) and there’s a horrible taste. On the other hand I think the fasting helps with the effectiveness of the chemo (if it works at all) and minimizes the side effects. It also helps me to appreciate eating when I can (which is no small thing, as I still mostly don’t enjoy eating, especially anything savoury – and again, taste is vital for appetite). A nurse who was taking my blood said how much she appreciated the practice of Ramadam; the fasting, she said, was very good for clarity of mind. This is not my experience. I tend to just sit in front of the TV a lot of the time when I'm fasting,, just passing the time. My brain doesn’t function.

We met the oncologist at the end of November to get the result of the Petscan from two weeks earlier. Had the chemo worked – either by stabilizing the growth of the tumours, or by actually reducing them? I was already quite sure that it hadn’t. Though I had no pain in my hips at all, I had a lot of discomfort and very slight but much more frequent pain in my right eye, as well as very occasional pain elsewhere on the right side of my face. If the chemo had worked, surely the eye would have calmed down. The clincher seemed to be the recent appearance of a painful swelling on the inside of my left elbow. A new tumour/

The oncologist rather pooh-poohed my swelling. Antibiotics would sort that out. He also said that the results of the scan were disappointing. A bit of reduction of the spots in the lungs; the tumour at the base of the skull was pretty stable; but there were some more spots in the bones, and crucially in the liver as well. So my instinct was right, but not my story. And worse followed. Originally he said that if the combination of chemo wasn’t doing the trick we could change it. But he now said that it wasn’t worth continuing at all. He said he would look into possible trials I could join, but that he wasn’t too hopeful, my cancer being so rare.

Cancer is a drama. This is why you get so many people writing about it. The enemy is cunning, secretive, utterly callous, unpredictable. Will our hero get the better of the bastard? In my case it’s no to that one. Originally, before the surgery, they were ‘aiming for a cure’. Afterwards, when they saw how aggressive it was, they were ‘aiming to control, and hoping for a cure’ with the radiotherapy (plus chemo). Then, they were hoping to put off my inevitable decline with chemo. Now, it is clear that nothing has worked, and I need to face my fate - no more maybes, no more hope, no more treatments. So how long have I got, doctor? 3-4 months before the symptoms of liver failure get to me. Dear me, that’s not long.

Now actually my experience is ok at present. Compared with what I went through in the first half of the year, overall, I don’t feel too bad. I’m still very much alive and engaged. I enjoy following the Ashes, and the rugby and football. I enjoy my meditation. However, what used to be an uncertain future has now suddenly come into horrible focus. The final descent will be in March or thereabouts.

We go through life imagining that the person we are going to be is pretty much the same as the person we are now. He or she isn’t. That sense we have of a self running through our life is misleading. Yes, you may have the same spouse, the same football team, the same house, the same job, the same political affiliation, many of the same habits, but you only have to look at yourself in the mirror to realize that the nature of all these relationships has changed, just as the nature of your relationship with your own body has changed. A young man set up conditions for this elderly man to inherit, whether genes or habits or just knowledge, but he isn’t me.

So much of our energy goes into looking after and worrying about the person we are going to be. I anticipate the conditions that he is going to have to deal with as if it’s me, now, who will be dealing with them. But it never is. I’ve grown into the situation I find myself in, over the last twelve months. If the person I was even just a couple of years ago could have seen me as I am now, he would have recoiled in horror. There is constant discomfort and sometimes pain in my face, especially the eye, and also the numbness over the whole of the side of my face and neck. You might think that numbness is more or less ok as a feeling, but it isn’t like there’s no feeling at all. It’s unpleasant - I never want anyone to touch me there. And there are my dreadful difficulties with eating, and the ulceration in the mouth, and the lack of saliva (the acupuncture is supposed to help with this, but so far not). Plus of course there’s how I look - and even my speech is laboured and uncomfortable. As for the sinister things that are going on inside, the spread of the cancer, and the prospect of imminent and probably painful death, well, the horror, eh? And yet, I’m ok with it all, more or less. I’m pretty much as happy as I always was. So what do we make of that? And by the same token, the guy I’m going to be further down the line is not me, as I look forward with dread to the progress of the disease gradually taking over my body. Even the final stretch, it will be a new version of me. Sometimes I quite fancy a bit of peace and quiet – but that’s me now.

The neuropsychologist, Paul Broks, observes that perception, memory, reason, emotion, language, motivation and action all function independently, at least to some degree. ‘There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul. No soul pilot. They come together in a work of fiction. A human being is a story-telling machine. The self is a story.’ So what is the self for? According to Broks, the brain has developed a model of the organism of which it is a part, and beyond this, a representation of that organism’s place in relation to other, similar organisms. ‘As part of this process it assembles a ‘self’ which can be thought of as the device which we humans employ as a means of negotiating the social environment.’ (Into the Silent Land)

You could say that the aim of mindfulness is to replace a mere understanding of the truth of what the self and our thinking really is, that who I am is not what I think it is, with an experience of that truth. Mindfulness is not an attempt to replace unpleasant experience with pleasant experience. It arises from a determination to attend to the truth of things rather than from a desire to move towards the pleasant and away from the unpleasant. It is difficult I think to appreciate how radical this shift in attitude really is.

The novelist Henry James said as he was dying, ‘So here it is at last, the distinguished thing’. He was I think mistaken. Death is not distinguished at all. The routes it takes are myriad, but in itself it’s a nonentity. Life is distinguished. A living body is a wonder. It’s stuff - earth, water, temperature, gases etc – coming together and coming apart again by a continuous process of breathing, drinking, eating, shitting, etc - and in such a way as to support a life. With all that the words ‘a life’ entails: as higher mammals, all we billions of individuals are, miraculously, each of us unique – not life, but ‘a life’.

Death is this extraordinary process breaking down and discontinuing. It is absence; it is not even a space in the world which one used to inhabit. John Donne addresses a poem to Death – ‘Death be not proud…’ But again this is nonsense. Even the dead body is not death. It is full of other forms of life – that is, the same processes working in different ways. In fact, let alone being a ‘living’ presence - Donne’s ‘you’ - death does not even have the status of a physical object. It is, though, an object of knowledge; it is a life’s growing and eventually overwhelming knowledge that his or her vast and complex body of knowledge, those memories, all those instincts and unthinking habits, will suddenly disappear – and ‘leave not a wrack behind’… WH Auden says this thought is ‘like the distant roll of thunder/at a picnic’. But it isn’t at all like that. The end of the picnic is a transition into getting home as the first heavy drops of rain begin to fall. There is no going home at the end of me. Surely?

There are a lot of cases of people after medical death has occurred, having similar experiences, of their life flashing before them, being propelled through a tunnel towards a light, leaving their body, meeting already dead friends and family, and so on. But the fact that they are somehow revived to tell the tale means that they weren’t quite dead after all.

In living, I am constantly having to take responsibility for my objective presence in the world. In dying that objective presence must give way to my subjective reality, which is a lot less clear. It’s me dying, and that’s a lot more mysterious than the old story of me, the bloke I identify as me. ‘There I am’ must give way to ‘Here ‘I’ am’. The thought of me must give way to the mysterious experience of what used to be me. The death of that bloke is a real event for other people; it is the end of that bloke’s presence in the world. Or rather, for a Buddhist, the end of the story is the funeral: I’ve already been asked about what funeral arrangements I want, and in a Buddhist funeral your erstwhile body is usually on show, and the assumption is that whatever else there is of you may be hanging about, maybe confused, and needing a bit of direction. But as for me – I will experience no end to the story, in the sense of a transition from experiencing to not-experiencing, just as in the beginning I never experienced the reverse of that transition. Not-experiencing is a thought. There is no experiencing not-experiencing.   

Now what I’ve been talking about here so far is a secular view of death. When the theologian Hans Kung talks about ‘the majesty of death’ it is from a theological viewpoint. All religions, including Buddhism, buy into the idea of death as a transition. But whereas for the secularist the transition is from experiencing to not-experiencing, the religious transition is from one kind of experiencing to another kind of experiencing. It is a doorway to another life. The Tibetan tradition refers to this transition as a bardo, or ‘in-between state’, between one life and the next. It’s just that whatever transition you are going to negotiate is not going to involve this physical body.

But can this be an experience? Without senses of any kind? Perception? Cognition? In meditation your experience can become so subtle that it is as if the body disappears, that your experience is of nothing at all. But does this conscious experience still subtly depend on the body being there? You may have an idea derived from a religious tradition of what shaking off ‘this mortal coil’ will be like. But you have no actual experience, or even a report of an experience from someone else, to go on at all. Death is the boundary line, ‘from which no traveller returns’ (as Hamlet says). Whatever is left of you will need to locate itself somewhere, and this is usually described as a ‘subtle body’. But we’ll see.

As I’ve tried to suggest, who we are is a mystery even in life, let alone in death. And yet we take moral responsibility for those mysterious selves of the past, as well as being concerned for those mysterious future selves – we acknowledge a connection. The idea of whoever I am when I die being connected with a future life of some kind seems hardly more mysterious. And there is some persuasive evidence of a very few children – maybe one in a thousand – remembering details of a previous lives.

Anyway, oriental religions offer us a return to this world, as well as the possibility of heavens or hells. And another life here seems to most people I think more straightforward than other realms of being - and more attractive. (“Heaven’ comes a bit short in the way of interesting distractions, doesn’t it?) However, I have to say that after what I’ve been through in the last year I am not so keen as I used to be on coming back to this world. I used to think that life was not too bad. Full of interest. Now I am much more aware of how much suffering there is going on. Not just the obvious stuff in the newspaper, but the mental suffering that most people keep to themselves. The fact is, I’ve just got lucky – I’ve never suffered great loss or mental anguish.

I recently took another look at a book called ‘Give Sorrow Words’, by Dorothy Judd, which is a classic text on the practice of psychotherapy with a dying child, centring on the author’s work with a particular six year old boy dying of leukaemia. Claudia was asked to write a substantial introduction to the third edition, so we did quite a lot of research into the treatment of cancer, specifically childhood cancer and even more specifically, psychotherapeutic work in that context. (And the good news is that cancer treatment for children has been transformed in the last fifty years: then, survival rates were 5%; today they are about 90%.) However, I used to find that I simply could not bear to read about this child’s appalling suffering, both physical and mental. I flinched, just looking at the book cover. Now, however, I have found I can read it with equanimity, and even interest. A child’s suffering is no longer an obscenity to me. It is something that happens, it is happening. This is the world I live in.

I can’t help thinking at this point of the erstwhile heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson’s famous remark – ‘everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the face’. When you get punched in the mouth you discover who you really are, as opposed to who you think you are. When you die, any idea of what is happening goes out of the window – you’re on your own with an actual experience that no story can prepare you for. My experience of myself is of a body, giving me the sense experience of a world around me, plus a public identity in the world. I am going to lose this, quite soon. Well, in a way. If I were to continue to experience myself after death, then it wouldn’t be as a story. It would be as if in a mirror. And when you are dying this mirror is already starting to emerge, as the world and one’s agency within it recedes, as people start to treat you differently, as someone who has finished with feasting on life. When we are dying, the show is over. We are stuck with ourselves just as we are. So what does the mirror show?

A lot of me is family conditioning. You can’t often see this clearly from inside the family, but like physical likenesses, this conditioning is identified easily from outside. You can see that the British royal family for example consists in an uneasy mix of stolid duty and rather rackety fecklessness, unencumbered by all that much brain or imagination. It is easy to take it for granted, however, when this conditioning is pretty positive. I feel very fortunate in having easy and secure relationships with the whole of my family. We have a basic trust in each other I think. We allow any problem that arises between us to blow over. This gives me a great sense of security, of belonging. And in simple terms it illustrates the extent to which our identity is not in any way separable from our place in the world. We consist in relationship. So friends and colleagues also leave their mark, especially in my case, Buddhist friends. I am very conscious of what I owe to our Buddhist Sangha, the Triratna Order, in shaping me for the better.

However, despite these positive influences, I am aware that I have spent my life performing various roles, presenting myself in different ways to different people, creating various social identities that I persuade people to affirm and reflect back to me. And I identify with this socially constructed self. It’s who I think I am. I’m a good guy. At least, the kind of guy that this society is pretty ok with. Even just a hundred years ago I’d have had to adopt a very different self in order to fit in.

People quite like this version of myself, it can be charming, but it is in some degree a front, masking another identity, that is not so nice, and yes, more combative and incisive. (Sometimes this aggression is exercised on behalf of someone I care about, especially Claudia in her professional struggles with people, but it’s the same thing.) This less acceptable side to me does not go unnoticed – it slips out in an unfair judgment of someone, an enthusiasm for nailing an argument, or an outburst of frustration. I have never really harnessed it, made it an effective part of my adult social identity (though I’m glad it’s there, and that it has emerged and been crudely effective to some extent).

For example, in the judo dojo, my approach to practice was playful. I felt I was genuinely not interested in ‘beating’ my opponent, or doing whatever I could to stop him throwing me occasionally. However, the truth is that judo is a fighting art; it’s about digging out and harnessing human aggression in a way that is liberating. But if my opponent became too defensive, or aggressive, my own aggression would emerge in a petulant rather than liberating way. And my opponent might say, playfully, ‘Hey, I thought you were meant to be a Buddhist!’    

If you are at all open about this baseball bat under the counter, it can be a real problem for you as a Buddhist. It’s not acceptable. People don’t like it. This is because as a Buddhist you have a third major identity, which is a kind of ideal way of being, where you respond in an ideal way to anything that gets thrown at you. It’s that Buddhist wisdom identity. Stories of the Buddha suggest that he embodied this wisdom identity 24/7. Us professional Buddhists have to make a stab at representing that wisdom identity in some way, but with varying success. A lot of Zen stories explore this inadequately embodied wisdom identity coming into contact with one that is fully embodied.

You don’t have to be a Buddhist to adopt this wisdom identity. It’s a purer, higher, deeper version of ourselves. Partly, it’s just a sense of what goodness is, and an acknowledgement that it’s beyond you. Or a sense of beauty – people go to art exhibitions for something that is at once human, ‘other’ and compelling. Philip Larkin, as ever, puts it well:

‘…someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious…’ (Churchgoing)

It’s that word ‘surprising’ which nails it: something of supreme importance is going on that runs counter to what you get so concerned about and fixated on.

In a book by Mary Gunn, called ‘Well’ she recounts as a doctor in Malawi, a woman with HIV/AIDS saying to her: “When you get AIDS there are two illnesses. The first illness is the problems and pains you suffer with HIV. You have to deal with that. The second illness is the fear of what HIV will do to you in the future. It is very important not to catch the second illness.”

This story is a curious and I presume inadvertent echo of a teaching of the Buddha, the ‘Two Darts’. The first dart is whatever suffering you have been dealt with or brought upon yourself. The second dart is the suffering we load onto the first, by worrying and catastrophising and blaming and so on over it. The mysterious thing is that the second dart does not present itself as pain; it is the mind attempting to find a solution to, or make sense of, or just get to grips with, the first dart. But when you experience occasionally a freedom from the second dart, even with the first dart being present, the experience can be liberating. You experience that freedom of the mind when your mental state is not determined by painful experience, or difficult circumstances.

The reality of course is that you can’t just pretend that the second dart isn’t present just because you’d like it to be. That woman may know well enough that it is important not to catch the second illness. But that ‘wisdom identity’ for most of us isn’t really who we are. Probably the best you can do is to recognize that the fear is an illness in itself, and not to feed it. Which brings me back to what I have to look forward to: liver failure. You go yellow; pain and swelling in the abdomen; nausea and vomiting; confusion and disorientation; followed by death. Could be worse… No, really – HIV without the recently developed treatments, that sounds seriously tough.

Sometimes you do meet someone who is that wisdom identity. This author, Mary Dunn, when she is diagnosed with cancer, goes to see Lama Yeshe, abbot of Samye Ling in the Scottish Borders. He doesn’t offer her sympathy: “I think that when you are ill, you in the West suffer more than we do. In Tibet, as soon as we are born we know that suffering, illness, and death are part of life. To some they come early… to some late.”

When her cancer returns, she goes to him and tells him how terrified she is. He tells her about his own major health problems. Gesturing to her body and to his, he laughs uproariously: ‘Very bad time now to identify with body: body falling apart.'”

There is another strand to oneself, I believe, that is uncomfortable to acknowledge, and this is one’s indifference to others. My experience of myself is so rich, so complex, so mysterious and ungraspable, so fugitive, so visceral – that my experience of others cannot match it in intensity. When people use the expression ‘How are you doing? Alright?’ or How’s it going? OK?’ the expression actually expresses a fundamental and rather horrifying indifference. It is designed specifically to channel the response away from any meaningful communication. I think we all do this to some extent when we don’t have time for someone. It is the reason why I try not to get into passing ‘chat’ any more. 

I think a constant exercise of the imagination is needed to break out of this indifference and reach out to meet the parallel experience of another and speak to it truly. Ultimately, the opposite of indifference is compassion. You can see how naturally Lama Yeshe is able to do it, but very, very few of us are able to pull it off as he does. Compassion - a compassion identity, if you like – is quite different from sympathy or empathy. It’s not about the first dart. It’s seeing the second dart, and speaking to that.

The job of a doctor, or surgeon – for all the talk of a good ‘bedside manner’ - is not to empathise with the patient; it is to look as clearly and coolly as possible at the patient’s symptoms and general situation so as to identify the best way forward in terms of treatment. When we arrived early in the morning for surgery a year ago the surgeon came in to discuss what he was going to be doing to me over seven hours. He was dressed in a hand-made pin-stripe suit, his collar open, very glamorous. This was reassuring, that he was closer to a city banker than a therapist. A few days ago my oncologist may have seemed a bit unaware of what the impact of his bad news might be - but again, that’s ok with me. I want cool in a doctor. On the other hand, what you want from a nurse is that he/she appears to care; you don’t want a robot who just delivers the treatment efficiently. So compassion is a little bit like the surgeon or doctor, and a little bit like the nurse. It is completely emotionally engaged, and ruthlessly dispassionate.