Anxiety, mysticism, and reality

Please see the previous post, where I explain that this is something I originally published in 1981. The chapter title, Present Shock, was probably meant to contrast with the idea of Future Shock, a book by Alvin Toffler that was quite popular in the 1970s.

Present Shock

As long as anxiety has an identifiable object we know what to worry about. We can locate our problem in a specific set of circumstances. We seize on all the evidence we can find and attempt to impose an interpretation. Because there is a focus for our thoughts, thinking is still organized and cohesive. But when anxiety becomes excessive, the particulars of the situation become unimportant. Anxiety itself becomes the problem. Under conditions of severe stress, the ability to process information breaks down. Knowledge appears inadequate and threatens to become useless. We cannot give meaning to a world whose contradictions, conflicts, and locked control room exceed the bounds of our limited reason. This lack of confidence in the order of the world is anxiety in its purest form, an awareness of the gap between the self and the world it has come to know and depend on. We sense there is something drastically wrong, but we’re unable to identify what it is. Threatened from all sides, unable to advance in any direction to confront the problem, we search for the name of the danger and for the security an unambiguous label would bring. Unable to make sense of our own reactions, such feelings can become unbearable. Fortunately it is the rare individual who feels this in its full oppressiveness, but in its milder forms this objectless, free-floating, chronic anxiety is the most common “neurosis” of our time.

Even as the thought process is disintegrating, we attempt to frame an interpretation of what is happening. But what information is available? The relationship we normally have with our self is seriously altered. Our emotions become strange to us. We fail to find an explanation for this in the world around us, for the real threat is coming from the inside. The danger is our own state of mind, the unwinding of stable strands of thought. As the categories for understanding the world loosen and disintegrate, the foundations of reality go soft, and the structure that props up the self dissolves altogether. This progressive loss of self-definition, in which the boundaries of identity fade and threaten to disappear, makes anxiety an essentially transcendent emotion.

Reality Shock: Level One

Such extreme anxiety is a variation on the more basic category of reality shock. A sense of unreality occurs when life takes a sudden, unexpected, and radical turn. The most common example is the near accident. The world suddenly switches into slow motion, converting the few seconds of an icy skid into an extended present of intense and confused thought. Although the feeling of shock may last only a few moments, they are vivid and memorable. But the near accident, by definition, is no accident. For those who drive frequently, it is another fact of life. We become immune to the extreme patterns of a way of life previous generations would have found unimaginable, just as we have already incorporated and taken for granted the idea of space travel, though virtually no one has actually experienced it.

There are other varieties of reality shock not so easily shrugged off. The news of the sudden death of someone close is hard to believe, difficult to incorporate. The human mind cannot make an immediate shift from “I’m having lunch with her tomorrow” to “I’ll never see her again.” For example, Bob Hope on learning of the death of Bing Crosby:

I was staying at the Waldorf in New York and going to do a benefit show over in New Jersey for a big hospital. And at about two o’clock Bill Fugazy, this friend of mine in New York, called and said, “Did you hear the news? Bing passed away on the golf course in Spain.”

And I had a very funny reaction to that. My head just got so tight that it felt a little dangerous to me. So I laid down and rested, because the whole thing was such a shock.

Personal devastations—seeing your home go up in flames, losing all your capital in a swindle, extreme humiliation—are not the only catalysts of reality shock. Becoming an overnight sensation, learning that someone is not dead, finding a large sum of money—these can be equally disorienting. Reality shocks occur when the “impossible” happens, when confronted with a meaningless situation, when a taken for granted frame of reference is suddenly irrelevant. When the transitions from future to future are too abrupt, the ability to interpret what is happening breaks down. Common objects lose their significance and familiarity. A sense of extreme strangeness takes hold, an unusual, depersonalized distance from both the world and the self. The alienated experience of time, a profound loss of faith in a world ordinarily so familiar, a detached, observational perspective—all these characterize the unreal.

The shift to a state of shock provides a distraction for the mind. It diverts attention from an unfaceable situation, avoiding the emotions that would make coping impossible. A detached self can operate as if on automatic, while social support systems—friends, clergy, or Red Cross and a cast of thousands with camera crew—take over during a period of crisis. Although the loss of reality is distressing, it is not entirely incomprehensible. An adult is capable of dimly perceiving the connection between the precipitating event and the subsequent state of mind.

In childhood, the distinction between reality and imagination is precarious to begin with. The triggering incident can be so confusing and unintelligible that there may be no apparent connection between the event and the sudden feelings of unprecedented strangeness. Although there may be emotional support—following the death or divorce of parents or the death of a peer—the child’s unusual state of mind may go entirely unrecognized or unacknowledged by adults. This is a very isolating experience. All of a sudden the world is completely different, and no one seems to realize that there is something terribly wrong and that you are no longer the same.

Such experiences in childhood are probably more common than we suspect. Children overhear things they misunderstand all the time. They can be terrified by private incidents they never reveal. Alcoholism, adultery, drug addiction, war and violence—these are simply the “facts of life” in the adult world. A child can either gradually come to understand such things when they occur in his own family, or they can hit him like a ton of silicon chips. The state of shock will wear off. Any after-effects are due to the event itself, not to the temporary feelings of unreality. But such jolts make a sharp impression and can leave steep memories. They are the bumpy points, the unexpected awakenings from the daily dream of childhood into the unreal world of adult life.

Reality shock is a time when we become inescapably aware that reality is a precarious construction. It is the loss of meaning and the inability to locate oneself in the world that make it a transcendent experience. Extreme anxiety is also a state of shock, but it differs from a bolt of pure unreality in its emotional overtones. A reality shock is beyond emotion. You are temporarily not you at all—”This must be a dream. I can’t believe this is happening to me.” But in anxiety, we are still sufficiently in touch with the world and ourselves to know that we are suffering.

Love and Death

The emotional overtones of anxiety are part of the meaning we give to the experience. But an increasingly disordered mind and loss of the self are of course not always interpreted and identified as anxiety. At other times, encouraged to adopt a different point of view, we give a very different meaning to essentially the same information. Many people are familiar with the experience of falling in love. In both anxiety and the onset of romance, major changes seem imminent. Identity loses its usual structure. The world moves into a state of flux, time is disrupted, the future uncertain, and thinking is in disarray. In love, we interpret this lack of stability in a positive way. Love seems to open up possibilities for the self, to be a welcomed opportunity for change, creating the belief that one could become something better, different, new. To be closely and favorably apprehended under intense emotional conditions makes us see things in a new light. This disruption of thought is valued and sought out and is generally not fatal. At worst it is a temporary impairment of judgment.

Mystical experience is a state of mind that more closely resembles anxiety. These are the rare moments of life when meaning disappears, taking with it the sense of a separate and unique identity. Anxiety borders on and can blend into mystical experience. An individual facing death—drowning, execution—is in a state of extreme panic as long as he fears for his life and struggles to survive. But once the mind adjusts to the realization that there is no hope, to the imminence of death, the will to survive becomes meaningless. We can give in to our fate and lose the self as we “become one with the universe.” As in new love, time is no longer a relevant category of measurement but a vestigial organ of a former mentality.

Anxiety and mysticism are both quite similar to reality shock. They differ in their emotional fringe, that is, in the interpretation we give to each. The anxious individual and the mystic have a different attitude toward knowledge. In mysticism, conceptual knowledge is secondhand pseudoknowledge, an obstacle to transcendence. Prisoners of socially imposed meaning, we escape rarely and then only for brief, sacred moments. But in anxiety, knowledge and meaning are not obstacles. They are the necessities of survival, the very sources of security. Here conceptual knowledge is not a prison but a haven, a guide not a warden, the only means to avoid and repel the terrors of existence. The world of meaning is our defense against chaos, not a restraint preventing us from embracing and uniting with chaos. Anxiety is a threat to the system that creates the distinction between subjects and objects. Mysticism promises liberation from that very system.

If we can bypass conceptual knowledge, then the gap it normally creates between the self and the outside world contracts. Mysticism escapes self-consciousness. Of course this contraction and shift in operational modes can never be complete. Enough self-consciousness must remain intact so that you not only know you are having this extraordinary experience, but so that you can record it in the real world—for example, John in “Revelations” or Huxley in “The Doors of Perception.” To lose the self completely would be to experience nothing unusual, nothing we could remember, at least nothing our “former” self could remember. This would be functional insanity. The anxious person knows he is acutely uncomfortable. If he could really lose himself, that is, reduce his self-consciousness to zero, he would not be able to feel any more pain. But unlike mysticism, the prospect of the oblivion that would accompany a total loss of the fleeting remnants of self-consciousness is no consolation for one who is struggling to hold onto the threads of the real world.

Mysticism and anxiety are two sides of the loss of reality. When reality shock is interpreted as ecstatic pleasure, one would be happy to die in such a state. This is great for the individual but presents very real problems for society. Large numbers of individuals can indulge in an escapist, temporarily insane, or mystical point of view only when they are unnecessary to society and their maintenance has been assured. On the other hand, anxiety is highly unpleasant for the individual but may well serve some greater societal advantage. Because individual human beings do have the power to exert some influence on their own environment, the larger complex of society is always subject to unpredictable change. Anxiety portends changes dimly viewed over the historical horizon.

Reality Shock: Level X

Emotions and ideas serve purposes that vary throughout history. Knowledge has always been a human creation, and it has always been possible to experience existential doubt, for reality to be suddenly thrown into relief. The mystical tradition is not new. But anxiety is new, a modern emotion, a new interpretation of the loss of a sense of reality and meaning. It is a response to a threatening, unstable, unpredictable environment. Unlike the isolating privacy of a personal reality shock, it is something that can happen to all those who share the same world—a collective shock to the mass mind. Such collective reality shocks occur with different degrees of intensity, affecting specific or extensive regions of the population. A relatively mild version is the shock that follows a traumatic incident with significance for a large number of people—the assassinations of Kennedy, King, Lennon, the Cuban missile crisis, the taking of hostages. Such crises generally call for public rituals and soul-searching as a means of coming to terms with the event. They necessitate reevaluations of what can and cannot happen in the “real” world. Unlike natural disasters—earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that are understandable (and blameless)—these “human” events remodel reality. The individual may have to alter how he feels about himself as a member of that new society.

Historical reality shocks—broader in scope—permanently alter the thought patterns of an entire civilization. Though shocks, they sink in slowly. It takes a long time to formulate and understand the implications of major historical occurrences—the use of an atomic bomb in 1945, the evolution of electronic communication, experiments that will lead to the cloning of humans. Personal traumas leave vivid residues in the privacy of memory; cultural traumas produce historical evidence. Individual minds affected by the new climate create new art forms, philosophies, and religions. We change the ways we give meaning to existence and add new biographical strata to the human museum.

Collective reality shocks of an even larger, yet unprecedented, magnitude are possible. It is only within recent times that the human species has become capable of both virtual instantaneous communication with all areas of the planet and virtual instantaneous self-execution. It is not totally inconceivable that some combination of events—ecological disasters, for example—could mean the end of the species within a finite, predictable, and relatively brief time—let’s say a few generations. This information will either be made public or kept secret, depending on the motives of those who will make the decision.

The idea of the “end of the world” is hardly a new one, although its meaning has certainly taken on new dimensions in recent times. Unimaginable possibilities edge closer to reality as disaster moves into the home. Although disaster scenarios by their very nature seem highly improbable and farfetched, it is not their probability but their plausibility that makes us anxious. The distinction between real and unreal becomes increasingly blurred in art forms. The “unthinkable” is not only thought about but, through living with it, becomes a commonplace topic of discussion and in this way threatens to become a taken for granted expectation. This sampling of the unthinkable is a process of acclimation whereby familiarity leads to consent, that is, resignation. Being human—being reflective, rational, and capable of enlightened forethought—the mere conception of such possibilities should, in principle, be sufficient to prevent them. But being human, there is an understandable lack of confidence in our own wisdom to prevail, and events of the near past make us increasingly anxious about the present future.

As the future grows less inviting, as conditions worsen, anxiety increases and, it follows logically, so do attempts to escape it. Making a virtue out of a necessity, we may “turn to mysticism” when we can no longer provide meaning for a threadbare human existence. Mysticism makes meaning unnecessary: the fundamental religious technique. Explosive, directionless, and uncontrollable change sets the stage for the anarchic disintegration of thought into chaos. This will not be a mystical union but a world gone mad. It is only after we have come to grips with our problems that we will have made the world safe for the mystically inclined, an option we deserve.

Related posts:
Something I wrote a long time ago

References:

The Bob Hope comment on Bing Crosby is from an article by Timothy White, “The Road not Taken,” Rolling Stone, No. 313 (March 20, 1980), p 52