The 50th Law - 50 Cent [98]
In the 1960s the neurologist Oliver Sacks worked on patients who had been in a coma since the 1920s, victims of the sleeping-sickness epidemic of the time. Thanks to a new drug, they were awakened from this coma and he recorded their thoughts. He realized that they viewed reality in a much different way than anyone else did, which made him wonder about our own perception of the world—perhaps we see only a part of what is happening around us because our mental powers are determined by habits and conventions. There could be a reality we are missing. During such meditations he slipped into a sense of the Sublime.
In the 1570s, a Huguenot pastor named Jean de Léry was one of the first Westerners to live among the Brazilian tribes in the Bay of Rio. He observed all kinds of rituals that frightened him in their barbarity, but then one evening he heard tribesmen singing in a way that was so strange and unearthly, he was overwhelmed with a sudden sense of awe. “I stood there transported with delight,” he later wrote. “Whenever I remember it, my heart trembles, and it seems their voices are still in my ears.”
This sense of awe can be elicited by something vast or strange—endless landscapes (the sea or the desert), monuments from the distant past (the pyramids of Egypt), the unfamiliar customs of people in a foreign land. It can also be sparked by things in everyday life—for instance, focusing on the dizzying variety of animal and plant life around us that took millions of years to evolve into its present form. (The philosopher Immanuel Kant, who wrote about the Sublime, felt it in holding a swallow in his hands and gazing into its eye, feeling a strange connection between the two of them.) It can be created by particular exercises in thinking. Imagine, for example, that you had always been blind and were suddenly granted sight. Everything you saw around you would seem strange and new—the freakish form of trees, the garishness of the color green. Or try imagining the earth in its actual smallness, a speck in vast space. The Sublime on this level is merely a way of looking at things in their actual strangeness. This frees you from the prison of language and routine, this artificial world we live in. Experiencing this awe on any scale is like a sudden blast of reality—therapeutic and inspiring.
THE SENSE OF THE OCEANIC, THE CONNECTION TO ALL LIFE
In not confronting our mortality, we tend to entertain certain illusions about death. We believe that some deaths are more important or meaningful than others—that of a celebrity or prominent politician, for instance. We feel that some deaths are more tragic, coming too early or from some accident. The truth, however, is that death makes no such discriminations. It is the ultimate equalizer. It strikes rich and poor alike. For everyone, it seems to come too early and can be experienced as tragic. Absorbing this reality should have a positive effect upon us all. We share the same fate with everyone; we all deserve the same degree of compassion. It is what ultimately links all of us together, and when we look at the people around us we should see their mortality as well.
This can be extended further and further, into the Sublime—death is what links us to all living creatures as well. One organism must die so another can live. It is an endless process that we are a part of. This is what is known as an oceanic feeling—the sensation that we are not separated from the outside world but that we are part of life in all its forms. Feeling this at moments inspires an ecstatic reaction, the very opposite of a morbid reflection on death.
Reversal of Perspective
In our normal perspective we see death as something diametrically opposed to life, a separate event that ends our days. As such, it is a thought that we must dread, avoid, and repress. But this is false, an idea that is actually born out of our fear. Life and death are inextricably intertwined, not separate; the one cannot exist without the other. From the moment we are born