How not to die while alive

Doctor of Psychology, professor at Moscow State University named after M.V. M.V. Lomonosov Dmitry Leontiev gave a lecture on how awareness of the reality of death can help us improve the quality of life. We share a few excerpts from it.

People alive and people dead

Formally, each person is alive until his relatives receive a certificate of his death. In fact, not every person who walks the streets is alive. Boris Grebenshchikov has a wonderful line in one of his songs: “There are people like “alive” and people like “dead”.

The ancients said: “When there is death, we are not; when we are, it is not there, so we will never meet with it.” There is no death, but there are boundaries of life — this is the fear of the end of life, the limitations of life. The fear of death is directly related to how our life is. “That which gives meaning to life gives meaning to death,” wrote the Strugatsky brothers.

We are afraid of death, we drive thoughts about it away from ourselves, but the paradox is that people who are faced with death — whether it is clinical death or near-death experiences — ultimately improve the quality of life. They begin to live more productively, maturely, treat life responsibly, realizing that it is not endless. The scarcity of a resource increases the efficiency of its use — awareness of the reality of death increases the meaningfulness of life.

“Mom, dad, are we alive or on film?”

The great psychotherapist of the last century, James Bugental, gave a wonderful metaphor when he spoke of the conscious and unconscious attitude to life. Saturday evening, a family comes out of the cinema — mom, dad and a child of an inquisitive age. The child asks the parents: “Mom, dad, are we alive or on film?” Bugental says this is the most important question of our lives — «Am I alive or on film?».

Throughout life, a huge number of tapes are recorded in the psyche — a generalized experience, many files. When we get into a similar situation, the tapes start playing, over and over again. Someone has a large repertoire of tapes, someone has a small one, but all the same, any tape reproduces only what is recorded on it.

We ourselves mechanically reproduce at will what is recorded on our tapes — we simply turn on the play button. What is written in us can be launched from the outside with the help of simple tricks. It happens that another person wants to make us behave in a certain way, and he remotely launches the film he needs at us. This is called manipulation.

But not everything we do is reproducing tapes, Bugental said. We can choose to be alive. Beyond the films, between the films, over the films, there is what Bugental calls life. What is it to be alive? “Living is something that can be different at any moment,” said another thinker Merab Mamardashvili.

Do not play the tape, but find another possibility. You just need to want, and it is important that it comes to our minds. Most prefer to follow their films — to live not as better, but as easier, this is a more energy-saving mode. “Don’t be loaded”, “don’t sweat it”, “don’t fool around” — this is the strongest motivation.

Both in literature and in life we ​​meet many such examples. Chekhov’s «The Man in the Case» is the most powerful image of leaving on film. The question is, am I living or is life living me?

Grandma’s existential psychotechnics

My grandmother Margarita Petrovna used to repeat to me what I later called «my grandmother’s existential psychotechniques.»

First: «Stop and count to ten.» To take life into your own hands, you must first pause. One of the leaders of existential psychology, Rollo May, said that human freedom is rooted in the pause between stimulus and reaction. It is necessary to delay the reaction, because the reaction to stimuli excludes the moment of choice, excludes freedom.

If I just slow down the reaction, I have a choice, I no longer have to react that way. Freedom begins with a pause. Zhvanetsky has a brilliant phrase: “Count to 10 before you say stupid things, up to 100 before you say a smart thing, up to 1000 before you do something.”

Grandma’s second technique: «Look at yourself from the outside.» This is what puts the attitude towards life in a different mode, makes life manageable. Back in the 90s of the XNUMXth century, Vasily Rozanov wrote that human life can be of two types — conscious and unconscious. The conscious is governed by goals, and the unconscious by causes.

The moment of consciousness allows you not only to be present in life in the “life lives on us” mode, but to format it for your own goals and intentions, that is, to be controlled not by reasons, but by goals.

By the way, a person who has his own goals, his own vector, is much more difficult to manipulate. To the extent that you have built a system of meanings, values ​​and intentions, to the extent that your life is conscious — that is, driven by goals, not causes — you turn out to be a tough nut to crack for manipulation.

Looking at yourself from the outside allows you to discover alternative possibilities. They are always there, but they do not always fall into the focus of consciousness. In order for them to enter the field of our consciousness, we must “wake up” and look at ourselves from the outside.

Love for life and love for death

Erich Fromm said that, in addition to the motivation to live, we have a motivation to die. He called them «biophilia» and «necrophilia».

Necrophilia translates as love for the dead. Usually this term is used to refer to sexual perversion, the desire to have a dead body for sexual intercourse, or the morbid desire to be near a corpse. In fact, this sexual perversion only mediates a different, more distinct picture, which in many people has no sexual overtones at all.

A person with a necrophilic orientation is attracted to everything inanimate, dead, but not only to corpses and diseases. Necrophiles, says Erich Fromm, are attracted to everything that deprives a living thing of life. A necrophiliac is characterized by a focus on strength, and strength is the ability to turn a person into a corpse. Ultimately, all power rests on the power to kill. On this basis, the necrophile is downright in love with strength.

For one who loves life, the basic polarity in man is the male-female polarity that produces life. For necrophiles, another polarity is in the first place: between those who have the power to kill, to turn the living into the dead, and those to whom this power is not given, the polarity of the murderer and the murdered. They are in love with those who kill and despise those who are killed.

The desire for a mechanistic order, the idea of ​​order, the idea of ​​stability is also a necrophilic idea. There can be no order in a living environment, in a living organism. The maximum order is in the cemetery, and the living, even if it is rolled into asphalt, still makes its way through the asphalt. The necrophile perceives life mechanically, treats living people as things. In fact, necrophilia is the desire to turn everything into films.

Fighting the dead in yourself

Merab Mamardashvili said that a very important, key part of life is the struggle with the dead in oneself. We become dead during our lifetime due to the fact that the inner world is overgrown with sediments, those very films, and does not allow something living to develop, grow.

No matter how life develops, the question still remains: “And what do I do with it?” It helps to approach life carefully and responsibly. The struggle with the dead in oneself helps not to die before death. This is the most important thing we can count on — not to die before death.