CIIS Public Programs Podcast

 TRANSCRIPT

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[Theme Music]

This is the podcast of the California Institute of Integral Studies, where each week we bring you conversations and lectures from our public program’s live events featuring world-renowned scholars, leaders, authors, artists, and thinkers. In this episode, author Stephen Jenkinson and CIIS Dean of Alumni, Richard Buggs, explores what it means to live and die well. This event was recorded on February 1st, 2019 in front of a live audience in San Francisco. To make sure you never miss an episode of the CIIS podcast, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or visit our website at ciis.edu/podcast. That's also where you can find out more about us including how to sponsor future episodes of the show.

[Applause]

Richard: We are so delighted here at CIIS. Sorry for the people over there that I can't look at so easily.

Stephen:  I'm looking at you.

Richard: Good. He's gonna project that way and I'll project this way. Because CIIS is one of those places where I really believe, having been here now 29 years, that we like to think that we value learning over knowing. This book is quite an incredible opportunity to enjoy learning and not get bogged down with having to know. So thank you. It's a beautiful book. It's a wonderful book [Stephen: Thank you.] and it will be a book that I will use as a resource for many years to come.

Stephen: Thank you. Good.

Richard: Here at the beginning, I thought maybe we could start by talking about endings.

Stephen: Okay. Good. An opposionalist. [Richard: laughs] Well that makes two of us so far.

Richard: Why do you think, and I know some of what you've written about, why do we struggle and have such a difficult time with endings?

Stephen: Yeah. Well, you know, the first important thing to say is let's let that be the last generalization we unleash across an unsuspecting public.

[Applause]

Stephen: Now I come to you as a foreigner. I’m from the northern side of the operation and I'm always very, very alert when I cross the border. That in a fundamental way almost everything has changed. The refusal to acknowledge that kind of thing is just another form of globalization and it's profoundly disrespectful of the particularities of place and people and time and so on. This is just a long-winded way of me saying that I'm not persuaded that we all do anything. Not to thwart the question because I take the spirit of it, but that's the first thing, that's my qualification. The second answer is I don't know, of course. I haven't been everywhere and I haven't asked everyone. If I did, I'm not persuaded that they were all honest. With that, it's a pocketful of caveats, what's left? Well, what's wrong with endings? Well, it's not why anybody came to this country. How's that? It's not part of the national mythology. It's not part of the code,  endings. Endings are a kind of collapse. The willingness to end, from everything I've seen and heard over the years, not only not held in high esteem, but it's viewed very dimly. I was somewhere outside Chicago and on the highway and I saw a sign, just like you have seen it many times before, and the sign never said anything to me until that particular day and here's what it said: “Be prepared to stop.”

[Laughter]

Stephen:  And I thought “Oh shit, yes! Of course! Who wrote that sign? Let’s get him to make some more! I’ve worked in a death trade long time and I can tell you and I'm sure it comes as no surprise to many of you, that the notion of being ready or prepared to die was held in high esteem. Until you started to wonder what they thought being ready to die would deliver to them. I have to report to you with some sadness that routinely division was being ready to die meant you weren't really going to die. That's what readiness is actually for in a place that doesn't believe in endings. It's a kind of bizarre insurance policy to guarantee that the inevitabilities are optional, where you're concerned. That's what your readiness is for. But of course, having pointed that out then the road to some kind of allegation of sanity would be what? To end. And to end well, not to not end and mistake that for a good conclusion.

Here's the second sign I saw in Toronto on the way to a gig one time. It said, “If you're afraid of drowning, try swimming.” I love that. I just love the absolutely stunning proposition that you are not obliged to drown. It's not the same thing as ending, you see. At the end of the day, because all the days have that, then the tutelage that comes from endings, eclipses by many times over. The mania for hope and the allegation that if you just work your hardest they won't get you. They'll get you. Every ending [laughs] will get you. It's what you deserve. It's what happens when you begin. Any grown-up knows that there's such a thing as too late to be saved from endings. This is a recipe for maturity and that seems to me (and we're going to talk at this great detail about this tomorrow) but endings play an enormous role in crafting human beings out of protein units.

Richard: Protein units.

Stephen: Yeah. [Richard laughs] Yeah, okay. Vaguely simian protein units. Just to give us our full due when we're born. Yeah. The idea that you can do anything you want is an absolutely ludicrous and cruel taunt. It's not in the repertoire of grown-ups to imagine that you can do anything you want any more than it is to require being hopeful as a prerequisite for undertaking the immensely challenging labor of being a human being in a troubled time. Hope is the pill you take to get you over endings. The whole thing is just a pharmaceutical nightmare to me. Next question.

[Laughter]

Richard: Next question!

Stephen: I’m finished.

Richard: You are an interviewer's dream. The next question is actually a quote from you. so I can't screw this up. [Stephen: Okay.] What has to die is your refusal to die. Your refusal for things to come to an end. If that dies life can be fed. Could you say more about that?

Stephen:  I did, there's a whole book. [Laughter] Well, let's see. I found that working in the death trade and I don't mean this to sound confounding but I'm trying to do absolute justice to how confounding it actually is because the conclusion of one's life is an inscrutable mystery shrouded in biochemical necessity. It's not a bad way of considering it. And it doesn't belong to you, it's entrusted to you, your ending. Its entrusted to you in exactly the same way that the world has been entrusted to the generations that find themselves alive at any given time. Not as a proprietary piece of ownership to do with what you want or see fit or milk for all it's worth. Because people did come to their dying time in my experience virtually the same way as they come to a piece of quote undeveloped land. Which in itself is a prejudicial term. Of course, there's no such thing as “undeveloped land.” That's like describing people as pre-literate. Or pre-christian or something of that ilk. Nobody answers to that description, of course. So, okay. Answer one question at a time. Okay. I'm not good at that. But let me see if I can chain myself to the necessity of it.

I found that dying itself took a long time to die. Which is to say that dying has from what I saw a momentum of sorts and you know, that's a blessed thing because it's not all the soundtrack of what I'm talking about. It's a blessed thing because the entire onus of the enterprise is not upon the dying person to quote pull it off. Because dying is bigger than all your ideas about it. Just as marriage is. Marriage will eclipse every idea you bring to being married. You could go further without risk of cynicism at all and imagine that the first casualty of getting married is every idea you had about being married. Right? Because all your ideas of marriage are a rookie's lunacies masquerading as a belief system, right? [Richard laughs] You say I

I’ve been married three times but I wouldn't brag about that. It's not as if you're finally getting it right after three times. Anyway, there's a lot of parallel to dying in this regard in that dying is so much larger than your preconceived notions about it. And dying is not that, frankly, tolerant of the particular prejudices you bring to it because it's asking for a degree of tutelage from you. It's not asking for any capacity. It's just asking for this kind of almost corrosive combination of willingness to learn and a willingness not to be possessed of certainty that is hopelessly premature and of utterly no use. In other words, you can hear the way I'm speaking about it. I've understood for a long time now that dying is a deity. And as such, approaching a deity, I don't know if you've done it lately, but it requires some considerable circumspection and that's proper. It's a different order and it's a different world. Because of that, one of the things I saw was when dying began to pick up a head of steam over and beyond the sort of conglomeration of symptoms and so on you begin to see that it has its own momentum over and above how that person in particular was dying. It brought them to the gates of death and beyond simply by force of momentum, you could say as much as anything else. There's an enormous amount of grace in that because it's not all up to you and to a certain degree you obey the rhythm of dying, too.

Okay. So it brings you past death. I don't pretend to know what's after that but anyway, certainly deep into the proceedings. Of course, the people quote unquote left behind, this tends to be in North America, a raggedly different story. The necessities that had their way with the dying person have become optional points of view or feeling states in the quote-unquote survivors. So largely, what you begin to find is the meaning of your death; you yourself will be a stranger to, because the meaning of your death will actually be crafted in the hours and then the weeks and then the years after your departure from the scene. That's when your death begins to acquire its meaning. Which is to say that the meaning of your life and your death is not really in your hands to craft. This is anathema in a culture that's predicated on being self-made and self-fashioned and self-directed. It amounts to a kind of crime against nature and some kind of inherent cruelty to begin to recognize that you're a bit player in the drama, which has been your life. From the point of view of authorship, obviously you were there most of the days, but for all of that you exercise no particular authority. Whereas everyone who will outlive you is more authoritative about the meaning of your life than you would ever know how to be. An amazing thing is you won't get to hear any of it. And so there's a grace in laying that down and the grace is in full disgrace now in the practice of baby boomers, I begin to hear about this now, who insist on being present at their own wakes. Not stuffed [Richard laughs] and set up in a chair and hide there. Not that form, still alive. See, it’s happening. It's no surprise that Boomers would insist on being at their own wakes, is it? It's kind of in keeping with the general consumer mania of the generation.

Richard: They’re probably going to film it too.

Stephen:  They have the full articulation of their self, and that includes participating in your wake. Well, honey, [Richard laughs] I'm sorry, but honey, look, if you're there, it's not a wake. Sorry. You screwed it up, again. You have to be dead. That's what a wake is. If you're there it’s called a party. No big deal. Not a one-off like your wake should properly be. Of course, at your wake, people will tell a lot of stories. Some of them will involve you, not many of them. Some of them will and some of them will be true. It's left to the peanut gallery to decide which of the various allegations of larceny that are attributed to you are authentic in some fashion and which begin the strange lionization that accrues to everyone who slips this mortal coil and has become, at least for 15 minutes, heroic simply by virtue of dying. You have to laugh to keep from crying sometimes. That's a long-winded way of saying what? Dying isn't concentrated in a few moments.

People have said to me routinely when I was on what I called “The Man Killer” tour in support of the book called Die Wise. “Man Killer,” referring to me and all the miles I was putting on myself. They would ask me, “When do you think a good time to get ready to die would be?” I don't wear a watch but I would go through the pantomime of going, “Well, let's see. What time is it now where you are?” They are standing right across from me. They say, “Well it's whatever, it’s 8:47.” Because their view was that things have to get quote pretty bad in order for you to decide that your shekels shouldn't go towards quote the rest of your life, but might be devoted to going towards the rest of your death instead. It fell to me to craft phrases like that. Quality of life is being used all the time in that business now and dying people are held to an insane standard of performance called “achieving and maintaining a quality of life,” but they're dying. Why are they obliged to maintain a quality of life, the integers of which were crafted when they were 14 or 17 years old? What do you mean? It's if we got a minute or two for a little more about this? Okay, because I saw some eyebrows.

Imagine this: if you look at all of the quality of life indicators that hospices use and so on, one of the things you're likely to find is underneath the particular expressions in articulations of that idea, there's two fundamental foundations. Given that this is North America, the first one is autonomy. Autonomy is the fundament of quality of life, along with it's strange bastard sibling, mastery. They could be mistaken for the same thing, but they're not quite the same thing but mastery and autonomy. This underlies every North American vision of what it means to be enjoying a quality of life. So the next question that you have to craft then, or at least one of my faves, goes like this, “When was the last time you enjoyed maximum autonomy and mastery?” You see people look at the ceiling like it's written up there. “Hmm. Hmm.” But nobody wants to answer in case they get it wrong [laughs]. I'm asking you about your life and you're careful that you don't want to get it wrong. I understand, because at some level you can smell that it's a trick question. Oh, yeah it's a trick question. And it goes like this. The real answer is when you were about 14 years old. That's the last time you enjoyed maximum untrammeled autonomy and mastery, Now, I know what you're thinking, “That's bullshit. I didn't have that when I was 14 years old.” I didn't say you had it. I said you thought you did. That's the way you carried yourself. “I don’t need you!” Right? I need the keys. [Richard laughs] “l don't need you!” and so forth. In other words, it's an illusion. In other words, the entire quality of life industry and the bizarre code of conduct and moral order that's insinuated from it is crafted in mid-adolescence. To serve an illusion that never comes to call. That's what's applied to dying people in their time of waning physical capacity. Why is it not called quality of death? Because that's what is there to be served. Not your quality of life as if the degree to which your faithful to your premorbid state is the degree to which you remain a human being. But instead your willingness to take all of that fidelity and give it over to the last months or the last weeks and understand that that is as deserving of the best part of you. As any quote wonderful time that preceded it was deserving of the best part of you. Including your life partners and all of that because your death is your most faithful life partner. It deserves the best of you.If you can't manage that, then give it the rest of you. That's what I advocated when I was there and I didn't have many takers. [Pause] Next question.

Richard: In some ways you've talked about the fallacy of sudden death. That doesn't really exist, sudden death, if one is being conscious, day-to-day, hour-to-hour kind of way of accepting that this is finite.

Stephen:  Would that it were so. I didn't make any allegation about chronic consciousness, no. No, I don't think that's true. What do you mean? I mean that when I say there's no such thing as sudden death... I should back up a step. Oftentimes, in the death trade days, I was pretty vehemently challenged when people would say the likes of, “It's all well and good and rather ornate the stuff you're talking about but it requires a high degree of intellectual acumen, in case you didn't notice.” At peoples’ best, not every this is not a liberally or at least democratically distributed capacity, in case you hadn't noticed that. “What about people with Alzheimer's?” Then it just went on and on and on. It fell to me to say, first of all, coming to an understanding of your death doesn't require a higher education. I could go further and suggest those with a higher education tend to be disadvantaged in this regard because of their willingness to believe that their thinking will get them through. The notion that there's no such thing as sudden death comes from understanding what death is, not that there's no such thing as acutely unanticipated. The phrase acutely unanticipated doesn't refer to the means of dying or the time lapse that it involved. It refers to your willingness to anticipate it. By that understanding alone, there is no death that happens quicker than your capacity to anticipate it. Which is to say that everyone sitting here tonight is fully capable of befriending and in deep learning about their own demise. Such that when it comes there is no out clause called “What?” None, none. If it's one of those that's no less true. That was as normal as the long and dark road of chemotherapy and so on. As noble, of course it is. Really the phrase sudden death is an acknowledgement of truancy. Not a characterization of a way of dying. In that sense, unfortunately, it's a bit of a... condemnation might be too strong, but it's a serious challenge. Fun guy, aren't I?

Richard:  Speaking of challenges, maybe we could talk about heart brokenness for a moment. One of the things that you note is that it's a vital sign of life, this state of heart brokenness. Again one that  is maybe difficult for some people to...

Stephen:  Allow me to quibble and I know you haven't finished.

Richard: Okay. I'm finished enough.

Stephen: No, not necessarily but heart brokenness, if you're asking me, is not a state. It’s in the phrase there. That leads you're thinking, phrases like that. It implies that there's a condition. You have kind of an a priori set of criteria, that you meet some kind of DSM. What are they at five, six, seven? Where they at now? Whatever it is.

Richard: Five and a half.

Stephen: Five editions! They can't get it right. [Richard laughs] If they did that with a Bible, what would you be thinking about the Bible by now? You’d just say forget it. Forget it, forget it. Show me the comics. Five. Anyway, so heartbroken this sooner or later if it's not already in one of them friggin things it'll end up there because it's alleged to be a state but I submit to you that it's not a state at all. Principally, heartbrokenness should be understood as a verb not an adjectival clutch. In other words, heartbrokenness is what you do. It's not how you feel about what you do. It's what you do. Heartbrokenness has a repertoire. Heartbrokenness  is very faithful to time and place, in a sense in a geiger counter sense of fidelity, I would say. The antidote that is offered in case this is... Anyway, I'll let you finish the question like a big-shot. I mean, let me finish this part by saying that in my encounters with the diabolical unwillingness to be heartbroken amongst competence-addicted people in the death trade, (that’s a mouthful, comma) not finish the sentence even. One of the things I found is the recipe that people more or less forced down each other's throats is less heart...to have less brokenness. In other words, competence. In other words, hope. In other words, [sings] “Here's a little song I wrote. You might want to sing it note for note.” That's tough. I submit to you that the recipe of less heart to achieve less brokenness turns out to be the kind of fool’s poker hand that you can readily recognize it to be as you hear me say it now and less heart is less everything. It's not just less brokenness and I'm not even persuaded it's less brokenness. It's something approaching numb. Isn't it? Enough heartlessness is trauma, not peace of mind.

My response is that when I speak with dying people, I would never ask them how they are until 15, 20, 25 minutes into the meeting because it's an extraordinarily consequential thing to ask a dying person. So you don't ask it, at least I never did but I would slip it in apparently with no, to no particular purpose. The session would often have begun with just horrendous layers and gales of despair and all the existential torment you could possibly conceive of. 25 minutes later I'd say “So how you doing?'' and they'd say “Pretty good.” I just look at them and then they look at me and then the face would change and they take umbrage. They say “How did you do that?” “How did I do what?” “How did you get me to say that I'm okay given everything.” I say “You alloqws me far too much influence.”  I have some consequence but I don't have that much influence, certainly no control, so that was all you. I simply asked you at a time where you didn't have the program locked in for the quote right answer but that's the right answer, isn't it? Right now you're sitting there doing two things at the same time that you thought were absolutely incompatible. Here's what they are: you're dying and you're okay. “Holy shit!” they would say.

[Laughter]

Stephen: That's terrible! Yes and no, because it holds you to a standard of prescience and conscience that doing miserably and being depressed and despairing lets you off the hook. In actual fact, the more capacity dying people have to be okay and dying at the same time, the more properly you should begin to ask of them. In other words, you are not, in my presence, allowed to rescind your citizenship in the land of the living prematurely. We will make our claims upon you to continue your journey with us until a point at which you will be left behind. You're feeling state is not the thing that determines when you're no longer with us. Sorry, what was your question?

[Laughter]

Stephen: I'm getting kind of excited. I'm happy to be here and that’s what it sounds like. [Richard: Oh, good.] I'm sorry. I don't really mean to take over.

Richard: No, I wanted you to take over here.

Stephen: You are asking me about my bloodline here.

Richard: Yes.

Stephen: So I'm telling you the old geezer stories now.

Richard: Well, I think that second part of the question was how does one deeply trust and practice our brokenness?

Stephen:  Ah! Wow, that's brilliant, brilliant. First of all, the question as a formulated proposition is worthy of so much honor and regard. How do you properly practice and trust heart brokenness? Immediately, it recast heartbrokenness not as an affliction but as something to be practiced or in my language, a skill. The skill of heart brokenness is something that should be taught in school. To kids this big. I'm not sure I'd have to teach them a lot about it because they are, to a certain degree, able practitioners, more or less instantaneously, but eventually they will learn that there's a distance between how they feel and quote whatever that thing is called their heart, sadly.

Okay, big story that just opens up when I say that if you don't mind stories instead of hypotheses. It goes like this. In the old days, I was lucky enough to be handed a ridiculous amount of money by a ridiculously rich family and all they said was “Do something for kids and don't embarrass us.”

[Laughter]

Stephen: That was the full program, do something for kids. We don't care what it is. It was true too. Well, a benign gift like that at arm's length is not a bad thing to have. You don't need the rich guys screwing things up. Just take their money and tell them you'll be letting them know next year how things are going. That's what I did. Then I established a center which I called so-and-so center because you got to put their name on it apparently to thwart the oncomingness of their own demise, apparently.

[Laughter]

Stephen: It should be called the soon-to-be ex-so-and-so center. Then we're clear, right? It's not like you get an out clause because you got the money. It's not what it means. Anyway, the “So-and-so Center for Children's Grief and Palliative care.” That's what I called it. You can hear I'm putting the emphasis on the syllable that I think deserves it. The emphasis on children's grief and palliative care is a distant second consideration when children are dying. It's children's capacity for and maligned expectations around grief that deserve the lion's share of the professional attention, in my not very humble estimation. Routinely—and this may cause you to draw in breath sharply, what I'm going to tell you now, but I've no reason to come all this way to you and lie or exaggerate, no investment whatsoever. This is absolutely faithful reportage from the front lines that the families, even in spite of their own motivation and inclination, harbored a sense of grievance and injustice about the oncomingness of the children's death that was not located in their children's death. Which is to say, the thing they were most aggrieved but not necessarily heartbroken by but the grievance that was most acute in them was not the fact that the children were dying, but that they would not live long enough to live a quote-unquote full life. That's where the sense of injustice arose and that's the vast majority of the parents and siblings and so on. I wondered about this as I began to see it and I was shocked, frankly. Not in a sense of me judging the legitimacy of that response but only that I didn't expect it. The fact that they were dying was left in the dust compared to the ripoff of not enjoying a full life.

I simply began to wonder whether the children themselves experience the same sense of ripoff and grievance about not getting to live a full life that their parents and all the various hangers-on were certain was the principal injustice in the whole scenario. Up to a certain age, not one child harbored anything like a similar resentment towards life that their parents and their families had. In other words, they were alone in their unwillingness to curse their fortune and they had no one to love life with during those days, if you can imagine, but that's what it came down to. Not one person on the parental side was loving life in those times. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying anybody is supposed to be celebratory, but I'm simply pointing out to you that there's an enormous unintended consequence from deciding that this is not a matter of heart brokenness,  this is a matter of Justice. When you go that route and that you imagine that all children have the right to live to eighty four point six years. Then basically you're condemning all the children who will not do so to a half life. A kind of shelf life.

Here's the story I wanted to tell you that comes from that. This would come up or I had to put it this way to the families in the family room. Then I would say, “You're quite sure about that? Your daughter, not because she's dying of leukemia at seven, is not going to live a full life.” They look at you like how could you not be on board with this understanding, as if this is an understanding. Which it isn't, it's an a priori prejudice. It's not an understanding that comes from the reality of dying. It's a prejudice that they brought to it. They would say “Yeah.” and I would say, “Why don't we do this now? Maybe for my own edification. Let's go down the hall and let's ask her. Let's ask her if she's lived a full life or if she thinks she's going to get to.” They look at you like you are a monster that you would actually put that into words and ask a seven-year-old and make them say it because their assumption is she's going to say yes. I already knew what she was likely to say. This entire exercise is not for the benefit of the child. You can hear it coming, right? Okay. They would say, “Out of the question.” “Completely understood,'' I said, “How about if I did? How about if I go down and I'll ask your daughter if she's gotten to live a full life and then I'll come back and just tell you what she said and this way you wouldn’t have to go through it. And that's what I get the big bucks for, you know. What do you think?” They'd all be shuddering and some part of them were going like this, yeah. Somebody, the more liberal person in the family would probably say okay and then I would go down and I would come. If you're ever in this position, I recommend this if for no other no other strategy than this one: to take the chair and rather than set the chair across from them as I am sitting across from you now, change the seating arrangement. Not that you're quite sitting beside them but you're looking off in the approximate direction that they are. Which is to say, the things you're wondering about don't include them. You're wondering together about something. They're not the object of your scrutiny. This great mystery is the object of your scrutiny, something that you can undertake together. Your seating arrangement actually signals that. If you don't have any leukemia around the house, do it with teenagers.

[Laughter]

Stephen: Okay. I come and I sit down, I seat the chair that way and I say and it went like this, “So I was sitting with your family a little while ago.” And she’d go [motions]. I'd say, “Pretty bad.” She'd go, “Yeah.” I’d say, “Do you know why?” She'd say, “Yeah.” I'm going to paraphrase it because nobody at seven actually said it this way but the paraphrase goes like this. She would say, “Well, I'm not allowed to know that I'm dying. So when they come around, I don't.” I’d say, “Yeah, pretty much. I got it. Okay. Well, here's the thing. Here's today's dilemma.” She’d go, “Oh really? What's that?” “Well, they're pretty sure that you're not going to live long enough to have a full life.” She just kind of narrowed her eyes and you could see that look again like, “adults are so weird” [Laughter] just come across her face. Adults are so weird. You can't make a case against that, really.

[Laughter]

I'd say, “I'm here to ask you about that.” She would basically say, “I don't understand the proposition. I don't understand the concept.” Of course, at that age, exactly, you don't understand the concept. Why, because you're not old enough? No, because you haven't learned it. Which is to say you haven't learned that the only valuable part of your life is the one that hasn't happened yet. You haven't learned that yet and you're entirely possessed by the minutiae of the stuff that's already happened. I would say, “Look, I got a clipboard.This is very official. Okay. I got a pen and everything. I need a couple of examples of the full life that you have no notion of and your parents are sure you'll never have.” I didn't say it like this, of course, but for your benefit, this is how it rolled out. She'd look at me like, “Shit. Okay.” Then she’s just rolling around in a brain going, “Full life, anybody. Full life?”

[Laughter]

Stephen: Then she would say this (I remember this one in particular should), “I rode a horse once.” Shit, exhibit A! I'd write it down, “I rode a horse once.” I said, “It's great but you know how parents are, you got to have three. At least three. [Richard laughs] One is not persuasive. That's

why they didn’t stop at you. They had a couple of siblings because one's not enough to persuade you. This is nuts. Don't have kids, it’s crazy. Expensive. It's crazy.”

[Laughter]

Stephen: They never thank you. You'll never get your money back. Return on investment is ludicrous. Don't do it. Anyway I said, “So I need a couple more” and she's like “Uhhh” but she's kind of on a roll now with it. The next one was, “I fell off.” This is The Iliad and the Odyssey in two sentences.

[Laughter]

Stephen: Rode a horse once, fell off. You ask the Dalai Lama about that. He’ll say, “Done. That's my replacement.” Anyway, I said to her “Can I have a third one? But don't tell me you got back on it.” “I didn’t get back on, I was too scared.” “Okay. What's the third one?” “Well, there was this boy that lived next door and and I kind of thought he was cute, and then one day we were playing in the sandbox, whatever it was, and then there was a fly that landed on his ear and I leaned over to brush the fly off his ear just when he turned to look at me like that and well it was close.”

[Laughter]

Stephen: I'm thinking, they'll never survive me reading these three out loud, which is true.  I said, “Okay. That's that's plenty, a full life. Your cup runneth over.” The whole deal is there and I'd go down the hall. I'd sit down and they’d look at me, “Did you ask her?” “Yes, I did.” “Did she answer you?” “She did.” After a little while, I'd explain the terms of reference but basically, “Yes, would you like to know what she said?” They said yes, but usually I never got past the second one and everybody...Well, it's a river of sorrow and everything, because at some level they think she still doesn't understand but the misunderstanding is misunderstood. The real fundamental misunderstanding is the notion that the life that will never be constitutes some kind of deprivation. Some kind of rip off. Some kind of right not exercised or enjoyed, which a seven year old has no capacity for.

This is a long-winded way of me speaking about heart brokenness. To say that the seven-year-old who understands that she's not allowed to know that she's dying as long as her parents are around so she doesn't cause them further heartbreak. It's the seven-year-old that's the heartbroken one, not the parents. The parents are trying not to be heartbroken quote for her sake, which is a ludicrous demonstration of a Teflon capacity that nobody should admire, in my view. The recipe for heartbroken, is more heart. These things are built with fissures, aren't they? I mean, even anatomically they are and every heart shaped thing, most of which are seeds, are dicotyledons. They're halved in some fashion and there's fissures that run through them and they're designed (of course, they are) to break, Minus the breaking there is no third thing. There is no life because life is rooted in the end of life, demonstrably, across all the natural world and alas in the human world it's still an allegation. Our capacity to be heartbroken has to be learned and minus adult scaled demonstrations of heart brokenness, heart brokenness becomes an issue of shame or frailty or weakness. Not a particular skillfulness that answers the call of the world faithfully.

Richard: I imagine it takes quite a bit of growing up.

Stephen: I'm very at odds with the notion of growth, for its own sake, to be frank. I would not characterize adulthood as a limitless playground of growth I would prefer to imagine true adulthood as the end of growth, the incarnation of grownness instead. Not completion, but then we have to start being able to rely on the fact that you've pulled off as much as you pulled off. and you don't get a day off from being the one that the rest of us are looking to. If you maintain the notion that you grow exponentially and infinitely and this is your moral obligation, then I wonder where you think all this growth is supposed to come from. Because in every other sense of the term, growth is an inquisitive thing that takes from somewhere. In every incarnation you can think about, growth happens over here because it's taking from over there. I'm not sure at all that the personal growth industry, if she proliferates in North America, is not doing exactly the same thing as any clear-cut forest company is doing. I lost all my friends tonight.

[Laughter]

Richard: And made a few new ones.

Stephen: Maybe.

Richard: My last question before we open it up to the audience is a little bit about the orphan wisdom school and also your idea that human beings are not born, they're made. I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more about that.

Stephen: Okay, I'll start with the term, “The Orphan Wisdom School.” I've been often asked when actually the phrase orphan wisdom is a kind of umbrella phrase I chose to characterize all my shenanigans. All of them. Even the ones I'm not sure about or I'm not proud of. So why of all the phrases? I mean I like the wisdom part but couldn't you just have said really wise wisdom school? Or just wisdom school? Why do you have to qualify it with all things, orphan? Okay, here's why. I'm a fan, frankly, of being incarnate. I don't consider it a problem to solve to have a body, right, and mind and all the other stuff that connects them. I don't consider any of these things to be a taunt or a joke or a gag or some kind of speed bump on the way to enlightenment. Near as I can tell and I don't pretend to understand very much, but this is what enlightenment looks like. To walk around going, “Christ. I get another shot at it. Sun rose and so did I and one of those two things is not a given.” And maybe both of them, the way things are going. So orphan. If I say the word orphan, generally speaking, and ask people to free associate, one of the first phrases that comes out is “no parents,” understandably, but there's no such thing as no parents. Now you might qualify it immediately and say well don't know where my parents are. Okay, but that's not a condition of orphanhood. “Never knew my parents.” Well, there's a lot of people still living with their parents who would say that.

[Laughter]

Stephen: What's orphanhood then? I would you know, just simplify it and say parents. Can't get there from here. That's how I understand the term. Now, when I said I'm a fan of being incarnate what I mean is I understand myself principally an inhabitant of cultural and historical reality. That I have a fundamental responsibility to regardless of how proud or not I might be of it. A responsibility that doesn't include unreflective pride. Do you understand what I'm referring to here? Okay. Thank you very much. One of the route conditions of being a North American, generally speaking, at least if you understand yourself to be in the dominant culture of North America, is that you're a spawn of a spontaneous mass migration that no matter what your national mythology says was not voluntary. That nobody looked up one day and said, “Let's see what's going on over there.” That all of the migrations were a consequence of an abject misery so profound that it's hard for us to conjure it frankly, to be driven literally to the edge of the known world for the sake of drawing breath says an awful lot about where you're standing and virtually nothing about where you're heading or why. These people were fleeing. This is the foundation story of North America and one of the consequences unintended certainly in the early going was the consequence of the Middle Passage were the Atlantic passage for crossing is that people say at some point during that voyage, at some point in the early years of being where they were, understood themselves to have both a moral obligation and an opportunity to be quote free unquote. That freedom almost across the board articulated itself as freedom from what they had been. The inadvertent consequence of exercising freedom and that understanding is that when it's your turn to die, your greatest fear will be what will become of you. Why is that? Because by virtue of leaving your ancestral stories behind, including the malignant ones, let's just be clear, including those, the consequence of leaving all these things behind is that you have no shared understanding with your peers about what's to become of you after you die and for all the misery that you left behind. You did have that. North America is the place where a deathful being so profound and existentially implacable has comforted and enjoyed an almost permanent employment. I can tell you that having been at the deathbed of so many people. Be they quote believers in one religious tradition or not or agnostic whatever they claim themselves to be but one of the route conditions that they shared in which they didn't is that they're fundamentally at the deeper cultural level, orphans. That orphanhood came to visit them in their dying time. It was never diagnosed and it was never discussed. The psychological higher-ups never approached it as a legitimate object of real scrutiny and consideration. Never. If I didn't do it, it never happened.

An exhibit A. I know this is going on overtime, crowd into your question-answer period, so consider this an answer to a question you haven't asked yet.

[Laughter]

Stephen: Imagine this, that people come to their dying time with a primordial fear so intense that it drew all the saliva out of them, even though it was nowhere close to them in that moment. Because that's true, they did and almost across the board. The fear was remarkably the same from one person to the next. It was writhing in agony at 3:00 a.m. with no recourse and no solution. In one way or another, that's what it came down to. You might find that prosaic and unbecoming of people anticipating their last days, but I don't think it was. Here's the mystery: that that greatest fear virtually never came to pass, certainly not on my watch. Why? Because the physicians that were involved in the team were so skilled at pain and symptom management, that writhing at 3:00 a.m. with no recourse under Dr. Dan, un-ministered virtually never took place now. Now, you and I know that not writhing at 3:00 a.m. required some heavy medication indeed. How should I put it? There is something to be given up in the name of not rising at 3:00 a.m., isn't it? Of course, there is. Now, here's what I'm here to tell you though. If that's their worst fear (and it was) and it never came to pass virtually (and it never did), then would this not just by itself in the naked way I’ve said it to you now constitute a recipe for sane holistic whole-person dying. The worst fear never comes to pass. Hallelujah time. How then to explain how many people whose worst fear never came to pass died sedated slack-jawed and drooling? How to understand it? My answer to you is because they were wrong about what they feared most. They didn't know what it was. Five minutes ago, I told you what it was. It seems so benign compared to the terrors of tumors and rupture and the notion that you don't know what's going to happen to you after you die, the notion that you're not persuaded that there's quote really anybody waiting for you. That the notion of ancestral continuity is such an allegation to you and nothing more that this belongs to people with swarthy skin, but nobody who looks like me or many of you sitting here now. But that's what it was and that's why they had to be sedated. Because their worst fear was still there and still intact and never spoken about. That understanding, among others, is the wisdom part of the Orphan Wisdom Enterprise. To understand that the Land of Plenty has never been with the national mythologies alleged that it is.

If I may put it to you this way, America still hasn't happened. It's a European fantasy. Obviously completely articulated by European miseries, and it has not taken place. It's still a European fantasy. North Americans, I know. We're freestyling here now. There's a sign-up sent, you know, we got to do this, we got to do that but we're humans and we’re on roll. Well, one of us is on a roll and the rest of us have no choice.

[Laughter]

Richard: We're rolling right along with you

Stephen: Because this ain’t no democracy. For the moment. Anywhy, why do I call it Orphan Wisdom? Because I don't say that by virtue of being orphans we’re bereft of the capacity for wisdom, very simply and very nakedly put. The notion that we have to pillage someone else's ancestry, spiritual,religious traditions, ceremonial life, and so on, speaks to a secret suspicion that we come from absolutely nowhere worth coming from and no one worth coming from. This is one of the principal anxieties, it seems to me, in the North American streetscape. Anybody who claims to try to be useful to their fellow citizens on this continent has a deep moral obligation to come to this thing and start at least articulating the perils of it. Happy to help in this regard. That's the first part. What was the second part? [Richard laughs] You don’t remember?

Stephen: Yeah, we have a school. Why do we have a school?

Richard: Humans, not born, they’re made. They're made.

Stephen: Because it’s hard to learn this shit.

Richard: Humans, not born, they’re made.

Stephen: Yeah! Humans are made. I'm just going to say this as an unsubstantiated declaration. It's the first one of the night though.

[Laughter]

Stephen: It goes like this: We have this word “human,” we talked about this a lot tonight, so I say it in short. We have a word “human” and then we have the word “humane.” That should trouble you because if you come from the secular humanist tradition and all of you were schooled in that, I'm fairly sure about it, then these should be synonyms. But you can feel it in your bones that the addition of an “e” changes the meaning of the word and these are not synonyms. If you go with the idea that being a human being is inevitable as a consequence of being a biped and Homo Sapien and such and so on and there's nothing to be done except fine-tuning (which is apparently all that edumacation is, just fine-tuning the incipient genius that you already are) and that you're human, that your humanness is inalienable, that you can't do anything to compromise it or lose it. Of course at some level, just to say these things out loud causes some ripples in the house like you thinking, “Okay, Ted Bundy.” Okay. Well, don't get extreme. Okay, let's not get extreme then. Okay. Why do we have the word humane if we've been raised with the idea that human is an inalienable Homo Sapien constant that we are the possessors of? Why do we have the word humane? Because the word humane is a clear signal that as humans we are capable of acting inhumanly. That's what it means. If your understanding of humanness does not include in-humanness, you're going to miss an awful lot of the 20th century, for starters, as a student of the way it is. I made a school that was predicated, that gave itself the following tasks. I'm going to see what I can do to lay bare the unauthorized history of America. Not America as a nation state, the United States of...but as America as a late medieval, early Enlightenment and Renaissance idea and ideal. The rest of the story, the story they won't tell the kids. A lot of it is history. Largely, the school is kind of historically ensnared. It's the best thing I've ever done and I'm immensely proud of it. I have a number of scholars from the school here tonight and they grant me the opportunity to feel useful in the world. I'm very lucky about it all. Are you the only teacher? Yep? Well, there's limits. Yep. I teach them too. I teach what? The limits of what I'm capable of. I teach them too, not authoritatively but by inference, I teach them. Right, then we better do the Q&A Bear Pit thing.

[Laughter]

Richard: Thank you so much Stephen. What a pleasure. We're lucky to have had the evening with you.

Stephen: Well, me too. I feel like …

[Applause]

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You’ve been listening to the podcast to CIIS Public Programs and Performances. Audio production was supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. If you liked what you heard you can subscribe on iTunes or visit our website CIID.edu/podcast

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