اندیشهفلسفهخردگفتگوحکمتمعناپرسشفرهنگ
Psychology
Lectures on “Finding Remedies for Anxiety” by Mostafa Malekian
Mostafa Malekian traces the roots of anxiety to comparing oneself with others, concern for their judgment, and pursuing multiple goals. The way out, he argues, is an authentic life in accordance with one's own reason and ethics, discovering a personal mission, and embracing the principle of austerity to choose a single, central aim.
Lectures
Finding Remedies for Anxiety [1]
Mostafa Malekian – Vancouver, Canada
Summer 2019
We are looking at the issue only from a utilitarian perspective, not a moral one.
1- Not living simply, possessing capital, and the anxiety of losing it through thousands of social factors beyond my control piles anxiety upon anxiety.
2- Comparison in thought and competition in practice regarding seven things—knowledge, reputation, fame, respect, power, wealth, popularity—a competition is only fair when everyone stands on the same starting line. In a competition, there is always someone ahead of you; these two factors are always a source of anxiety. The mystics always emphasized: do not compare and do not compete. We are only supposed to compare ourselves with our former selves. The more areas of comparison expand, the more anxiety increases.
3- If I pay attention to the approval and disapproval of others, I become anxious. In the five types of relationships I have—kinship, collegial, friendly, romantic, or occasional (for instance, being a fellow traveler with someone for one night on a train)—in these relationships I have with you, I should obtain whatever pleasure I can from you for myself, and extend whatever goodness I can to you. But what this behavior of mine creates in your mind, and then whether you judge it positively or negatively, whether you like it or dislike it, is none of my business. I should not be worried about whether this person thinks positively or negatively about me, whether they liked it or not. No one has ever been able to discover an action that, when I perform it, pleases the entire world. I am supposed to do things that are consistent with my own reason, conscience, and morality, not to try to satisfy everyone with myself. Life is not meant for me to satisfy you with myself. If it were otherwise, we would always have the anxiety of what is going on in the thoughts and minds of others regarding me. An authentic life means a life in accordance with your own understanding, discernment, reason, and morality. The existentialists said that morality means having an authentic life. But at the very least, having an authentic life is one of the greatest rules of living. That is, I live according to my own reason, morality, and discernment, and I do not care whether others like it or dislike it. Of course, people like Hitler and Mussolini also did not care about the opinions of others, but the difference between me and them is that I owe you pleasure and you owe me goodness, so I must pay this debt. You cannot escape the positive and negative judgments of others.
4- Now that I am not supposed to care about the approval and disapproval of others, I must therefore seek my own mission in life; then anxiety will depart from me. That is, in the puzzle of the world, I should search for my own place in this puzzle; if I am in another's place, pieces of me will be patched or mutilated. In ancient Greek theology and philosophy, they said that everyone has a mission, and if someone discovers their mission, they will realize how much peace they will find. Nietzsche was the greatest philosopher who emphasized finding our mission in life. When we asked the ancient thinkers how we can understand what our mission is, they would say, look within and see the love for what task has been placed in your heart. In the words of Rumi:
They fashioned everyone for a task, And cast the love of it into their heart.
Today, in the third and fourth waves of psychology, they do not settle for this concept of love alone; they have devised a series of mental and intellectual experiments (16 in number) and say, perform these experiments on yourself to understand what work you are meant to pursue in life. When you walk in step with your calling, you are completely at peace. Over 90 percent of people in Iran have their hands in one job but their hearts set on another. Such a person is not happy in life, and the reason for this is that social attractions did not let you pursue the work your heart is in. It is because of the seven social attractions that human beings turn their backs on their own dreams. They have no idea that when they turn their backs on their own dreams, they only create a source of anxiety for themselves. If I turn my back on my own dream but attain that wealth, or fame, or popularity... I will still have anxiety within me, because in my unspoken language I am saying to my vast wealth, 'You are good, but you cost me dearly.' Something that costs you dearly, you cannot truly enjoy. Do not take your models for romantic relationships from our classical literature; in our classical literature, the girl would be as coy as possible, and the poem would say:
Between the lover and the beloved, the difference is vast When the beloved shows coyness, you must show need
Do not take this as a model, because it is true that the lover will endure your coyness, but only up to a point. If he sees that you are becoming too costly for him, he will leave you and go. Do not think that the more you turn up the flame of coyness, the more he will turn up the flame of need; beyond a certain point, you become too costly for him, and then you will fall from his favor. So do not learn this from Saadi and Hafez, though a small measure of it is acceptable.
The Jungians say, do not turn your back on your own dream; everyone has a dream, and they must not turn their back on it. Humanistic psychologists and transpersonal psychologists say more often: be faithful to yourself and do not betray yourself. We usually betray ourselves because of the social attractions, those seven items mentioned. For example, if your intelligence is high, your parents will say you must become either a doctor or an engineer, and they do not care at all what your dream is, for what work you were made and suited. A person who goes against their own dream, no matter how successful they are, has anxiety. If a person pursues their own dream, whether they attain those seven attractions or social successes or not, they do not have anxiety.
5. The principle of asceticism in life: Life is not structured so that you can attain all your desires; therefore, we have no choice but to select. The ancient philosophers said that the natural world is a world of conflict—if you want to attain one thing, you must forgo several others. A person who wants anything must pay a cost for it, and that cost is forgoing several other things. The mystics used to say that life is founded on asceticism. Asceticism means that if you want to attain one thing, you must renounce several others. Part of our anxiety may stem from the fact that we think we can have everything in life. One must distinguish between goal and outcome. Successful people have as few goals in life as possible, to the point where Kierkegaard said that a successful person is someone who has only one goal in life. Of course, in order to reach one goal, you may also attain several subsidiary goals. But the problem of anxiety lies in our illusion that we can have everything at once. Thus, we are always making demands on ourselves. Kierkegaard has a book called Purity of Heart, or A Pure Heart—though the original title of the book is Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing. In this book, he seeks to prove that existential anxiety is the fate of those who will more than one thing in life. Hence, multiple goals yield nothing but an increase in anxiety. We have not been made in such a way that we can care about nothing, but neither have we been made in such a way that we can care about everything. Therefore, one should not have excessive expectations of oneself. Some of the 16 experiments for finding one's personal mission in life—one famous experiment belongs to Jung, and two of the experiments belong to Nietzsche. For example, Nietzsche said: suppose 120 years after you die, they want to write on your tombstone that here lies someone who wanted to be X but became Y, or wanted to be A but became B. So, there are two columns: one column is your dreams and aspirations, and on the second column, draw an X, and from tomorrow, act according to the first column. Another experiment of Nietzsche's is this: when, for instance, they make a film, the actors watch the scenes they performed in again. For example, they realize that if they were playing the role of an addict, they performed a certain action too quickly in a certain place, and an addict could not perform it that quickly. Then he says: suppose they brought your entire life and showed it to you—is there a scene in the film of your life where you would say to yourself, 'If I were to play this scene a thousand more times, I would play it exactly the same way'? Then see what things in that scene captivated you. Those things that captivated you in that scene are among the components of your life's dream. Another experiment belongs to Socrates (the Invisible Man experiment),
It was said that our discussion is absolutely not in the domain of ethics but in the domain of prudence; secondly, that our discussion is, in fact, about the ability to prevent the onset of anxiety; thirdly, that all these methods may not be beneficial for everyone. Each person must pursue the path that they intuitively see and feel with their entire being to be true. It may be that two of these paths are beneficial for someone, and several more for another.
6—The more we reduce the number of options before us, the more we reduce our anxieties. One reason modern humans suffer from anxiety while people five hundred or a thousand years ago did not is that, as modernity advances, the number of options before each individual increases. The story of Stanisław Lem was later made into a film by Tarkovsky. At the beginning of this story, Stanisław Lem himself writes a preface and says: when I was a teenager, our television had two channels; I would turn on the TV, prefer the second over the first, watch the second, and had no problem. He says, now consider our children—they face four hundred television channels. Even though it is impossible, suppose I could see all four hundred channels on one screen, so that I could choose with the fullest possible awareness and insight, having truly seen them all, and then choose. Now suppose that out of these four hundred channels, I choose channel 199. The mechanism by which I choose 199 is that I preferred 199 over the first alone, and over the second alone, and so on, but I did not prefer it over the sum of all of them. And while I am watching channel 199, I am constantly saying to myself, in my unspoken language: I am watching you, but choosing you has cost me dearly, because I have forgone 399 other channels. The reason I pick channel 199 is that I have preferred it over each one of those 399 other channels; I was willing to prefer you over each one of those 399 other channels, but I cannot prefer you over the sum of those 399. For this reason, my enjoyment of the film I am watching is not pleasant, and this means that the pleasure I derive from it now is diminished, because the pleasure you derive from an event like watching a film depends on what you have sacrificed. The degree of enjoyment of an event depends on how many rivals that event has pushed aside. This is why, when the technology born of modernism increased and the number of paths before us multiplied, it caused me, when I occupy myself with one path, not to derive pleasure from it. In fact, the potential for enjoying any event in life does not actualize equally in all of us. If I were blind, the number of paths before me would be fewer, and it is true that I would be deprived of a great pleasure called sight, but because my alternatives are fewer than those of sighted people, I enjoy whatever I encounter at each moment more. Given this, in order to reduce one's anxiety, one must consciously reduce, based on one's love and talent, the number of options before oneself more and more and more. That is, I must first conduct a serious sifting among fields of study—or fields of study or social services—let us call it the sifting of love, and truly sift; then I pour all that remains into a second sieve, which is the sieve of my inner abilities and talents, and thereby reduce the number of options again. As a result, if I choose, I will no longer agonize that I have lost thousands of alternatives. This, too, requires a lengthy discussion: to reduce the number of options, we need a very conscious mechanism, and the most important consciousness required is self-knowledge.
7—One of the things that reduces people’s anxiety is knowing that one can never, in the final analysis, understand whether a given event in life will turn out to one’s benefit or to one’s detriment. Suppose you have prepared yourself thoroughly for an entrance exam; as a rule, you will pass that exam. But suppose on the day of the exam you get a headache or a troublesome illness that causes you to answer a few fewer questions, and instead of University X you are admitted to another university, and this is a great loss for you. So you constantly curse yourself and fate, saying, “Why did I fall ill today, causing me to answer a few fewer questions, and now I am forced to go to such-and-such university?” In any case, when you enter that university, you see that a person of the opposite sex is very suitable for a relationship, and then you say to yourself, “How good it was that I did not answer those few questions well!” Thus, for a while, what was a calamity for you becomes a source of happiness. Later, you marry that person of the opposite sex, but unfortunately, after marriage it turns out that your opposite-sex partner was infertile, and now being admitted to that university becomes a calamity for you again. Then your city is bombed, and your friends each lose one or two of their children; then you are happy again that “How good it was that I did not have children!” That is, you can never say that this is the final day and the result will never change again. So the case of whether this event that occurred is to my benefit or detriment is never closed. The more you expand the temporal and spatial intervals, the results can change. Hence, one can never understand whether being admitted or not to that university was to one’s benefit or detriment. Aristotle says, “Until you have placed someone in the grave, you cannot know whether they lived happily or miserably.” Until the very last moment, a life that has been entirely full of success may, in its final moments, encounter a catastrophic failure that makes people say, “Thank God I am not in this person’s place.” Therefore, you can never understand what result an event will ultimately have for you.
8- Lower the flame of your expectations from your fellow human beings as much as you can. In this case, if I receive a benefit from others, that benefit tastes very sweet to me, and if I do not receive a benefit, I have lost nothing and do not face a bad event. This expectation should not be held in any of these 5 groups of people: 1- Relatives such as father, mother, sister, and brother, 2- Spouse, 3- Colleague, 4- Friend, beloved, 5- Someone we come into contact with by chance. Of course, we know that in kinship, friendship, and love, these expectations arise very often. When you have expectations, you are anxious because you have placed part of your life's burden on the other person's shoulders, and now you do not know whether they will carry out this part or not.
9- In general, one should not pin one's hopes on future events. One should not pin one's hopes on any specific phenomenon. Hope is praised in all religions and creeds except Buddhism, which is very opposed to hope. Buddha's point is this: suppose we place the entire universe within a circle; he said that one cannot pin one's hopes on any part or object that falls within this circle, because for that thing to be able to work for you, it needs the cooperation of the rest of the beings in this circle. Suppose I pin my hopes on this lady or gentleman, and I have great hope that they will solve this problem for me, but the issue is that the entire machinery of the universe is not in the hands of this lady or gentleman. For this lady or gentleman to be able to fulfill the hope I have pinned on them, they need the cooperation of the entire universe, and it is possible that the entire universe will not cooperate with them. Therefore, Buddha said that in this respect, you cannot pin your hopes on any being, because for that being to fulfill your hope, it needs the cooperation of the entire universe, and we know there is no such guarantee. Buddha knew that we pin our hopes on beings, and each of these beings is less than the entire universe, like the links of a chain whose strength depends on the weakest link present in it. Buddha said that pinning hopes on a being when you do not know whether that being can help you or not is, in fact, a postponement of our project. The question that Kant first raised was this: if I cannot pin my hopes on any being, then how can I live well? We will address the answer to this question later.
10- In order for our anxiety to decrease, we must not consider others to be so free. The more you consider others to be free, the more your anxiety in life increases. Have you noticed that regarding others, we consider them to be freer and more autonomous than they are, but regarding ourselves, we imagine ourselves to be less free and autonomous than we actually are? For example, we blame others for their bad behavior, but we do not know how many calamities and problems they currently have in their lives. To the extent that we consider others to be free, we feel more resentment towards them. I should not think that only I am subject to internal and external determinisms; rather, I must also imagine others in this way.
11- If we want our anxiety to diminish, we must not consider ourselves the god of the world. It is said that when Abraha's army came from Abyssinia to destroy the Kaaba, the siege of Mecca lasted a long time and they could not enter. Abd al-Muttalib was the chief of Mecca and requested a meeting with Abraha. They asked Abd al-Muttalib what he wanted. He said, "Your soldiers took several camels from us; order that these camels of mine be returned to me." Abraha said, "Your words were very contrary to my expectations. You are the chief of this city and renowned for wisdom. Instead of coming to negotiate peace, you are concerned about your camels." Then Abd al-Muttalib said something that seems heartless and irresponsible on the surface, but in reality, there is a profound wisdom behind it. He said, "I am the owner of my camels and must defend them. The Kaaba has a Lord who must defend it Himself." The meaning of this statement is that the limits of each person's responsibility are equal to the limits of their authority. How narrow are the limits of our responsibility? Our authority is just as narrow. A portion of our anxieties stems from the fact that each of us thinks we have come to change the course of history, for example, we have come to lead Iranian society to such-and-such a place, and so on. That is, we have actually taken upon ourselves the work that God should do. What is incumbent upon us is to do the best possible work within the sphere of our authority. Everyone's responsibility is proportionate to their authority. In reality, we have somewhat high expectations of ourselves, which causes anxiety. The more we overestimate our abilities, the greater our anxieties. For any task we undertake, we are only responsible for performing that task in the best possible way. When something is not within your control and you worry about it, you have not helped others, but you have harmed yourself. Let us never imagine ourselves to be more important than we are; therefore, we must know that we are not that important.
12- Many times, because we have caused our father or mother pain, we are angry with ourselves and torment ourselves. Living ethically does not mean that you live in such a way that no pain or suffering reaches others from you. Living ethically means that no unnecessary pain or suffering reaches others from us. If I am ethical, I behave, live, and am in such a way that no unnecessary pain or suffering reaches another from me. We are not responsible for the pain and suffering that others impose upon themselves. The psychological formula for narcissism is that a narcissist is someone who says that everything that belongs to me, solely because it belongs to me, is better than other things that belong to others. For example, my homeland or my religion is better than other countries because they are not my country or religion. Now, that thing could be one's homeland, field of study, house, spouse, parents, or anything else that a narcissist considers superior to the things belonging to others. Hence, the narcissist says that these things that belong to me are preferable to the things of others, solely because they are mine. For instance, if the daughter of a narcissist adopts a lifestyle different from her father's, she causes her father pain, but this pain of the father is due to his narcissism, not his daughter's behavior. When narcissism exists in an individual, it creates seven diseases of thought. A person who is narcissistic has a positive prejudice toward themselves and a negative prejudice toward others; they have fanaticism, dogmatism, rigidity, immoderation, aversion to reasoning, and superstition. A narcissistic person is afflicted with these seven intellectual plagues. If the view were that a person must live in such a way as to cause no one any kind of pain or suffering, the first thing that would be sacrificed would be ethicality itself. Moral sentimentalism is this false claim, meaning that being ethical means living in such a way that no one suffers any pain from you. Ethics contains a rationalism, or rationalistic element, in that if someone is suffering because of their false beliefs, it is none of our business. When we hold this moral sentimentalism, our children grow up spoiled and pampered because we want to cause them no pain or suffering, and we act according to their every wish or whim. One of the sources of our anxiety is that we think no one should be hurt by us. So, if you are living ethically, it does not matter whether others are hurt by you or not.
13. Another pain and suffering we may inflict upon ourselves is that we may not forgive our own past. Self-forgiveness is very important; Seligman says that a person cannot forgive others until they forgive themselves. Some of the mistakes I made in the past are reparable. The part that is irreparable, the moment something has passed, it is beyond the domain and power of any being, even God. The moment something has passed, it is beyond the domain and power of any being, even God. Now, I will make amends for that part of the past that I can, but as for the part I cannot make amends for, what benefit do I bring to myself or others if I constantly torment myself? One instance of unnecessary pain and suffering is not forgiving yourself for the irreparable past. When I do not forgive myself, my self-respect diminishes and my standing in my own eyes decreases. That is, I fall from my own eyes. I no longer have dignity and honor before myself; this causes me to repeat my wrongdoings in the future. If we consider our past unforgivable, then we permit ourselves, thinking 'I'm already damned anyway,' to commit other wrongdoings. A person who has committed murder will find lying an easy thing to do, provided they feel their case is closed. But if you tell this same person, 'You still have room for reform and can return to square one,' then their behavior will be different. When you can forgive others for their bad deeds, why can't you forgive yourself? So, if you are truly remorseful about the past somewhere, why don't you forgive yourself? That which is our moral duty towards others is also our moral duty towards ourselves. From here, I can be certain that I am remorseful because I have resolved with all my being never to repeat this mistake.
14. One of the sources of anxiety within us is the claims we make. When you make a claim, from then on, you must search the world to ensure the claim turns out to be successful. Because of this, I become anxious, whereas if I had made no claim, whatever existence ordains for me would make no difference. The saying in the Holy Book, 'Do not claim, so that you are not judged,' is a useful psychological statement. When you minimize your claims as much as possible and attribute no knowledge or ability to yourself, whatever happens in the world does not turn out to your detriment. Anxiety does not belong to someone who says, 'Whatever comes, comes welcome.' One must, as much as possible, make no claims so that one can cope with all conceivable, possible, and probable circumstances. This is why psychology advises using mitigating qualifiers like 'apparently,' 'perhaps,' 'maybe,' or 'probably.' In fact, these qualifiers inoculate you against things turning out badly. 15. In the existential sense, we are alone in life. When we use the word loneliness, fourteen different meanings might be understood. The deepest meaning of loneliness is its existential meaning. This loneliness cannot be resolved, nothing can be done about it, and one must come to terms with it. But if we move beyond this loneliness, which is one of the tragic aspects of our life, there is another kind of loneliness in life, which is anxiety-inducing, and we must eliminate it. Every human being needs some form of companionship, association, and company. If these associations have three characteristics, they play a significant role in reducing anxiety, because then, in the social sense, we feel that we are not alone, and this not-being-alone reduces anxiety. These three conditions are:
First, the other party in these associations must face you as an equal, not as someone superior to you. Therefore, a kind of egalitarianism must exist between the two parties for the association to dispel loneliness for both and reduce anxiety. Those who do not treat the other party as an equal in their associations gradually cause the other party to lose their self-esteem, and the harm of such associations outweighs their benefit. That is, the other person must not feel insulted, belittled, or mocked. So, the first condition is that the other party feels a sense of equality with me.
The second characteristic is that the individual must have a rational confidence in the stability of this relationship, knowing that it will last as far as is foreseeable; relationships whose future one cannot predict from one day to the next do not yield this benefit.
The third characteristic is that the other party must have a commitment toward me. That is, they must consider my pain and suffering, to some extent, as their own pain and suffering, and my joy, to some extent, as their own joy.
Someone might meet the first condition but not the second. If someone meets all three conditions, the rational recommendation is to choose these associations. Of course, it is not necessary that your pain and suffering be fully internalized in their psyche, but it is also not necessary that they be completely indifferent to your pain and suffering. If they are completely indifferent, it means they feel no commitment or obligation toward you. Social psychologists say that if we associate with others under these three conditions, it can be effective in reducing anxiety. Such friendships are purely psychological support; you cannot have a large number of friends while maintaining these three conditions for all of them, because observing these three conditions is difficult. One of the findings in the research of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who is remembered as the psychologist of death because she led a team for forty years on the psychology of the dying, was that she said when a person is in a state of dying—when you are certain they will not leave this bed alive, whether they live two more years or bid farewell to life tomorrow, because in reality, it is their subjective certainty that matters, not the objective certainty of the doctors—from the moment I, the patient, have a subjective certainty that I will not return home alive from this bed, one of the realities for the dying person is that they are intensely terrified of the death they see before them, and many negative emotions overwhelm them. Meanwhile, they have negative feelings about the life they have left behind. Kübler-Ross's research stated that what creates so many negative feelings in individuals toward the impending death or toward the life behind them is due to these five causes. To the extent that I can live in such a way that these five factors are less present in my life, then both my fear of the life ahead diminishes and the feelings and emotions I have about the life behind me diminish. The third of these five factors is: why have I not had selective friendships? That is, friendships that one has not consciously cultivated according to the three factors mentioned. We have many friendships, but none of them are selective. We usually oscillate between extremes; either we open the door to friendship with anyone very quickly, without being able to ascertain these three conditions, or some of us are the opposite, meaning we do not open the door to friendship with anyone at all. Kübler-Ross said that when a person lacks these selective friendships in their life, it is one of the five factors that makes death appear terribly horrifying to the individual, and the person also harbors negative feelings about the life behind them. Psychologists have researched and found that these selective friendships are very effective in reducing anxiety for individuals. And the fewer of these selective friendships we have, even if we have many friendships without these three conditions, the more it will contribute to increasing our anxiety. My friend's commitment to me has a series of signs and symptoms, and also, my friend encounters me from a position of equality.
16—If we were to choose a single story from the Masnavi that is, in my opinion, the most profound, this story I am about to relate is the most important one. It appears at the end of the second book and the beginning of the third book. A man saw a girl in the marketplace and fell in love with her. In the crowd of the market, he lost her, and thereafter he took up residence in that same city. His sole occupation was to wander day and night through all the alleys, backstreets, and avenues at various times in order to find this woman again. Years passed; in Rumi's phrasing in the second book, he says seven years passed, and at the beginning of the third book, he says eight years passed. One night, late at night, a policeman saw a man walking in the streets. The ancients believed that anyone walking late at night must, as a rule, be a thief. The policeman ordered him to stop, and he, out of fear of the policeman, began to run. He reached a dead end, climbed over a wall, and threw himself into the space beyond it, where he saw that the girl was sitting in the courtyard of the house. This man began to bless the policeman, because if the policeman had not pursued him, he would not have shown such persistence and terrified him, which led him to this point where he could find the girl. He was saying, 'This policeman, outwardly, did me great harm, but he did me the greatest kindness.' If he had not seen the girl on the other side of the wall, this man would certainly have begun to curse the policeman. What is the difference between these two scenarios? Why, when he did not see the girl, would he have heaped so much scorn and curses, yet now that he has seen her, he is so grateful? The difference is that this man reached his beloved, and he says that all the twists and turns I have seen in my life, because they led me to my beloved, take on a positive value. But if he had not reached his beloved, all past events would have been bitter and unpleasant to him. Now, Rumi draws this conclusion from the story and says: if you want all the bitterness of your past life to become sweet to you, start living a desirable life right now. That is, if you have begun that ideal life your heart desires right now, then a swift reasoning arises within you, which is this: if my past life had played out any differently from what befell me, I would not have reached this desirable life now. So, now that I have reached this life, I must be grateful for all that past which brought me here. Because, as you know, if a single link in the chain of past events, whether small or large, were different, you would not have exactly this situation you have now. I am now the deterministic resultant of my entire past life. Rumi says: live the life you love right now, and then you will simply say to yourself, 'If a single link in my life were different from what happened in my past, I would not have this life now.' Then the pleasantness and delightfulness of your present life will be diffused over your entire life. Because you see your past life as the effect of causes that have resulted in this present. The lesson Rumi gives here is this: he says that whoever wants to make their past life, which has been very painful, contaminated, and difficult, appear good in their own eyes, so that they even feel joy when looking at it, must make their present life good in their own estimation. This means that many of the anxieties we have will diminish if I begin living the life I have loved right now. Then the meaning of past events will become different for me. This is one of the types of psychotherapy that Rollo May has presented in his works.
17—Living in the present and having a here-and-now life, this kind of living reduces anxiety. Living in the present does not mean that I never have the right to step out of the now. Heidegger said the here-and-now is my nest; a bird that has a nest for itself, yet sometimes necessity dictates that it leave its home to find food. But it returns to its nest again. Our bodies always live in the present moment, but the mind and psyche can travel to the past and the future. Sometimes a decision-making process necessitates that your mind revisit certain places in the past or future so that it can make a decision in the now.
Second, they say live in the present; both the pleasures and the virtues of life depend on living in the present moment. Pleasure means the good feelings that arise in the present, and virtue means living ethically. Whenever you have done something unethical, see whether you were thinking about the past or the future; it is impossible for you to live in the present and commit a wrong act. John Rawls, the American philosopher, introduced a concept into political culture that is also used in moral philosophy. In his book *A Theory of Justice*, he devised the concept of the veil of ignorance.He said that in a country's legislative assembly, if we want the laws passed there to be full of justice, an injection must be administered to these representatives that reduces their self-awareness to absolute zero, so they have no awareness of themselves at all. That is, this gentleman or lady should not remember: am I a man or a woman? As long as they even know whether they are a man or a woman, they might pass the law in a way that favors men or women. If they remember they are a factory owner, they might pass the law in a way that benefits factory owners; or if they remember they are a worker, they might pass it in a way that benefits workers. If they know they belong to the country's religious minorities, they might pass the law to their own advantage. When I know nothing about myself, then I must pass the law in such a way that, when the effect of the injection wears off, I will not have suffered a loss, whatever the case may be. For this, I must pass the law exactly according to justice so that I do not suffer a loss. He said a veil of ignorance must fall over the heads of all legislators; the legislators should know nothing about themselves. Since they do not know what will apply to them, they are forced to act completely justly. He said that since such an injection does not exist, there are mechanisms that we must employ to place legislators in such a state of ignorance, so they try to pass the law fairly. It is the same in moral matters: if someone does not treat you ethically, it is because the past they have had with you is in their mind, or sometimes the future I will have with you is in my mind. Dwelling in the future and the past takes this virtue from our lives and prevents us from treating others ethically. Have you ever seen a thief steal from you because of their hunger right now? No, they consider the future—that their children want to go to university and they must pay their tuition fees. Therefore, because their mind is wandering in the future, they commit theft now. Now, if a thief does not steal this bread right now and dies of hunger, from an ethical standpoint, they have not done anything ugly at all, because ethically, if something endangers your minimal survival, doing that act is permissible. So if a person does not consider the future, they will not steal. Thus, the more we live in the present, both the pleasure in our life increases and the virtue in our life increases.
18—Do not identify with your beliefs, that is, do not feel a sense of oneness and identification with your beliefs. Many of our anxieties arise because we identify with our inner states. Suppose I tell you that your sock has a hole or is worn out. Since I do not equate myself with my sock, I then look, see that it is torn or old, and simply change it. I do this relatively easily because I say, I am not equal to my sock. Therefore, if someone criticizes me, they have criticized my sock, not me; criticism of the sock is not criticism of me. Now, suppose I could treat my beliefs the same way I treat my clothes or my glasses. For instance, someone says a certain belief is wrong, and since I do not equate myself with my belief, I would re-examine my belief, and if I saw it was wrong, I would replace it and thank them for correcting a false belief of mine. And if I saw it was not wrong, I would say, that is your opinion; in my view, it is not wrong. Please show me where it is wrong or unfounded, and if I saw you were right, I would thank you for ridding me of a false belief. But when a person's belief is criticized, they imagine that they themselves have been criticized, and they become anxious and agitated, because they hold the view that their belief is equal to themselves. The same point made about beliefs also holds true for feelings and emotions. If someone criticizes our feelings and emotions, it is as if they have criticized us, and then we become anxious. The flaw of beliefs is that they may not be true or justified, that they may be unfounded. Our feelings and emotions do not have truth or falsity; rather, they are appropriate or inappropriate. My hope in you was something it should not have been; my anger toward you was there even though the anger was inappropriate. Our desires have neither truth nor falsity, nor appropriateness or inappropriateness; rather, they are reasonable or unreasonable. One of the greatest sources of our anxieties is that we identify or feel a sense of oneness with these three psychological states of ours. If someone deems one of our beliefs false, or one of our feelings and emotions inappropriate, or one of our desires unreasonable, we become upset. If we practice and come to understand that we should not identify with any of these three, and know that these are my possessions, not myself—just as glasses or socks are my possessions, not myself—I have my beliefs, not that I am my beliefs; I have my feelings, not that I am my feelings; and likewise, I have my desires, not that I am my desires. If I treat these three as possessions, not with an emotional transaction or oneness or identification, and do not consider myself one with them, then you will see how much our anxieties diminish. Frege had a thesis in the philosophy of mathematics. Russell wrote him a letter and argued that this belief of yours is incorrect. Frege wrote back to Russell, saying, Dear Russell, your letter has ruined the work of 27 years of my life, but I am very happy to have emerged from a 27-year illusion. Such a person will never have anxiety.
19—In the philosophy of life, there is a discussion called life images. The discussion of life images is this: everyone, if they are inclined toward self-depth, understands that they have a metaphor for their own life, and their entire life is shaped based on this metaphor. This metaphor is called a life image.
It is said that everyone has an image, a notion, or a conception of their own life. For example, some people's image of life has been that we are a bird in a cage, because their conception was that we have a great divine spirit and then we have come here, that is, into the cage of the body, and become trapped. Naturally, their entire life is based on this metaphor. When you hold this metaphor of the bird in the cage, these questions arise for you: first, where did this bird live before? Second, who built this cage? Third, what happened that the bird left that space before the cage and came into this cage? Fourth, how can the door of this cage be opened somehow?
Philosophers have discovered 40 notions that humans have used so far; now, if someone's metaphor is that I am a prisoner in a prison, in the previous metaphor we asked what fault the bird committed, but in this metaphor we ask what sin did I commit to deserve prison, and how can a tunnel be dug into this prison,
who is the prison warden? One metaphor is the metaphor of a play or a playhouse, meaning a scenario and a theater where each of us appears on the stage and performs a role for 70 seconds, and then these questions arise: who wrote this scenario? Who gave me this role? Until when must I perform this role? What is the best way to perform this role? And who are the spectators of this role? Someone considers the metaphor of life to be a marketplace; for instance, the Quran considers the metaphor of life to be a marketplace, constantly speaking of people incurring loss, people making profit, who sells their soul to God, who sells their wealth to God and lends to God, and whoever lends to God, He will repay their loan tenfold. If these images reach the level of the individual's own awareness, the individual can create significant change within themselves and alter their image or see the flaws in their own image. Depth psychologists usually keep prodding their patient to see what their image of life is, and they enter into dialogue with that image. But because this matter rarely reaches the level of our own awareness, and we usually do not deal with a psychologist who tells me, 'Your image of life is this, so be aware that it has these disadvantages, these advantages, and these benefits.'
There is one image that is very effective in reducing anxiety, and that is that life is a dance. This image was first invented in the Hindu tradition, but psychologists took notice of it. The difference between dancing and walking down the street is that when you walk down the street, someone catches up with you and asks, 'Where are you going?' and you say, 'I am going to buy bread.' If you went and the bakery was closed, this walking of yours was futile, because you traveled a path that did not lead you to your destination. But if someone is dancing and you ask, 'Why are you dancing?' they say, 'For the sake of having danced.'
Of course, not someone who dances as a professional dancer, but a dance that one does at home and only for oneself. Here, failure in that sense does not exist, because dance is the only movement where the path and the destination are one. In going to the bakery, we could speak of success and failure, but in dance, there is no talk of success. The only evaluation is whether you dance well or badly. Those whose image of life is that life is a dance mean that they do not want to arrive somewhere in life; they only want to live well. Most of us want to arrive somewhere in life. For example, a student toils their entire life, and the night before their doctoral dissertation defense ceremony, they have an accident and die. Almost all of us say, 'What could be a greater tragedy than this?' Because we consider life a path where the individual must arrive somewhere, and since they died without reaching where they were supposed to arrive, we become sad. But if someone says that in life, one should not arrive anywhere, life lies in whether you danced well or not.
Situational anxiety is the anxiety that arises for a person due to situations, and existential anxiety is the anxiety that has nothing to do with situations, but is with the person throughout their entire life.
20-One part of our anxiety is the haste that modernity and modernism have created in our lives. Haste is always anxiety-inducing. In modern life, any kind of slowness means falling behind. The more modern, the more haste is required, and if we do not have haste, we will in fact fail and fall behind. It is predicted that in the coming years, milliseconds will also affect the fate of companies and factories, meaning that a company deciding a few milliseconds earlier to do such a thing or make such a decision will have its situation greatly changed. Well, this world is a world of haste. Therefore, in addition to having speed, the speed of our speed must also increase day by day, and this creates anxiety. If you go to a remote village in China or our own country now, you feel as if life moves slowly and everything has slowed down, and of course, this life has more tranquility, but that life is not transferable to a developed modern city, because you will in fact fall behind. Well, this necessity multiplies anxiety. Buddha said, when I eat, I just eat, and when I sleep, I just sleep, and when I rest, I just rest, and when I speak, I just speak. But we cannot do this, and in his view, this was more important than traversing the earth and seeing through walls—that a person be engaged in one task at every moment of their life. This is not possible for you today, because you are doing several things at once, and if you want to abandon this method, you will not achieve a certain meaning of success, which was discussed in previous sessions. Well, here you are in fact placed at a crossroads: to have a hurried life with anxiety, or to have a calm life, but reduce a part of your success so as not to have anxiety. Many books have been written on this subject, and one of them is the book Slowness by Milan Kundera, which shows how haste endangers our true Self, not our ego, because our ego is being strengthened through this very hurried life, since the ego's survival depends on success, but it is destroying the self, or our true self. So the solution in this modern world is to be less contaminated by this modern world; otherwise, one cannot remain completely aloof from this modernity, but one can be less contaminated.
۲۱- Modern life is anxiety-inducing in yet another way, and that is that modern life is complex, and complexity is always accompanied by a kind of ambiguity, and it is ambiguity that causes worry. Two or three hundred years ago, even if someone were completely alone, they could more or less fend for themselves. There are stories in world literature, such as the story of Robinson Crusoe in the West or the story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan in Arabic and Persian literature, which tell of Hayy ibn Yaqzan or Robinson Crusoe being on an uninhabited island, yet they are entirely capable of meeting their own needs by themselves. But in today's life, outside of the field in which you specialize, you know nothing else. For example, if our refrigerator breaks down, we cannot fix it ourselves. The division of scientific and social labor has become so extensive that it has caused you to specialize in a very, very, very narrow slice of life. You are heavily dependent on others in various fields, and life cannot be lived without the presence of others. This creates two further aspects: one is that I realize how much my life veers toward impossibility if others withdraw their support even a little, and the other is that I do not know about those who are entering my life—and indeed entering to meet my needs—I do not know to what extent they are not deceiving me and to what extent they are behaving honestly with me. Especially if you know that large capitalists block much research that harms their interests, manipulate many statistics, it is possible that the psychologists and sociologists in their employ, and even the nutrition and pharmaceutical specialists in their employ, might be bribed and present you with a series of so-called research studies, so that you consume the substance they have produced. Such things were meaningless a hundred years ago. Now, you can only buy many goods based on the seller's word; for instance, they say this pair of glasses, and this pair, and this pair cost this many rials, and that one costs that many rials, and I do not understand whether these glasses really differ from one another or not. Everywhere, the division of labor has occurred to such an extent that you are always faced with a state of not-knowing, and you do not know whom to trust. Now there are companies that sign contracts with yoga groups so that the yoga instructor will say that when doing yoga, one must wear this clothing. Therefore, this state of not-knowing greatly increases anxiety. In reality, we ourselves do not have the power of judgment everywhere and do not know whether to trust what is published or not. This is today called anxiety arising from the social division of labor; hence, I must trust a society that is not trustworthy. These two factors—namely, one, acceleration, and the other, the complexity and ambiguity that have arisen in modern life—are anxiety-provoking, and nothing can be done about it, except that one can become less entangled in life. The more simply a person lives, the less they value the judgments of others, and the more they suspend competition and success in their life, all three of these factors cause the factors of acceleration, complexity, and ambiguity to arise less for them. Therefore, it is inevitable that we trust those who are not trustworthy, and individuals always remain in this anxiety that they might be deceived. And this issue is not merely economic; for example, you and I might consume a food substance for a long time, and later it might become clear that we should not have consumed this substance, and so on.
22—This point is similar to the previous one, with the difference that the previous point was in the realm of practice, while this point is in the realm of theory. Consider, for example, that our ancestors had a worldview and, in accordance with that worldview, a way of life; it was genuinely possible for them to go through their entire lives without learning of any other worldview or any other way of life. For this reason, they lived in a certainty that the good and correct worldview was precisely the one they held. Now, we are increasingly realizing that for every issue on which we adopt a stance, we find that others have adopted opposing stances. This is called theoretical ambiguity in the world, and the world is becoming more and more theoretically ambiguous by the day. An interesting book has been published titled Just When I Understood the Meaning of Life, the Philosophers Changed It. It is said that in philosophy there are no answers, but the problem is precisely that in philosophy, for every subject, there are thousands of answers. The problem is not that philosophy does not provide answers to questions, but that it provides a thousand answers. Thus, this is a form of knowledge that has emerged today; even up to the early twentieth century, that is, the beginning of the First World War, this ambiguity in understanding the world did not exist to such an extent. For instance, I decide to base my life on the belief in the existence of God, and then I think, what if God does not exist, and vice versa. Well, this ambiguity is anxiety-inducing. To reduce this anxiety to some extent, or to offer a solution, the individual must, as far as possible, expel two things from within themselves and be content with what remains after expelling these two. One is to truly set aside self-interest, and when examining opinions, to absolutely disregard one's own gain and loss, and not say that my benefit lies in this opinion being accepted or that one being accepted, because this matter prevents us from grasping the truth of the matter among various opinions. The other is for the individual to become distrustful of authorities, to become distrustful of totalitarian systems; otherwise, the next totalitarian system will change your mind. But more than this cannot be done, and we are all condemned to this anxiety, especially if we are people for whom theoretical matters are serious, because there are people for whom theoretical matters hold no importance.
23—What is known in philosophy as chance is more commonly known in ordinary understanding as luck or fortune, and to reduce anxiety, we must accept that this has an effect on life. Of course, what I mean by chance or luck and fortune is anything that happens in our lives in which our actions and reactions have had no influence whatsoever. For example, if my father dies in an accident, or my uncle goes bankrupt, or an earthquake occurs—I am not involved in it one iota. We must not imagine that everything that happens to us is either through genetics, or through upbringing, education, culture, or age. So, we must know that things may happen to us in which we played no role. When we have no role in them, we should no longer be anxious about them either; we should not behave as if we ourselves played a role. Therefore, accepting these matters is essential for reducing anxiety. Sometimes an individual theoretically accepts that they bear no responsibility for an event, but their behavior in practice shows the opposite. Of course, accepting these things requires not only will but also time and planning. Voluntary matters are of two kinds: one kind requires only will—for example, I tell you to raise your hand, and will alone is sufficient to perform this act. The other kind, however, are matters that require time and planning in addition to will, such as losing weight.
۲۴- توجه به بی ثباتی جهان مهم است و بودا کسی بود که می گفت که تنها واقعیت ثابت جهان بی ثباتی است. ما باید قبول کنیم که در همچین جهانی زندگی میکنیم، آدم باید وارد بشود که بداند آنجا که وارد میشود لوازمی نیاز دارد و اگر آن لوازم را رعایت نکند نباید وارد این حوزه یا دایره بشود. اگر نخواهی رعایت بکنی فقط آزار میبینی. ماهم یا باید در دنیایی بیثبات وارد نشویم که چنین امکانی وجود ندارد، اما حالا که وارد شدیم باید قبول کنیم که در جهان بیثباتی وارد شده ایم و قبول کنیم که هیچ چیزی زمان بقا ندارد، یعنی نمی توانیم بگوییم این حالت همیشه میماند. این مهمترین آموزه بودا بود و نتیجه این آموزه این است که اگر چیز مثبتی در زندگی ما پیش آمد، خیلی شاد نمیشویم ، چون می دانیم هیچ تضمینی برای بقای آن وجود ندارد، از آن طرف هم وقتی چیز منفی هم در زندگی من به وجود آمد مطلقاً به دل نگرانی و اضطراب و یأس و ناامیدی نمی افتم، چون میدانم ممکن است لحظه بعد عوض بشود. مولانا میگوید:
جمله بی قراریت از طلب قرار توست طالب بی قرار شو تا که قرار آیدت
یعنی جهانی که در آن قراری وجود ندارد ، اگر تو می خواهی در آن قرار پیدا بکنی، آنگاه بیقرار میشوی. مثلا من یک کتاب میخرم و میخواهم آن را نو نگه دارم یعنی نمی خواهم در این کتاب بی قراری به وجود بیاید، آنگاه اگر بخواهم آن را به کسی قرض بدم اضطراب دارم، ولی اگر از اول کهنه شدن کتاب را بپذیرم و تغییر و بی قراری را بپذیرم به راحتی آن را به دوستانم قرض می دهم یا مثلاً یک دوستی دارم که می خواهم همیشه محبت آن را نسبت به خودم نگه دارم و در واقع قرار می خواهم، ولی نمی دانم که دل مردم دست من نیست و ممکن است روزی دوستی من در دل او کهنه شود و محبتش کم شود ، ولی اگر از اول بی قراری دوستم را بپذیرم ، راحت با وقایع بعد از آن کنار می آیم . دوستی میگفت: کسی که میگفت به خاطر یک تار موی من حاضر بود جهان را به آتش بکشد، وقتی یک تار موی من را در آبگوشت دید، می خواست خود من را به آتش بکشد. بودا میگفت هر بار با کسی ملاقات می کنید به خودتان بگویید فلانی سلامی است و وداعی. چون هیچ ضمانتی وجود ندارد که سلام و دیدار بعدی هم رخ بدهد. برای همین بوده وقتی می خواست با کسی خداحافظی بکند از او پوزش خواهی می کرد، چون می گفت ممکن است دیگر زمانی برای این پوزش خواهی به وجود نیاید. خوب این نوع نگاه خیلی اضطراب فرد را کم میکند. همه آلات و امور جسمانی بیرونی و هم روابط و هم رویدادها و هم حالات درونی همه بیثبات هستند لذا برای حفظ همه نباید جلز و ولز کرد.
۲۵-رواقیون اعتقاد به چیزی دارند که به آن می گویند عشق به سرنوشت، هر کدام از ما با یک سرمایه هایی مثل سرمایه های روانی و جسمانی و ذهنی و فرهنگی و جغرافیایی به دنیا می آییم که باید عاشق این سرمایه ها باشیم، مسلما همه ما با یک سرمایه مشابه به دنیا نمی آییم، یا با ۸ سرمایه ذهنی مثل قدرت یادگیری، قدرت به خاطر سپاری، قدرت یادآوری، هوشبهر، سرعت انتقال ، قدرت تفکر، عمق فهم و قدرت اقناع متفاوت به دنیا می آییم. ۵۴ یا ۵۶ سرمایه روانی هم روانشناسان کشف کردند که اینها هم در افراد مختلف متفاوت است، مثلاً قدرت مدیریت از بچگی در آدم ها فرق میکند، رواقیون میگفتن به این سرمایه هاتون عشق بورزید و هیچ وقت آرزوی کمتر یا بیشتر برای هیچ کدام از آنها نداشته باشید. سرنوشت در مکتب رواقیون یعنی این ۵ عاملی که در دست ما نیست (۱- تواناییهای جسمانی،۲- ذهنی ،۳-روانی،۴-ویژگیهای اقلیمی جغرافیایی ،۵- ویژگی های فرهنگی تاریخی) ، اگر به اینها رضایت بدهید آن وقت چنان آثار مثبتی از این رضا دادن میبینید ، که کمکم به سرنوشتتان عشق می ورزید. رابرت سولومون فیلسوف آمریکایی که مایه های اگزیستانسیالیستی را با روش تحلیلی با هم گرد آورده است، کتابی دارد بنام معنویت برای شکاکان ، سخنش بر سر این است که اگر کسانی بر سر دین و مذهب آنچه که در قدیم وجود داشت موضع شکاکانه دارند، شق دومش این نیست که لزوماً بروند ماتریالیست بشوند، میشه آدم نسبت به آنها آشنا باشد ولی ماتریالیست هم نباشد، لذا راه سومی را معرفی میکند به نام معنویت. میگه اولین کاری که برای زندگی معنوی باید کرد این است که این اندیشه رواقیون را آزمود، بدین صورت که تو اول سرنوشتت را در این ۵ عامل بپذیر و بعد با پذیرشش شروع به زندگی کردن کن، چنان زندگی در نظرت لذت بخش می شود که این پذیرش تبدیل به عشق به سرنوشت میشود، ولی ما معمولاً نسبت به بعضی از این ها راضی نیستیم مثلاً میگوییم چرا زیباتر یا باهوش تر نیستم؟
26- The feeling of guilt or moral error also greatly increases anxiety. There are two groups whose anxiety in life is low in this regard: those who have turned up the flame of their idealism in life, but have also turned up the flame of their action, like Buddha or Rumi, Francis of Assisi—that is, at some point they realized they must increase their idealism but also understood they must pay the costs of this idealism. The opposite is the second state: those who understood they had raised the flame of their idealism needlessly, so they lowered it, and they act in proportion to that lowered flame. But those who suffer are the ones for whom the gap between their idealism and their action is large, meaning they have high idealism and little action; well, these people constantly blame themselves. It seems the solution for confronting that feeling of guilt appears to be no more than two things: A person who sees they cannot achieve their ideals would be wise to lower the flame of their idealism. Regarding the body, we can very easily say that my body is not a weightlifter's body, but regarding the psyche, we cannot recognize our true potential and that my mind is not Einstein's mind. Second, the idea of innocence is nothing more than an illusion. No one in the world is innocent. And therefore, for me to live in such a way as to be innocent is an illusion, and so we should expect to make fewer errors from ourselves, not to be error-free. There is a book called Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo, the famous Italian writer of the late nineteenth century, in which the hero of the story, Zeno, decides to quit smoking, even though he was a heavy smoker. He says, from tomorrow morning, I will absolutely not smoke. The next day, he does not smoke until noon, but this organism, accustomed to 120 cigarettes a day, you can be sure will rebel. It is near noon when he sees he must smoke, so he smokes. Then he says to himself, well, since our pact was broken today, let's continue smoking for the rest of today; I will quit smoking tomorrow. The next day, he repeats the same thing. After a while, he sees it is useless and says, from the beginning of next week, I will no longer smoke. This too falls through, and he says, this week is gone, from next week I will quit this smoking. Some time passes in this weekly manner, then he says, this month we have been polluted, from the first of the next month I will no longer smoke, and again months pass fruitlessly. Then he says, from the beginning of next year, I will no longer smoke, and he repeats this for several more years. After that, the process becomes once every few years, and he says, from the ninth of the ninth, 1399, I will no longer smoke, thinking, for example, that this day has a special property. This means you wanted not to smoke from tomorrow morning, but you will keep smoking like this for the rest of your life, because no day is different from the day before; that is, the very thing that defeated yesterday's plan will defeat today's as well. But if you say, I smoked 120 cigarettes today, tomorrow I want to smoke 119, this decision does not seem heroic or revolutionary. However, if we say, I do not intend to quit smoking, a body accustomed to 120 cigarettes can make do with 119; we smoke that amount for a while, then you say, I want to make this 118 cigarettes per day. This decision is not heroic, but it will certainly lead to a result, and after 3 years, you will definitely see that you have quit smoking. The same applies to moral errors. If you want to suddenly become innocent from tomorrow, you cannot, but if you reduce your moral errors little by little, you can achieve results. The idea of innocence is what keeps you in the swamp of corruption until the end of your life. These anxieties that arise from the feeling of guilt are reduced in this way.
27- Very often our anxieties stem from the fact that life is not meaningful for us, and we feel that life has fallen into repetition and daily routine. Then, in order to escape this repetition, we do things that, as it happens, increase anxiety. For example, to flee from boredom, we turn to addiction. If life is meaningful, one does not become bored by its repetition. Why do you not become bored by the repetition of eating? Because we believe that this eating has a meaning, and that is creating health. You never say, "Well, we had breakfast; until when must we have breakfast every day?" Yet we have breakfast every day because we know what it does for us; eating and bathing are meaningful for you. If you believe in discovering the meaning of life, you must discover its meaning, and if you believe in fabricating the meaning of life, you must fabricate a meaning for your life. I believe we must fabricate a meaning for life, meaning we ourselves must bestow meaning upon life. That is, we engage in meaning-bestowal, not meaning-discovery, because life has no meaning that can be found. When we have found or bestowed meaning upon our own life, then we emerge from boredom and our anxiety diminishes.
28- There are pieces of knowledge that, if they increase your suffering, you can at least do something about it. But there are pieces of knowledge that, when you know them, your suffering increases, yet you can do nothing about it; they only increase your anxiety. We must consciously withdraw ourselves from such knowledge. For instance, at some point I realize my friend is afflicted with an incurable disease; then I become worried, but it leads me to help my friend. But if I know that there are starving people in Africa, that in a certain country five thousand people die every day, and suppose you can do nothing for them, what benefit is there in being informed of this news? This has no positive effect other than increasing your pain and suffering. This prying, where we want to be informed of everything every day and poke our noses into everything, we do not realize that much of this prying and nose-poking only and solely increases my pain and suffering, because I can do nothing about that calamity. Many of our anxieties are due to information that reaches us, and we are powerless to do anything; we just fret and torment ourselves. A person knows for themselves what kind of news they can do something about; therefore, they should only expose themselves to that news. But news about which I know I myself can do nothing—why should I pry into it, so that it increases my pain and suffering and harms me, while bringing no benefit to those afflicted? Not to mention that hearing too much news creates a kind of hard-heartedness, and the threshold of their compassion constantly rises higher and higher, yet at the same time our anxiety increases. And regarding knowledge, we must possess the wisdom of 'What is that to me?'
29. One of the sources of our anxieties is always that we consider ourselves the victim of an accident or calamity, and this makes us more anxious. If I find out that I have contracted a cancer that 40 million people in the world have, I am more at ease than if I find out I have caught a cold that is the first case in medical history. Because when I know that 40 million others also have this cancer, I say, surely humanity will do something for 40 million people, and we will benefit from whatever they do for those 40 million. But for a cold that has had no precedent until now, what can they do for me? Who would first be motivated to direct medical research toward this cold for the sake of a gentleman like me? And even supposing the research does take that direction, will it yield results? One of the anxieties we have in life is that we think our afflictions are unique afflictions. In depression, the first thing that happens to a person is that they think their pain is exceptional. I am a special case of depression and different from others. We must pay attention that this is absolutely not the case; we are not a special case, and therefore we should not magnify life's problems by considering ourselves a special case. In psychotherapy, it is said that the least a therapist does for you is tell you that you are not unique, and this calms you somewhat. When the psychotherapist says, 'I have encountered five thousand cases like you so far,' this itself reduces the burden of suffering in you. It shows that you are not an exceptional case. The Arabs have a proverb that says, 'When a calamity becomes widespread, it itself becomes a blessing.' Sometimes we know theoretically that we are not a unique case, but we behave in a way as if this calamity has befallen only us, and this increases our anxiety.
30. Socrates in Western culture insisted on something called ironing, and later this idea became very strong among the existentialists, and Kierkegaard wrote a very important book on this subject. Irony means the power to laugh at ourselves. We must have this power. Many of us imagine that either the show of the world must continue forever for us to take our role seriously, or if this show is to continue for only a short while, we do not take our role seriously. Socrates said the right way in life is to know that all of life is a play in which you are one of the performers, and soon the entire stage will be dismantled, yet at the same time, play your role seriously, but know that after a while, this whole stage will disappear, the spectators will also disappear, and they will forget your role. And he said this is achieved by having the power to laugh at yourself. Bergson has an important treatise on laughter, discussing the positive psychological effects laughter has on our lives, and indeed one of its effects is that laughter reduces a person's psychological stress. Socrates did not pay attention to this point but focused on the second point, saying that laughter causes the importance of something to diminish in a person's view. When we laughed twice at an obscene joke, our parents would get upset, because they knew that when we laughed at something twice, the indecency of that subject diminished in our minds. If someone laughs at a saying of the great figures or religious books, it is taboo, because it diminishes its grandeur. Ivan Klíma was one of the greatest intellectuals of Eastern Europe and has a book in which he says the Soviet Union did not collapse with Gorbachev coming to power; it collapsed from the moment we started laughing at the words of the communist leaders. Their grandeur crumbled in our eyes, the subject lost its importance, and then we lost the terror we held toward that subject. If we want to reduce the terror that has gripped us about something, we must laugh at it. If you recount the way you entered the classroom to your friends and laugh about it, or suppose you are a professor and you critique your own professorial style and laugh at it, little by little, your anxiety while teaching decreases. Socrates said we must be able to laugh at all of life, meaning that while we live seriously, we should sometimes laugh at life and remind ourselves that this life does not have much importance and it is we who assign importance to it. In another expression, play our role seriously, but at the same time know that the whole thing is a play within a play within a play.
The world is like a bubble, and what a bubble— Not upon water, but upon a mirage. And what a mirage, one seen in a dream, And what a dream, the bad dream of a drunken wreck
Perhaps if we can attain this outlook, we might not play our role well, which is not right. Socrates said to have this view toward the whole of life, but take your role seriously, yet know that the entire world is just this. It seems that one of the characteristics of Hafez's roguishness is precisely this ability to laugh at the whole apparatus of the celestial wheel and the world, and we usually cannot act in this way.
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[1] Source of the transcribed text: Negaresh Psychology Blog
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Audio of the First Session of the Lectures on “Finding Remedies for Anxiety”
Audio of the Second Session of the Lectures on “Finding Remedies for Anxiety”
Audio of the Third Session of the Lectures on “Finding Remedies for Anxiety”
Audio of the Fourth Session of the Lectures on “Finding Remedies for Anxiety”
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Discussion6 comments
از لطف و سواد علمی و رایگان بخشی استاد ملکیان و نگارنده محترم سپاسگزارم ?
خطاب به امیر آقای ملکیان در ابتدای هر جلسه فرمودن بحث اصلا اخلاقی نیست بلکه فایده انگارانه است. این بحث اصلا عرفانی هم نیست. تمام صحبت هایشان چکیده راه کار هایی است که در طول تاریخ برای کاهش اضطراب از سوی فیلسوفان و روانشناسان و عرفا مطرح شده است. خود آقای ملکیان هم فرمودن همه این ٣٠ راه کار به درد همه نمی خورد بگردید ببینید کدام با با شهود شما میخواند. درباره جنگ هم که فرمودید ایشان برای اینکه زندگی اصیل را که تاکید کردند به هیلتر و استالین ها نینجامد با گفتن اینکه ما خوشی از دیگران طلبکاریم و خوبب به آن ها بدهکار پس جنگی هم در نمی گیرد. رسالت هم فرمودن ماموریت الهی اینها نیست. در دو جلسه درباره ماموریت و رسالت توضیح داده ن پیشترک.
پیداشون کردم.??
اگر معیار رسالت رجوع به درون است که تزاحم رسالت ها تبدیل به جنگ جهانی میشود. سازگاری و همزیستی غیر ممکن خواهد شد. ظاهرا آقای ملکیان از روح ایندیویجوالیته و فضای فکری جهان امروز خیلی آگاه نیستند.
با سلام لطفا آقای ملکیان و ما را با نوشتن یک مقاله یا دست کم یک یادداشت آگاه فرمایید.
وقتی در سخن شما جایگاه خدا متزلزل میشود آیا می توان از عرفان سخن گفت؟