Nodes

(p. 366 M. Heidegger. 1949.)

We sense the movement ,almost in a visceral way, of Heidegger’s thought and the movement is intensely opposed to the normative approach to death. In the above, dread becomes something different. The dread that emerges in the face of death is an opening, an entrance and not an exit. Yet if we ask what the entrance leads to, we are faced with a question that cannot be asked. Heidegger refers to nothingness and once again we are faced with the connotations that this word assumes in the conventional context. We cannot think of entrance as the dualistic opposite to exit, entrance here must be rethought before we can understand the significance of death and dread. "Entrance" longer holds a clear meaning in terms of our ego-related search for surety and definiteness. One could formulate a knowing academic response to the above but we have become inured and mired by the words and the very mode of our expression ironically recaptures us in the configurations of what there already is.

One of the great unheard themes waiting at the fringes of modern consciousness is that of death. In it lies the exits and entrances to the new and the final leave-taking of all consciousness that is dependant on the dualistic forms of action and thought. If we are to hear and " hearken" to what is said by the philosophers and thinkers then we have to adopt the mode of consciousness that infiltrates our world as death.

THE DE-STRUCTION OF DEATH

The cultural deployment of death in the West positions this actuality in terms of the predominant philosophy and primary thought or mood structure that is influenced by the cultural milieu. The Western perspective is generally influenced by the metaphysical, logocentric mode of thought. This mode of thought acts in terms of linear presuppositions that positions death at the end of life as an exit into the unknown. The Western dualistic mode of thought, as Martin Heidegger and others have realised is essentially a subject -object orientation with the subject taking a privileged position over the object. The dichotomy between subject and object places the subject in the definitive position in order to exert control over the object. The relationship is the structural foundation of Western thought and is projected into its reality structure

The ego or self-subject is therefore the locus and centre of ratiocination in the west.
In other words, a system of thought exists which is prejudicial and dominating, with all knowledge being referred for validation to the centre of the ethnocentric ego.

This is central to the understanding of Western culture and it is this aspect which distinguishes it from the East where the subject is displaced form the centre. The effect of this mode of thought as Heidegger realised, is to prejudice the construction of reality and in fact limit the perception of that reality to the boundaries of the human self and the subjective mood state. Nothing can exist or can be known outside of the self, all that is outside of the self is unknown and hence dark with potential . This potential is mostly seen in a negative light as the potential to destroy the security and the centring of all on the self. It flows form this that the fact of death is the greatest threat that can exist to the egocentric centre. It is against this background that death as an exit is to be understood in the Western context. Death becomes, in this strategy, something to be avoided and talked about as the enemy, as something to be overcome. Death is the agent and the intruder into life. This symbolism has greater depth than at first might seem apparent. (This will be explored later). Death becomes the most extreme position on the map of reality and in the failure of modern religious systems, the most feared point in existence.

The position of death in the reality structure of the West produces a reaction to death which is generated as a cultural norm. The response to death is evasion and hence the modern hedonistic celebration of life is in reality a mask which hides the terribly urgent need to avoid death. The lack of religious and spiritual structures to maintain a balance between and supernatural and natural contributes to the growth of the materialistic imperative. This is seen by some as the greatest danger facing the technological world. Heidegger voices this in his realisation that a new meditative mode of thought must be achieved and at the same time he realises the deep legacy of metaphysics cannot simply be discarded without losing much deemed to be valuable. In Heidegger and others we feel the texture forming, almost crystalline in it subtlety, of a new mode of consciousness. This mode of consciousness moves closer to the East where the symbolic and actual threat of death is an entrance to reality and not an exit from it .

CLICK on this image or HERE to access fragment: "the Patient and modern Initiation."

Martin Heidegger understood the meaning of this in his analysis of dread when he referred to the nothingness. This nothingness is the non-being and the void of Buddhism. It is also the experiential world of the shaman. This nothingness emerges as a counter-strategy to the thinking of the West. The following quotation briefly outlines the position of western thought as an egocentric and anthropocentric view of reality.

"The traditional philosophy, which since Plato has maintained that the source of light resides in the intellect, considers the thingness of a thing exclusively in relation to a subject. In the essentialist view, a thing is a substance (an unknown X) to which we attach perceptible properties, called accidents. For ex- ample, a piece of rock is hard, heavy, extended, formless, colour- ful. The thing is not these characteristics but rather that which underlies them. According to Heidegger, to look at things in this way is to turn them into objects of representation: "the image they offer to immediate sensible intuition, falls away. . . . Purposeful self assertion, with its designs, interposes before the intuitive image the project of the merely calculated product. . . .". The representative mode of thinking, which is also that of science, brings about the universal loss of things by flattening out their inner depth and self sufficiency, their standing-in-themselves. Things become commodities when they are perceived in their complete unhiddenness, i.e., as objects. Heidegger is not suggesting that the sciences are false. It is only that what they discover and 'prove' is not the thingness of a thing but one of the many possible cases which can respond to an already established view about things. As Barfeld says, a scientist discovers an objectified lifeless nature because that is precisely what he is looking for. And "if enough people go on long enough perceiving and thinking about the world as mechanism only, the macroscopic world will eventually become mechanism only."