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NONKONFORMIST: What interests me the most is Ernest Becker, his books, ideas. Could you please talk about the so called immortality projects?

GREG: Sure. Ernest Becker, who died in the early 1970's of cancer, was a cultural anthropologist who synthesized the work of a number of different thinkers into a framework of looking at human psychology from the perspective of examining the ramifications of death and the role which death plays in shaping personality and culture. Becker identified that humans are trapped psychologically between two concurrent modes of thought: the temporal and the eternal. From the perspective of the temporal, Becker noted that humans are animals, and that as animals we bleed and mate, and die and are born and suffer and exist as other creatures do. Concurrently, he noted that humans are gifted with the abilities both to reason and also to think of themselves in symbolic terms. Translation: people can imagine themselves doing something more than what they currently are doing or being in a better position than they currently found them selves. Becker took the next step with this though to identify that spirituality and religion is an extension of this thinking: that humans aspire to the heroic, and to the eternal…largely because both provide an escape from the temporal and the animalistic and the eventual withering and death that the temporal and animal world offer. Becker said, with all this in mind, that humans were trapped. We were doomed to die, but would die dreaming of something more, something better, something other than the fate to which we were prescribed. Becker went on to say that in the midst of our being trapped, that the anxiety produced by these two polar opposites of existence caused psychological unrest. He said that we create projects in our lives and in the things that we do in order to expand our lives beyond the immediate fear of the eventual death that awaits us. The point and hope of these projects, on a psychological level is to reach closer to the immortal and away from the finite. These "immortality projects" take the form of our art, our passions, our loves, our self-definition…all of the things which distract us from the inevitable and which serve to soothe our tortured hearts and minds.

NONKONFORMIST: If we call a project an "immortality project", how can that be? An immortality project which brings death? I mean, death is unavoidable, but if we strive for immortality, we should be doing something positive instead? At least this is my interpretation.

GREG: Becker's suggestion was that immortality projects ARE our lives. He suggested that striving to exist beyond the body is an inevitable part of existence in our culture, given the psychological battle between the temporal and the eternal that we face consciously or unconsciously on a daily basis. The question, if we frame it from the perspective of our striving for immortality as a psychological soothing process and not one with any actual reachable goal, is not whether or not we should be doing positive or negative things, but rather whether or not we identify at all what it is we are doing. An important note is that Becker warned against getting caught up in all this: he was aware of the fact that thinking about all of this stuff too much is a trap in and of itself. His ultimate suggestion was to live, and live artistically and passionately, and just offer the things you do to existence itself. It is a process of basically throwing your hands into the air and saying "Here you go!" to the world and to the universe.


POST-INTERVIEW NOTE: The process of coming to terms with one's death denial is not a process of "giving up" or "giving in" ("a process of basically throwing your hands into the air", etc), but rather, living courageously in the face of the unknown.

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