Tired of living, but scared of dying

More explicitly, the plight in which the ego finds itself entangled is the following: The ego would like to have all its desires fulfilled, which means not having desires any longer; but not having desires any longer would be the death of the ego; so the ego would like to continue having desires!

The appeal of old myths evoking the nostalgia of a primordial Eden, of a Paradise Lost where everything was immersed in everything, distinctions were non-existent and harmony reigned (all desires fulfilled), clashes with the will of the ego to continue, that is to continue to have desires. The ego is the living contradiction consisting in trying to experience “totality” and “individuality” at the same time. And, as in the Spiritual “Old Man River”, the ego is “tired of living, but scared of dying.”

The idea of improving itself in order to cope with the situation may appeal to the ego.
Doctors, analysts, even magicians may be consulted for that purpose. But even along this road there is little salvation, because the ego puts up resistance when some considerable measure of success is in the offing. The ego is afraid of changing too much since that would go counter Wits basic need of identity.

There is an old story which I will adapt freely to the situation.

A Young Lady Made out of Salt.

Once upon a time there was a young lady made out of salt who felt such a strong attraction towards the sea (from which she was born) as to wanting to be reabsorbed by it.
One day she made the first step into the water, but two toes of the wetted foot dissolved rapidly. The young lady retreated in anger since, of course, she did not want to lose her individuality. So she turned her back on the sea and started fighting in order to affirm herself more and more, as a separate entity, hoping (senselessly) to come thereby closer and closer to the sea. The young lady, in other words, wanted to become the sea again and, at the same time, to continue to be herself.

She tried to reconcile what is reciprocally incompatible.

Is Man a Useless Passion?

If, at that point, we look for a conclusion, we may be tempted to adopt the celebrated one put forth by Sartre: “Man is a useless passion”. Were it so, the only way open to man would be to bear with courage his radical, inescapable unhappiness.

But thus to conclude is to interrupt the process of understanding. Before doing that, in any case, let us carry this process a bit further.

Is man a useless passion? I would rather say that the ego is. In trying to define the ego we have found that it resists attempts to describe it statically, that is according to the traditional  Aristotelian logic based on “substance” or “essence” whereas it lends itself to be explained in terms of passionate activity, meant to satisfy an impossible desire.

The ego deceives itself into thinking that its real problem is the satisfaction of this or that desire, being led astray by a world which appears composed of durable and lasting things and therefore productive of lasting happiness. This world is only a creation of language, but the ego ignores that and acts according to its false belief.

However, the human being who, under the impact of language, becomes an ego, has the possibility of awakening which, if developed, would destroy the ego. Usually that possibility is dormant; the ego takes itself, its activity very much for granted. The obviousness of the world of words with all its implications is so deep and generally acknowledged that whenever it is questioned, astonishment and derision arise.

A Pirandello Play

In a famous Pirandello play (“Six Characters in Search of an Author”), there is a dialogue between a character (fully conscious of its condition as “character”) and the producer (who performs the role of a man in flesh and blood) during which the former expresses its doubts about the so called self-identity of the latter.

Here is the relevant part of that dialogue:

“FATHER (the character): … and once again I ask you in all seriousness; ’Who are you?’ PRODUCER (turning to the Actors in utter amazement, an amazement not unmixed with irritation):
What a cheek the fellow has! A man who calls himself a character comes here and asks me who I am!
FATHER (with dignity, but in no way haughtily): A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character has a life which is truly his, marked with his own special characteristics. And as a result he is always somebody! Whilst a man … And I’m not speaking of you personally at the moment … Man in general … can quite well be nobody.
PRODUCER: That may be as it may? But you’re asking me these questions. Me, do you understand? The Producer! The Boss!
FATHER (softly, with gentle humility): But only in order to know if you, you as you really are now, are seeing yourself as, for instance, after all the time that has gone by, you see yourself as you were at some point in the past… With all the illusions that you had then … with everything … all the things you had deep down inside you … everything that made up your external world … everything as it appeared to you then … and as it was, as it was in reality for you then! Well … thinking back on those illusions which you no longer have … on all those things that no longer seem to be what they were once upon a time … don’t you feel that … I won’t say these boards … No! … that the very earth itself is slipping away from under your feet, when you reflect that in the same way this you that you now feel yourself to be … , all your reality as it is today … is destined to seem an illusion tomorrow?
PRODUCER (not having understood much of all this, and somewhat taken aback by this specious argument): Well? And where does all this get us, anyway?
FATHER: Nowhere. I only wanted to make you see that if we (again, pointing to himself and to the other Characters) have no reality outside the world of illusion, it would 13 be as well if you mistrusted your own reality The reality that you breathe and touch today … Because like the reality of yesterday, it is fated to reveal itself as a mere illusion tomorrow.

The poor producer does not feel the earth slipping away from under his feet, he is so sure of himself, or perhaps sometimes he does but he is so scared by it that he does not pursue this terrible feeling.

Every now and then, men (producers or not) have a glimpse of their fundamental situation.
They may see the world and themselves with new eyes. When that happens everything shows itself as a reverse of what appeared before; everything seems unreal if compared with the usual, customary reality.

Usually these flashes of awareness are without consequences; just one of those fleeting thoughts which have no impact at all on the kind of life one leads. And even if this sort of realisation happens rather frequently, it can be discarded for a variety of reasons; because, for instance, one sees in it a temptation of the Devil against the Divine affirmation: “The world is not an illusion and you have an immortal soul”; or because the carpe diem is made to prevail.
So, many seeds are wasted. However there are instances in which they give their fruits. But a fertiliser is necessary for that. That fertiliser has a common name: attention. But it must be an attention of a special kind as we shall see presently.

(...)

It is an attention which watches reality in the making, moment by moment, in the here and now of every moment. In fact everything happens in the here and now; there is no other lived time than the here and now, but usually we are not conscious of it.

This attention, therefore, is not discriminatory, has no preferences. It is focussed on what happens to be there.

All this represents a radical change with respect to what we usually do. We interpret immediately a group of sensations and we use a name to symbolise them. To take again an example already made, we say: “I am hungry”, but—paradoxically as it may seem—we know very little the sensations

the sensations which are behind those words. We certainly feel hungry but more than that we know we are hungry; we do not spend time in order to experience those sensations; rather we run to eat something.

This new attention is without presuppositions because any possible presuppositions are or should be converted into an object to be attentive to. It is a detached attention as if answering an eternal question: What happens? What happens here and now?

[The ego experiences not only the present (or, better, what is present) but also remembers the past and anticipates the future. This remembering and anticipating gives the ego a sense of duration, of its temporal extension in the two directions. But memory has its limits; so, beyond these the ego imagines a further past conceived as a (mythical) primordial age; it does the same with the future, especially the far distant future, seen as a kind of Utopia where peace and harmony, as in that glorious past, would reign. In so doing, the ego creates eternal values of a secular or religious nature. The main reason why the ego indulges in this activity is its strong tendency to escape from the present. The ego seems to be alienated from what happens here and now; it takes refuge in projecting itself in to other times already gone or to come. Blaise Pascal had already noticed it: “Man does not know how to live in the present; he is veiled by the shadows of the past or by his planning of the future.” What matters to the ego is to refuse the limitations of the present; it revolts against its being just what it is and nothing else, its apparent insignificance. And words are an excellent vehicle to get out of the now. Everybody remembers the old story of the three stone-cutters who, to the same question, “What are you doing?”, each one gave a different answer: the first said, “I am cutting stones”; the second, “I am earning a living”; and the third, “I am building a cathedral.“ The power of words is such that their meanings can considerably exceed the restricted area of the here and now. Through language the ego quits easily the things which happen in the present, in order to go into the abstract; this is why words poorer and poorer of content and richer and richer in fascination are frequently used.
So the ego has a strong tendency not to be there, where in any given moment it actually is.]

From essay Birth, Life and Death of the Ego
Carlo Gragnani