Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection: Inner Deadness

Karl Garcia
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

Our topic this morning is inner deadness — that feeling that even though your life is full (perhaps overflowing) and you live in the midst of plenty, we are all quite comfortable here compared to so much of the world, that somehow there is nothing there there. Perhaps you feel empty — a numbness — a meaninglessness of life — a perpetual feeling of boredom and an indifference to everything. Perhaps you are lonely even when surrounded by acquaintances — you might try to fill this void with cynicism or even turn to an addiction to feel something — anything.

Psychoanalist Erich Fromm described it like this: “The common suffering is the alienation from oneself, from one’s fellow man, and from nature; the awareness that life runs out of one’s hand like sand, and that one will die without having lived; that one lives in the midst of plenty and yet is joyless.”

How does this condition come about ? I mean on the face of it it doesn’t make any sense. Surrounded by friends, yet still feeling lonely ?? Your life is overflowing with appointments and meetings and fun activities, yet you feel hollow inside — there is an emptiness which just doesn’t go away.

I can imagine there are several ways this feeling can creep into your psyche.

One way is the over stimulation we are bombarded with each and every day. The constant stream of messages in our society that say “if you really want to have fun, buy this product” or “you are not really living unless you have done this or gone here”. This steady stream of messages ratchets up your expectations of how someone with a quote “real” life would live. The expectations pile on one another until there is no way that a mere mortal could ever hope to fulfill them. And thus an inner deadness forms as a protection mechanism — I can’t measure up to these expectations so rather than feeling like a failure, I am just going to feel nothing.

Another way this inner deadness could creep into your psyche is if you felt that because of some accident that changed you physically, or because you thought you were missing some character feature, that you could never measure up to social norms. I can imagine that one might develop an inner deadness — a cynicism — to mask the discrimination which inevitably follows from being different from the norm.

These are just a couple of the possibilities.

From personal experience, I can tell you that neither of these paths are inevitable. Working in high tech and living in Silicon Valley has subjected me to lots of stimulation with marketing messages. And I was thrust into the world of people with visible disabilities a couple of years after graduating from college. Yet, I don’t feel that I have ever experienced an inner deadness.

Having gone through these experiences, I do, however, understand how people could react to the situation by forming a protective shield which would lead to an inner deadness — a sense of meaninglessness. It is, perhaps, the easy answer.

While reading about this topic in preparation for this reflection, I came across a quote which I think sums up my feelings. The quote is from Shakti Gawain who is a pioneer in personal development. She says:

Every time you don’t follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, a loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness.

 

Sermon: Full Aliveness in Deadly Times by Nichola Torbett