The Romeo Error

by Lyall Watson

  Most trance states are conditions of dissociation produced by strongly exciting one focal area of the brain until this produces a reciprocal state of inhibition in other areas. Fire walkers use this technique to prevent the volleys of nerve impulses from the feet arriving at the brain so that, even if they should burn themselves, they feel no pain. It seems likely that religious hysteria provided the same benefits for Christian martyrs and allowed them to enjoy states of bliss even while being eaten alive by lions.

  William Sargant has made a worldwide study of trance behavior and finds that the state is induced everywhere by a combination of rhythmic stimuli and overbreathing. [238] In Zambia traditional healers cast out evil spirits by holding a patient's head under a blanket and over a smoking brazier, where he is forced to hyperventilate by breathing very rapidly and shallowly. In Ethiopia village priests exorcise devils by spraying holy water into the faces of the possessed for so long that they almost suffocate and have to overbreathe. "Bringing down the Holy Ghost" in Trinidad involved handclapping and rhythmic heavy breathing. The pocomania ceremonies in Jamaica are built around "tromping," which is a rhythm of foot-stamping and peculiar breathing sounds. Warriors of the nomadic Samburu and Turkana tribes in Kenya dance themselves into frenzy and collapse to the accompaniment of sustained drumming. When recordings of all these rhythms are played to European audiences, they are equally effective in putting nontribal people into the same trance states. Comparisons have been made between these patterns of sound and the old iambic rhythm, which was thought to be so powerful that it was banned in ancient Greece unless a priest was in attendance. After the epidemics of plague in medieval Europe, dancing to the point of collapse became quite common and was added to the more drastic techniques like flagellation to bring the nervous system to the final state of trance and collapse.

  The point of inducing trance states in all these systems is to heighten suggestibility and to create faith and obedience, but they also have the side effect of releasing nervous tensions, sometimes even those severe enough to be pathological. They produce dramatic cures in cases of severe depression, paranoid schizophrenia, and enduring trauma by inducing excitement that leads to exhaustion, collapse, and a permanent alteration of restoration of brain function. The bushmen of the Kalahari call the collapse state "little death" and make no distinction between that induced by rhythmic dancing and that which occurs in epilepsy. [160] It is quite possible that the two are directly comparable and that spontaneous epileptic fits are brought on by the mind in a desperate attempt to shake itself out of potentially harmful conditions. The ease with which those trained in transcendental meditation can bring about fairly dramatic physiological changes indicates that it is certainly not beyond the capabilities of the brain to create its own internal rhythms of the kind necessary to produce trance and seizure. [288] If this is true, then epilepsy is not the symptom of a disorder, but perhaps the cure.

  There is a well-tried psychoanalytic technique called abreaction in which the therapist tries to release a repressed emotion by forcing the patient to relive the original experience. Sargant treated a large number of World War II soldiers suffering from combat neuroses by suggesting to them, in a trance state or under the influence of drugs, that they were back in the situation of terror and stress that was disturbing them. [238] Often this would stir up intense nervous excitement that produced violent outbursts of emotion and ended in collapse. When the patient came around, his abnormal preoccupations had disappeared. More recently, the same results have been achieved using electroconvulsive therapy, in which the patient is given an electric shock severe enough to produce an epileptic seizure.

  Gregory Bateson has invented the concept of a "double bind" to describe the well-known situation in which, no matter what a person does, he cannot win. [14] Following this concept, the therapist who deliberately pushes the patient in the direction of his symptoms is using a "therapeutic double bind." [13] The technique trades on an equally well-known human tendency to try to verify the unpleasant by seeking repeated experience of it. The tongue keeps probing at an ulcer on the gum and makes it more and more painful.

  No such mechanism is recognized in conventional theories of learning, but I suggest that a positive feedback loop exists in our bodies which reacts to certain kinds of discomfort by increasing the behavior that produced that discomfort, and keeps on with this runaway reaction until a threshold is reached when some major rearrangement takes place. This mechanism could be what Freud called the death instinct, and if it exists, epilepsy could be the manifestation of this feedback in action. I am suggesting that the body monitors itself all the time and that there are certain circumstances that it recognizes as potentially dangerous and treats by giving itself electroconvulsive therapy, thus producing a fit that changes those circumstances and saves its life. On the homeopathic principle of letting like be treated by like, it trades a temporary "little death" for the more permanent big one.

  If electrodes are attached to the stomach of a woman in late pregnancy, the brain waves of the fetus can be recorded. Usually these prove to be slow delta waves at a frequency of less than three cycles per second, but sometimes this regular pattern is interrupted by larger discharges similar to the spiky recordings obtained from adults in epileptic attacks. As the baby approaches full term, these convulsions become more frequent, until at the time of birth they are almost continuous as the child thrashes its way out into the world. We are all born in something like epilepsy, and if we survive the experience it seems highly likely that this could be just the sort of positive conditioning necessary to produce the same response again in later comparable crises. The first seizures in the womb may be brought on by oxygen shortages which occur as the child begins to outgrow the resources of that haven. In the final month of all pregnancies it is common for the child to twitch and stretch as the supply of oxygen begins to lag behind its needs. This results in an increased alkalinity of the blood, and that is what seems to push the brain into convulsions in both the unborn child and the entranced or epileptic adult. The birth seizure may end, as adult ones do, with a brief period of unconsciousness -- perhaps taking place just at the critical time when relaxation is necessary. Immediately the newborn baby begins to breathe on its own, or the adult crisis passes, the seizure stops, and brain waves return to their normal patterns. Very often the subject falls into an easy sleep.

  In several West African languages, there is no word for sleep. The verb for sleep is written "to be half dead." In English we speak of being "dead tired" or "dead to the world," and in much psychoanalytic thinking, sleep and death are regarded as synonymous to the unconscious mind. Is there any connection between the two? People frequently die in their sleep, but is sleep a part of the process of dying? I doubt it.

  It has been known for some time that the brain contains a center that is specifically responsible for maintaining wakefulness. The latest research indicates that sleep occurs when this reticular activating system is influenced in one of two ways. [135] In one, a chemical produced in another part of the brainstem actively inhibits wakefulness, in the same way that a car may be brought to a stop by applying the brakes. This active interference produces light orthodox sleep. The second method involves a different chemical whose effect is analogous to stopping a car by taking the foot off the accelerator. This passive control results in deep paradoxical or dream sleep. If the system that maintains wakefulness is detroyed by injury or surgery, the body goes into a permanent coma. At first the activity of the brain is depressed as it is in light sleep or in the transient coma produced by epilepsy, but soon all brain waves grind to a halt and the subject never wakes again, but becomes a "helpless, senseless, paralyzed blob of protoplasm." [83] In other words, it becomes goth.

  There are no marked changes in brain patterns with increasing age. Recordings from eighty-year-olds look much like those from people of forty. It seems that the brain is normally capable of outlasting most of the other organs and that it is usually the fail
ure of one of these that kills the brain by depriving it of oxygen. The dying brain is calm. As the blood brings it less and less oxygen, a few slow waves appear; these then rise in amplitude and finally slowly wane until the pens on the electroencephalograph are drawing long straight lines. This lack of response is identical to that seen in permanent coma, but it bears no resemblance to the rhythmic and intricate patterns of either kind of sleep.

  Both sleep and epilepsy are related to dying in the sense that they are seen to be symbolic deaths. Freud suggested that the epileptic attacks of Dostoevski were death substitutes brought on by guilt about wishing his father dead. [85] It is possible that a person will unconsciously feign death in some way to try to avoid the real thing. The opossum does just this and there are many examples of animals that respond to situations of great stress by simply withdrawing and going to sleep. Robert Lifton in his study of hibakusha (those who survived the Hiroshima bomb) reports widespread psychic numbing and suggests that in order to avoid losing their senses altogether, the survivors undergo "a reversible form of symbolic death in order to avoid a permanent physical or psychic death." [165] Survivors of concentration camps, medieval plagues, and natural disasters all behave as though they had been stunned or dazed. This numbness or anesthesia is so characteristic of the post-disaster syndrome that it must have survival value. By closing themselves off from forces invading their environment, organisms do manage to avoid damage and destruction, but there has to be some awareness as well. In Nazi camps inmates trained themselves not to recognize or respond to the vicious killings taking place around them, but they also practiced an exquisite alertness to signals from the environment that enabled them to prepare for the next series of blows. [206] This combination of life and death, of hidden sensitivity in an individual apparently dead, is basic to all behavior involving death-feigning and deathlike states. It is a biological condition and an essential part of the economy of survival.

  We find ourselves now in the world of the mortally wounded operatic soprano who always has time for an elaborate aria and several encores before she finally fades away. Dying is not just a brief process that immediately precedes clinical death. It can be very brief in cases of sudden death, but even here it seems there is room for complex flashbacks within a series of interrelated phases tbat follow a predetermined sequence. The weight of evidence suggests that dying is a highly intricate behavior pattern which is by no means confined to preparation for death. It exists throughout life, and parts of it can even be used specifically to foster the continuance of life. We can begin to describe organisms as manifestly "dying to live."

  The key to the nature of the Romeo Error lies in natural history.

  Life evolved from the nonliving and still depends for its efficient survival on the nonsurvival of some of its parts. Life and death are indistinguishable, but there is a third and distinct state of goth and a clearly defined series of events that lead to it. These can be manifest at any time of life.

  What we have called death is merely a change of state, often temporary and sometimes curable. Death on its own has no clinical, logical, or biological reality and exists only as a construct with validity in interpersonal relationships.

  When Romeo found Juliet pale and lifeless in the tomb and assumed that she was dead, she was dead. The fact that she later recovered and became more lifelike does not cancel out her death. When Juliet found Romeo lying lifeless with poison in hand, he, too, was dead, and his death would remain valid even if some quick-witted physician had rushed in from the wings and pumped out his stomach in the nick of time.

  The Romeo Error is all in the mind.

  PART TWO

  MIND

  The mortality rate in life is one hundred per cent. Everyone eventually reaches the point where he or she is considered to be clinically dead, and every society has a well-established pattern for dealing with individuals in this condition.

  The Ashanti of West Africa bury their dead below the surface, lying on the left side with hands beneath the head, in special burial grounds set aside for that purpose. [224] The aboriginal Tiwi of North Australia bury their dead above the ground by covering them with huge mounds of earth that are stamped down into place in a funeral dance. [107] The Bavenda in South Africa shut their dead up in their own houses and abandon them, but many people build special death houses. [260] In the Philippines these are constructed of bricks baked only for that purpose. Among the Maronite people in Lebanon, death houses are built of stone, while in Madagascar wood and bones may be used. The Ovimbundu of Angola put their dead in caves [104], but the hill tribes of India rely simply on exposed rock ledges. [199] The Santee Sioux sewed their dead into deer or buffalo skin and left them in the tops of tall trees. [259] In Assam, where trees are scarce, special platforms are built, and in Tibet, where trees are virtually nonexistent, air burial is practiced. [56] This involves cutting up the body, separating the flesh, grinding the bones into small pieces, mixing it all with barley, and feeding this hash to birds specially summoned to the feast by horn. [246] In Mongolia the eagle is known as the nomad's coffin, and it is considered a good omen if a body left in "some lonely, clean and noble place" is quickly consumed by scavengers. [158] Some people prefer to eat their dead themselves, believing that it is better to rest in the stomach of a friend than in the cold ground. In New South Wales bodies are roasted over a slow fire until the flesh is smoked hard. In Bali the dead are burned entirely on special towers in elaborate and riotous ceremonies. [51] In other parts of the world cremation takes place in huge drums, in the house of the deceased, or in special crematoria. On the banks of the Ganges there are ghats, stone platforms, on which Hindu funeral pyres are lit once the bodies have been washed in the river and smeared with clarified butter. Water may be used instead of fire, as in eastern Tibet where weighted bodies are thrown into the rivers, or in old Scandinavia where important dead were allowed to float in flimsy boats down rivers and out to sea. [143] Sometimes the remains are divided and treated differently, as on Samosir in the Pacific where the body is placed in an underground vault and the skull in an urn on the surface. [18] In Irian the Asmat headhunters keep the skulls of friends and enemies alike as household ornaments.

  Every one of these methods of disposal is accompanied by an appropriate ritual. R. W. Habenstein, in his world- wide survey of funeral customs says, "There is no group, however primitive at the one extreme or civilized at the other, which left freely to itself and within its means does not dispose of the bodies of its members with ceremony." [100] These practices have enormous survival powers and are one of the aspects of human culture most resistant to change. In many cases they provide the most readily available "fossil" relics of lost times and places. Fraser found that the aborigines in New South Wales either buried their dead at full length, lying on their side, trussed up in a bundle or standing erect; or else placed them in a hollow tree, on a raised platform, covered them with logs or roasted and ate them. [82] On the basis of these characteristics alone, he was able to determine the origins of each family in a very mixed racial area and successfully work out their ancestral movements. Anthropologist William James Perry made a superb study of anthropological origins in Indonesia and sorted out much of the confusion which today exists in the thirteen thousand islands of the archipelago, by using the orientation of the dead as his guide. [215] He found that there was a very strong correlation between the burial position and the presumed location of the land of the dead; and that if a Savu islander, for instance, was buried in a sitting position facing the west, the land of origin of his race was invariably also in that direction.

  Throughout all these many and varied ways of dealing with the dead runs one central theme. Implicit in every funeral practice is the assumption that death is not the end, that it marks some kind of transition. [282] In his investigation of the Malayan death system, Robert Hertz shows how death is not regarded as an immediate or final event, but as only one phase of a gradual development. [115] The Malays and many
others recognize a death process that begins early in life, and this belief is reflected in the minds and actions of their communities. The moment that we call death is for them no more than an intermediary stage, a sign that the body should be dealt with in some provisional way. The Malays bury it temporarily. The Kotas of South India cremate most of the body, but save part of the skull. [172] The real funeral follows only some time later when it is thought that the soul has finally decided to move on. During the waiting period, the dead person is considered to be very much present. In a Kota community a dead man has a social personality until his funeral. If his wife becomes pregnant after his clinical death, but before his funeral, the child is his and shares his name, his clan, and his property. Their society recognizes the biological distinction that we have drawn between death and goth.

  In our society the generally accepted opinion is that death is instantaneous. The only reason for the delay of two or three days between death and disposal is to allow preparations to be made and to give time for friends and relatives to gather. The fact that we are almost alone in this view, and that few other cultures regard death in such a precise way, cannot be accidental. Sometimes we even seem a little uncertain in our convictions. The way in which Stalin's body has been moved to and fro in time with the shift of official opinion about him in the Soviet Union is an excellent demonstration of the ambivalent attitude toward death even in a materialistic society. [290] The nature of this and most funeral practices makes it quite clear that the practitioners assume that the dead still live and that elaborate precautions are necessary to make sure that they do not hang around. The funeral rites serve two functions: to keep the dead alive and to keep them away. Hindu cremation ceremonies are directed mainly at inducing the spirit of the dead person to go on to its proper place. The Egyptians took elaborate precautions to confine the dead to their tombs by providing them with everything they could possibly need there. After a Hopi Indian funeral, a relative of the deceased waits at the forest grave on his own and then symbolically closes the trail back to the village by drawing charcoal lines across it. [25] At the climax of a Kota funeral, a pot is smashed in the cremation ground and everyone attending the ceremony runs back to the village without looking back. The living go one way, the dead another; and it seems that the ritual works, because no Kota community is ever plagued by ghosts.