Optimism, Part 2

The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things : Fourteen Natural Steps to Health and Happiness
by Larry Dossey, M.D.

(Page 2 of 2)

It is unethical, we are taught, to paint a rosy future for a patient who is facing a grave health challenge when we know the outcome is likely to be the opposite. The problem, however, is that the physician's realism can trigger disastrous results. Consider medical prognosis. When a physician tells a patient she has a fifty percent chance of living twelve months, the patient is likely to interpret this as a fifty percent chance of dying by the end of a year. The patient, failing to understand that the doctor is simply making a calculated guess, often converts the statistical prediction into a death sentence by dying on schedule.

But it is never only a matter of the words that a physician uses to deliver bad news, it's also how they are conveyed. Some physicians are able to express bad news with such compassion that the sense of impending tragedy is annulled. How do they do it? The way physicians always have - through deep empathy and caring for those they serve. They convey a sense of love and oneness with their patient, as if to say, "Together we will do our best. No matter what happens, I am with you every step of the way; you will never be alone."

If profound pessimism can kill, why is it so widespread? Why would evolution have permitted it to persist? What purpose would pessimism have served? "The benefits of pessimism," suggests psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association and author of Learned Optimism, "may have arisen during our recent evolutionary history. We are animals of the Pleistocene, the epoch of the ice ages. Our emotional makeup has most recently been shaped by one hundred thousand years of climatic catastrophe: waves of cold and heat; drought and flood; plenty and sudden famine. Those of our ancestors who survived the Pleistocene may have done so because they had the capacity to worry incessantly about the future, to see sunny days as mere prelude to a harsh winter, to brood. We have inherited these ancestors' brains and therefore their capacity to see the cloud rather than the silver lining."

The survival value of pessimism may date from the era when humans descended from treetops onto the savannas of Africa. These open grasslands were the home of the great stalking cats and were dangerous places. Pessimism would have lent an edge in the struggle to survive - not pessimism that overwhelmed and drove our ancestors back into the safety of the forests, but enough to guarantee wariness and survival.

But perhaps we should not concede too much to pessimism. It is difficult to imagine how Homo sapiens could have advanced from savage to barbarian to civilization without a sense that things might be better. How could we have journeyed from caves to castles, from skins to silks, from dominance to democracy, without optimism? Without the beckoning light of a brighter future, it would have been easy to quit in the early days and settle for the status quo. Something kept us going toward a dawn not fully glimpsed, and optimism is as good a name as any for this indwelling itch.

Ultimate Optimism

It's easy to be optimistic about optimism these days. Research shows that optimists on average get sick less often and live longer than pessimists. The immune system seems to be stronger in optimists, and the cardiovascular system more stable. Optimists are the go-getters, achievers, and leaders who are held high in public esteem. Optimists are generally likable; they pump others up, and people enjoy their company more than that of pessimists. There is a new field, positive psychology, that stresses the value of optimism. Optimism is so hot it recently made the cover of Time magazine.

Optimism is on a roll - and I sometimes feel as if it is about to roll over me. Although I am personally inclined toward optimism, I tremble at the showy, smiley-faced, shotgun variety that is advocated these days by the insufferable optimism merchants. I favor a quiet, indwelling variety of optimism that I keep to myself as a calm certainty. I hesitate to name this attitude; even calling it a "cognitive style," as the positive psychologists do, is going too far. As Stendahl said about happiness, "To describe [it] is to diminish it." My approach is akin to what medieval theologians called the via negativa, the negative way, which emphasized the fullness and reality of the Divine by dwelling not on positive attributes, but on the fact that the Divine is beyond description. Attributing any quality to the Absolute was a form of anthropomorphic idolatry, dressing up the godhead in human form. Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century German mystic, was a proponent of the via negativa. He said, "Then how shall I love him? - Love him as he is: a not-God, a not-spirit, a not-Person, a not-image; as sheer, pure, limpid unity, alien from all duality. And in this one let us sink down eternally from nothingness to nothingness. So help us God. Amen." In keeping with Eckhart's view, perhaps I should call my attitude not-optimism.

For me, linking optimism and the Absolute or Divine, however named, is not hyperbole. The connection is natural: Optimism comes from Latin words meaning "highest" or "best," which is what we consider the Divine to be. Julian of Norwich, England's sublime fourteenth-century mystic, understood this relationship. At a time when the Black Death was stalking Europe, she found no difficulty associating optimism and the Divine. In enchanting prose she exulted, "But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well ... He said not 'Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be diseased,' but he said, 'Thou shalt not be overcome'" Or as poet Maya Angelou has echoed in our day, "You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated."

Optimism unanchored to the Absolute is hard to sustain. If one takes the distant view of modern cosmology, the scenario is bottomlessly depressing. Our expanding universe, scientists tell us, will eventually undergo heat death and will descend into irreversible disorganization. This means that life and consciousness will perish. Against this backdrop, optimism is a worthless, pitiful Band-Aid. But if consciousness is linked with the Absolute, the outlook changes. The Absolute stands above all, including whatever may happen to the cosmos. Our connectedness with the Absolute implies that we share qualities with it - qualities which, much evidence suggests, include infinitude in space and time. If so, we are in some sense eternal and immortal: the ultimate justification for being optimistic, and a finger in the eye of doomsaying cosmologists.

Copyright © 2006 by Larry Dossey. Excerpted by permission of Harmony, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Larry Dossey, M.D., is a former internist and chief of staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital and the former cochair of the Panel on Mind/Body Interventions, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, National Institutes of Health. He is the executive editor of Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing and the author of nine other books on the role of consciousness and spirituality in healing, including the New York Times bestseller Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine. Dr. Dossey lives in Santa Fe with his wife, author Barbara Montgomery Dossey.