My First Anxiety Attack 9-18-2010

 I had this topic in mind for awhile, but it came back stronger as I read St. Augustine's Confessions.

My first panic attack came when I lived in a little apartment off of Central Avenue in Anderson, Indiana. It came in the middle of the night as I lay there, half asleep. I thoughton how in 13 trillion years there would be the heat death of the universe, Heat death meaning even the atoms in the paint of every painting, the material of every sculpture, the paper of every book, would be wiped from the universe, as the universe disappeared from existence. I ose out of bed with a pain in my chest and fighting to breathe. I took in the complete end of human civilization. I saw the futility of all human endeavor. 

I was thirty-eight when I had this epiphany.

Thanks to my incarceration, I read St. Augustine's Confessions This passage comes from XI, xiii (16):

 Nor dost Thou by time precede time; else would not Thou precede all times. But in the excellency of an ever-present eternity, Thou precedest all times past, and survivest all future times, because they are future, and when they have come they will be past; but You are the same, and Your years shall have no end. Your years neither go nor come; but ours both go and come, that all may come. All Your years stand at once since they do stand; nor were they when departing excluded by coming years, because they pass not away; but all these of ours shall be when all shall cease to be. Your years are one day, and Your day is not daily, but today; because Your today yields not with tomorrow, for neither does it follow yesterday. Your today is eternity; therefore You begot the Co-eternal, to whom You said, This day have I begotten You. You have made all time; and before all times You are, nor in any time was there not time.

That passage made me think of Einstein. 

It also makes me think I am right in not reading Genesis literally. 

I also see an argument against predestination. It is not that we are predestined, it is tht God being outside of time sees what we cannot. We can all try, but not all will succeed in reaching salvation.

Contributing to my thinking was C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity section "Hope":

(3) The Christian Way - The christian says "Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these exist... If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, nver to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something lese of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same."

Then, too, there were the more secular answers to be found in Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus" and The Rebel: to preserve, to be creative in the face of an absurd universe, paying attention to moment in which we find ourselves in. 

When I had the panic attack, I knew of Camus's solutions. They went out the window as depression took hold of me, and brought me under the cloud of nihilism. Maybe all could have been avoided with proper medical care. That means asking fo rhelp, means thinking someone cares enough to see you get the care, means having enough self-regard to solve the problem rather than merely endure with the hope death's release.

Those reading this with depression, pay attention and get help.

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