What triggered the Imperatively Visible Concept that immortality is absolutely essential?
When I was only 6 years old, I went through an emotional trauma, from which I am still suffering today, and that has led me to come here and be the only one working in the EIT building during Christmas break. On October 2nd, 1980, only one day before my daddy’s birthday, my aunt Frieda, who I liked a lot because she paid lots of attention to my long stories and actually took them serious, suffered from a sudden heart attack. My daddy succeeded to bring her back to life with CPR and my mom called the emergency doctor in the mean time. The doctor was a quiet man from Rumania. He had short black hear and looked like being around 30 years old. His voice was very quiet and emotionally detached when he asked my grandma about the age of my aunt. My grandma replied, she is 83 years old. And then something happened, which I never expected, i.e. the doctor went on in his empathy-lacking quiet voice to say the few German words, which I still remember as if my aunt had died yesterday. He said “Ich denke, wir hoeren auf.” In English this means, “I think, we are going to quit.” He meant going to quit any efforts and even medical interventions at our disposal to bring my aunt Frieda back to live and to make sure she’ll stay alive. When the doctor said this, it was spooky quiet, as if a ghost would kill my aunt. I felt like screaming into the face of the doctor, YOU MUST DO YOUR JOB AS EMERGANCY DOCTOR, TO DO EVERYTHING IN YOUR POWER TO MINIMIZE MY AUNT’S RISK TO DIE FROM THIS PARTIAL HEART ATTACK REGARDLESS OF HER AGE!!!! But I was only six. I was scared and confused. It was my first real encounter with death. I helplessly looked at my parents and looked at my grandma. I wanted them to demand from the doctor not to use my aunt Frieda’s advanced age against her. Although I was only six years old I strongly felt that no medical provider has the moral right and should be punished harshly when using his patient’s age as a shallow absolutely unjustified excuse for refusing to save their lives. But it was so quiet this time, which I recall must have been around 7.30 p.m. on October the 2nd, 1980, when my aunt laid diagonally across the carpet on the floor of the children’s room. Neither my mom nor my daddy nor my grandma nor my 2 younger siblings opened their mouth.
Although I was furious beyond anyone’s imagination, the fact that my otherwise very confident parents and even my grandma, who was best friends with my dying aunt, i.e. all three adults in the room, who’d I expect to fight for my life if I ever needed urgent medical care, and who’d otherwise readily expressed their opposition to anything they did not agree with or considered unfair, did not even attempt to pressure the doctor on a mental, emotional empathic, moral, medical or legal level, to take his job seriously regardless how he personally felt about my aunt’s advanced age. When something totally unexpected like this happens, i.e. in case of such kind of second degree murder due to medical neglect and intentionally withholding readily available medical interventions without any apparent rational reason for not even trying to save my aunts life, when we still had a chance, I became speechless. I felt like screaming to my parents to not allow the doctor to let my aunt die, after my daddy had brought her back to life already. My daddy is very good in CPR. He’ll fight for everyone’s life as if it was his own. My daddy waited for the doctor’s instructions on how to proceed after restoring my aunts consciousness to the point, where she had her eyes opened and could hear every single word, which was spoken by anyone in the children’s room. When all this happened I stood about 4 feet away from my aunt. I was afraid to move any closer because I was worried of accidentally bumping into something I could not see but which would kill her. Now something happened that I can never forget. My daddy got up from the carpet and stopped CPR! I felt like screaming “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!” “WHYYYYYYYYYY???” “DON’T!!!!!!” “KEEP BREATHING MORE AIR IN HER MOUTH!!!!! Don’t listen to this evil doctor. He has no respect for life! He does not deserve to be an emergency doctor!!! What if she were his aunt???? She is conscious and will most likely fully come back to life if you’ll just give her enough time to get over this medical crisis!!!! Actually, she was already over the hump because apparently her heart was beeping already independently and all my daddy was still doing, was breathing air in my aunt’s mouth. I wanted my mom to call another doctor. I wanted him to be a German doctor, who treats our aunt as if she was his aunt. I felt that this Rumanian doctor had no empathy for Germans because when my entire family looked up to him for help, he indirectly killed by neglect. Even if is negative medical intuition should turn out to be true and all of our medical interventions were doomed to fail this evening, I felt he should at least try anyways or else there would have been no point in the doctor making the trip to our home. Then he could have stayed in his killer-hospital. At least that way he would not have had the opportunity to encourage my daddy from reviving my aunt with CPR. When I was six, my daddy was still very powerful. He would have kept performing CPR for hours to save my aunt’s life, if this disguised killer-doctor, would not have instructed him to stop and let her die, just because he felt no old people deserve resources intensive medical care, unless they are his own relatives. Would he let his aunt or grandmother die like that if he had good chances to prevent or at least postpone death? This I felt would have certainly give my aunt enough time to get over the fear, which is an inherent feature of anyone surviving a heart attack, especially when the doctor is instructing my daddy to stop saving her alive. I felt like being in a madhouse. I could not speak. My otherwise very attentive parents and grandmother did not seem to be aware that I felt so much emotional pain with such a mental intensity that I almost felt as if I was the one dying instead of my aunt. This god dam Rumanian doctor! Why did he have to be on duty when my aunt needed dedicated professional medical help to get over her heart attack? Why did the hospital not send a German doctor with a strong voice, who’d be much more assertive in his speech and actions to instruct my parents to do everything in their power to save my aunt’s life? Why did my aunt deserve such an indecisive foreign doctor, who lacks the kind of strong loud confidence inducing voice, which patients and their relatives need in their struggle of succeeding in overcoming any medical crisis? Why did this stupid hospital send us this absolutely useless and even counterproductive foreign physician, who refused to even say a single word when my parents and grandma looked up to him and expected rational life-saving medical advice? What was he thinking when he condemned my aunt with the only very ambiguous sentence, I still remember verbatim from this cursed Rumanian doctor, “I think, we are going to quit.”? Was he asking my parents, whether they’d approve his proposal to quit saving my aunt’s life? Did he order my daddy to quit CPR and let my aunt die? This doctor showed lack of leadership when everyone is expecting him to take charge of the medical crisis at hand and to maximize the odds for the best possible medical outcome.
I remember not being able to feel anything that evening. My aunt laid dead diagonally across the carpet in the children’s room when I started to understand that everyone expects me to go to sleep as usual. I hid under my blanket and wanted to die. I cried so hard. This was probably the very first time in my life that I felt seriously suicidal. What if I had a heart attack? Would my parents and grandma follow the medical advice of the doctor, if he told them that he thinks, we should quit saving my life? Luckily, I only was 6 and no doctor would even dream about using my age as an excuse for letting me die. I suffered from many potentially very serious medical conditions, such as cleft pallet surgery and frequent infections because my tonsils had to be removed in a risky surgery when I was hospitalized for over half a year until the doctors considered me to be healthy and physiologically strong enough to have at least a 60% chances of surviving the immanent cleft pallet surgery in 1977 in the children’s hospital located in the small town of Thalwitz in northern rural Saxony. It was so poorly connected to the generally otherwise relatively good public transportation gird of East Germany in 1977, that my parents could not come and visit me often during the six months I was hospitalized there. In the late 1970s owning a car was still the exception rather than the norm. The average waiting time for the opportunity to buy a car was 12 years. We considered ourselves as a very lucky family because our waiting time to buy a car was cut in half from 12 to only 6 years because two out of my parents’ children were severely disabled and especially I, despite being the oldest, required most medical care. I was considered to be too weak and sick for even attending regular Kindergarten until I turned five. From then onwards things started to slowly but gradually improve. I remember my parents and any medical provider to dedicate a lot of their efforts in teaching me to speak properly because I was unable to speak before I had cleft pallet surgery.
Hence, when I was little I had to deal with lots of medical providers. My life depended on them. Fortunately, I cannot remember a single instance for any medical provider to treat me badly. I blindly trusted any doctor, nurse or other caretakers, because all of them where always there for me whenever I felt I needed then, especially when my parents could not visit me for extended times. And I was a very demanding child. I screamed and cried and threw temper tantrums until most of my caretakers gave into my demands and let me have what I demanded, which actual was not much. While in the hospital I refused to sleep unless I could take a red toy bus with a white roof with to bed. I remember having to sleep next to a fridge, which made lots of humming sounds at night that I had a hard time falling asleep at night in the hospital. I remember looking for many hours at a stretch nonstop out of the hospital’s window counting the lights of the cars, which drove buy, hoping that eventually one of these cars would bring my parents back to the hospital because I remembered that I came with them in a taxi to the hospital. Since I remember my parents leaving the hospital in a taxi, I had no doubt that eventually another taxi would bring my parents back to me to the hospital. But back then I only was 3 years old and did not get a chance to gradually develop any concept of time. Back then, every evening, which I started to count the lights of the cars driving by my hospital’s window, I was certain that this evening one of these cars had to bring my parents back to me that night simply because I decided to count the lights of the cars driving by that evening. Back then even causal relationships were still an IHC to me. I still remember employing very strange ways of reasoning because I still lacked any concept about the difference between cause and effect and their temporal unidirectional relationship between them. I was so confident that if I spent lots of time and efforts in counting the lights of the by driving cars, my counting and track keeping efforts would pay off eventually because I remembered from past hospital visits of my parents that their arrival was always preceded by a car driving by my hospital window and then turning into the hospital parking lot have - oh joy - my parents inside it. Since they left exactly the same way they came, I seriously assumed that - since my parents only came after the lights of their taxi glanced by my hospital window - then looking at the lights of cars glancing their lights by my hospital window, and making a concerted effort to keep counting any new car correctly, would inevitably and imperatively cause another taxi to inevitably and imperatively return my parents to visit me in the hospital if I only was persistent enough not to stop counting any new car driving by my hospital window, until one of these cars, which I counted, would bring my parents back to me to the hospital eventually. The problem with my way of reversing cause and effect was that it kept reinforcing its backwards way of reasoning by reversing the temporal direction, which normally causes the reason to precede its consequences, because if I kept counting the cars over many days and weeks, then eventually one of the cars, which I counted meticulously, would be the taxi cab returning my parents to visit me in the hospital. I remember attributing the return of my parents to my car counting efforts. This inadvertently reinforced my misconception that counting cars long enough would eventually bring back my parents. Hence, whenever I missed them I confidently started counting cars and refused to stop counting until one car brought my parents back. This gave me the illusion of being in control to see my parents whenever I like simply by stubbornly insisting on carrying on counting cars and refusing to stop counting under any circumstances, until eventually one of the cars, which I counted, eventually had to be the taxicab, which my parents eventually took, to visit me for a second time.
The reason for sharing my very first memories of my experiences about slowly yet gradually perceiving myself transitioning into something, which keeps becoming increasingly distinctly different from his/her surrounding and how keeps gradually advancing in manipulating his surroundings according to his constantly evolving and increasingly distintly personal preferences, e.g. insisting to only sleep with the red toy bus, which had a white roof; to dislike the humming sound of the freezer next to my hospital bed and for insisting to maliciously keep counting every single car, which drove by my hospital window until eventually, given enough time, one of the cars, which I must inevitably end up counting, must be the taxicab, which my parents took to visit me for the next time.
These hospital memories above were formed from my very first experiences, which allowed me to start to subjectively perceive myself – fist still imperceptibly slowly and initially still subconsciously – transitioning from an still completely IHE to an eventually fully IVE, because the number of features, based on which I could clearly tell that I must differ from my surroundings, keeps rising with every new impression and with every no matter how minor and initially still very instinctively controlled responses to any small changes in external stimuli, such as feeling a cold, smelling food, getting tired, searching for my red toy bus with a white roof, smelling the postcards my parents sent me, dropping my pillow from my hospital bed, spilling tomato soup everywhere or losing my hospital house shoes. I remember developing Synesthesia (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia) by inadvertently associating a very specific shape and its exact color of randomly any visible object (VO), at which I happen to look either by random chance or by intentionally implicitly guided, yet still very broadly and none-directionally acting inspirational conveniences cleverly stimulating the first steps of the initial formation of new mental imaginations, which will gradually evolve over time into a storage place for adjusting still rudimentary incomplete fragmented precursors of randomly scattered pieces of initially inadvertently acquired external information, which keeps getting subconsciously rearranged and related to one another to reflect any additional observation from the surroundings by subconsciously rearranging all the pieces to avoid any kind of contradictions between any of the increasingly many visible elements (VE) by combining their features until they form the first still very primitive yet coherent and internally consistent concepts explaining the observations made about the gradually rising number of distinct features by which each of the IVE can be defined as being imperatively different from its surroundings. This, in turn, aids the very exciting continuously progressing playful discovery process typically observed in very curious Kindergartners, who tend to view their surroundings as a gigantic all-encompassing and continuously producing toy-factory, which is capable of magically creating any combination of fancy toys, adventure worlds, villains, allies, heroes, challenges, games or missions, which they could possibly imagine and which can only be very loosely defined by their features, which inherently describe their innate IVFs, from which they cannot be separated, because they are unique in that they exclusively refer to one particular - but no other – VOs. Hence, they must always be associated with their very specific VO without which its VFs immediately cease to exist.
This still very naïve, exciting, playful worry free times of childhood development, during which the parents, grandparents and other adult relatives and family friends easily seem to carry the burden to fix everything, which could potentially go wrong, is the ideal breeding ground for developing any absolutely unique, irreplaceable and irreproducible self-perception and self-identity, which gives our lives their intrinsically indefinitely high values; hence, making them subject of deserving our upmost protection from any risk to ever get lost due to any reason.
Unfortunately, most of us are still trapped by the very counterproductive and misleading concept to inadvertently but nevertheless erroneously equate life with a Boolean variable, which can only take two values, e.g. true or false, on or off, zero or one, yes or no, etc. For those poor people any individual can either be alive or dead, but nothing else. Generally, as long as they have reason to believe that an individual has good chances of resuming all its essential functions of life in the near future they keep referring to it as being alive.
However, this long obsolete misconception completely contradicts my evidences above for – instead of being a choice between all or nothing – the intensity by which we can get impressed through external stimuli takes place on a gradual continuum ranging from 0% to up to more than 100,000% of the life intensity most of us tend to experience when graduating from high school.
From birth until high school graduation we all experience a rapid, exciting and stimulating rise of VE, which are characterized by a rising number of their defining imperatively visible features (VFs), which – by definition – must always differ from their background. Every additional IVF, which – by definition – can never take on any value, which would prevent the subjective observer from distinguishing it from its background at any possible observation time point and its respective background conditions, increases the sharpness of any IVE, which can be unambiguously and uniquely defined by its defining IVFs, because it provides an additional opportunity for the subjective observer to distinguish it even better from its background noise, i.e. an actually misleading term, because it almost always refers to a bunch of still IHEs. The absolute number of IHEs, which most of us tend to mislabel as background noise without ever being aware of it, tends to exceed the absolute number of IVE, which even the most skilled and well trained professional observer can subjectively distinguish from their background noises throughout the course of his/her life, by a factor exceeding at least 1,000 - and possibly even much more - because there are many more opportunities to define absolutely legitimate - but nevertheless completely imperceptible - IHE by features, which most likely nobody will have a chance to know about unless he/she had figured out much better ways of succeeding in taking extremely clever, creative and innovative actions specifically aiming to actively and intentionally uncover almost any intended IHE as long as the professional IHE hunter is aware of at least one indirect consequence of his/her IHE interest. There are so many new cool mindboggling and exciting new opportunities for penetrating into the realm of completely unheard of dimensions entailing the complexity of entire universes, which are governed by scientific laws, which not even remotely resemble any of the natural laws, which govern the physics, chemistry, biology, nuclear, radiation, penetration, attraction, repulsion and interaction, of our universe. I hope I’ll get a chance to explain them in detail before my intended audience can discourage me from trying to complete the unifying and universally applicable theory about IHE because without it we won’t even have an itty bitty remote chance for ever becoming immortal within the next 4.5 Billion years our mother star, i.e. our sun, can provide us with the solar energy to power all instances of life striving for immortality.