The God Project

T H E G O D P R OJ E CT

Humans have a long history of telling stories and creating deities to account for the unknown. In our response to severe anxiety, OSHER GÜNSBERG sees a disturbing parallel. But he’s also discovered a smoother path to inner peace

IN A TIME before science, we gave human qualities to natural phenomena as a way to explain them and manage our fear of them. In our world, humans were the only entities that made things happen deliberately – and without knowing what physics or thermodynamics were, the only way we could make sense of nature was to conclude that a human-like being was behind it.

Lightning is a perfect example.

It’s an enormous, terrifying bolt of blinding light that comes from the sky along with a noise that shakes you to your bones. It can set a whole forest alight, explode your cows and kill your aunty, who’s just going about her business out the back.

We didn’t understand lightning at all, other than that it was immensely destructive and could bring death.

The only other thing we knew of that brought that kind of death were warriors who carried weapons. So we invented thunder gods, who were mostly all warriors that carried weapons.

You’re probably familiar with the god of thunder from Norse mythology: Thor (not the one from Byron Bay whose massive pipes and shining smile are often on the cover of this magazine, but the actual hammer-wielding god of lightning, thunder and storms.

If you were on the shores of ancient Norway with your Viking family and you heard thunder, you’d be shouting, “Kids! Thor’s angry! He’s gunna hit that hammer and shoot death from the sky! Get inside!”

If you heard thunder in ancient Greece, you’d shout, “Kids! It’s Zeus! He’s going to throw his lightning spear any second and that’ll kill you dead. Get inside!”

In ancient Hindu and Buddhist mythology, Indra shows up wielding a thunderbolt and riding a white elephant. In Buddhist iconography, the elephant has as many as five heads. You could be just hanging with your family one arvo when…BOOM BOOM BOOM…

“Dad, what’s that?”

“That’s Indra and his five headedelephant coming this way quick sticks, and it sounds like he’s about to throw that thunderbolt. Kids, get inside!”

Here, in Australia, the Gunwinggu people of west Arnhem Land believe in the ancestral being Namarrkon. He speaks with thunder as his voice, rides a storm cloud from place to place and throws lightning bolts at humans who are failing to observe good behaviour or pass down culture and history to the uninitiated.

“What’s that giant cracking sound, Dad?”

“That’s Namarrkon – and he sounds angry. Kids, get inside!”

After a few thousand years of this, we started to figure out that maybe it’s not a cloud-based Norseman with a hammer or an angry god on a five-headed elephant after all.

Eventually, we came to understand that lightning is an electrostatic discharge between two charged points – one on the surface, the other in the atmosphere. There’s about a gigajoule of energy discharged, along with a huge amount of light and heat. The heat causes an air-pressure shockwave that makes a colossal noise, which we call thunder.

We figured out that it’s not a god, but it’ll still kill you. So, we figure out ways not to get hurt by it.

For one, go inside. (The old people got that bit right.)

Stay away from lakes, pools, trees and towers. Keep away from electrical equipment. If you’re in a group, stand further apart from one another. And get off any high ground.

There you have it.

Not so scary now, eh, Thor?

With knowledge and actionable steps to take, I am now more powerful than the gods.

When it comes to our mental health, it’s kinda the same thing.

If you don’t know what an anxiety attack feels like, and you start to experience one, it is so terrifying that you could absolutely believe you’re about to die. The pain in your chest, the feeling of being gripped around your throat, your heart beating so hard that you can hear it in your ears, your hands shaking, your breath coming short and sharp . . . it could very well make you call an ambulance.

I certainly did. When I was about 18, I was working as a roadie in Brisbane. After driving home from work at about 4am (and enjoying a delicious shower beer) my eyes were itchy so I took an antihistamine. I swallowed it down with the rest of my Milton Mango and only then read the packet which warned: “Avoid alcohol”.

In those days I was a very, very anxious person and I plummeted into a terrifying panic attack, convinced that I was going to overdose and die. Convinced that death was imminent, I called an ambulance and waited to be rescued on my front step.

When the ambos showed up, I was puzzled as to why they didn’t give me oxygen nor put me on a stretcher. Instead they just got me a glass of water, calmly explained what was happening to me, and helped me to breathe slowly for a while.

After about 10 minutes my most concerning symptom was embarrassment.

But there was nothing to be embarrassed about – I just hadn’t known what was happening.

Anxiety is so scary that if you don’t know what it is, it feels like it could kill you. But once you know what it is, and then learn ways to deal with it, it becomes just a problem with a solution.

Say you’re in a meeting at work, and something triggers an anxiety attack. If you can realise, Oh, my heart is beating really fast, my breathing is shallow, pretty sure I yelled the last three things I said…Aha! This is an amygdala hijack, my body’s in fight-or-flight mode, and I probably don’t need to be ready to bite and claw my way out of this room.”

That realisation in itself frees you