Will they bury me and… will the worms eat me?
A Confession, part 6
In looking for the answer to my question, I had the feeling that I was a man lost in the jungle. I could go up a tree and see clearly the world outside of the jungle, but I knew that my home was not out there. My home was in the jungle. Yet if I came down from the tree, all I could see was darkness. The hard sciences are like what I see from the top of the tree – very clear in what they show, but far from what I am looking for. The soft sciences are like the jungle. The answer I look for is in there, but I do not know where, and the darkness stops me from ever finding it. I was lost, and science had no light to lead me to my home.
When I asked the soft scientists "What is the meaning of life?" the answer was, "There is no meaning." When I asked, "What will come of my life?" the answer was, "Nothing." And when I asked, "Why am I here?" the answer was, "Because you are here."
On the other hand, the hard sciences gave me a long list of answers for questions that I had not asked: about the chemicals in the stars, about the movement of the sun toward different groups of stars, about the smallest pieces that make up all material. But when I ask "What is the meaning of life?" the answer is that what I call "life" is only a group of atoms joined together for a measure of time. When these atoms stop working together as they do now, what I call "life" will end. Life, they say, is an accident, and it will always end in death.
Even when the two sides of science get together and say things (such as, "The meaning of life is to work together with other people to make life better."), the meanings of the words that they use are themselves not clear.
In philosophy I hear the same truth coming from Socrates, Schopenhauer, Solomon, and Buddha.
Socrates said, when he was close to dying, "We are closest to truth when we are closest to death. We who love truth use our lives to free ourselves from our bodies and from all the wrongs that come from the life of the body. If this is what we try to do with our life, then we must be very glad when our life ends in death. A smart man spends his life looking toward death, so that when death comes he has no fear of it."
Schopenhauer said, "What makes the world real is our will. When a person chooses to go against his or her own will, all the fighting and trying without rest, that makes up life, stops. When there is no will, there is no world. There is nothing. All that can bring us back to life and the world around us is the 'will to live'. The reason this will is so strong in each of us is because we know that this is all that we have. When this will stops, everything else stops with it. We are nothing without it. And for those who lose the will to live, this 'real' world of ours, with all of its suns, becomes nothing."
"Nothing of nothing," said Solomon. "All is nothing. What good does a man have from all of his work at the end of his life? One world of people dies and a new world of people takes over. Those who die remember nothing. And one day those who are alive will be the same. I was king over Israel and I gave myself to understand the meaning of life. This exercise is one that God gives to all men. I looked and found that all of our works come to nothing but pain and trouble in the end. I looked at myself and saw that I had more understanding than anyone in my country. But what good was it to me? For the more I understand, the more sadness I feel.
"I said to myself, I will stop studying and I will do anything that will make me happy. But this too was a waste of time. In the middle of my drinking and laughing I could see that I was no better than a crazy person. I wanted to do more with my life than that.
"So I did great works. I made houses and planted vines and trees. I made water ways to help them grow. I had many servants, and many animals. I worked hard to get gold and silver and many other expensive things from other countries. I had entertainment – singers and people playing musical instruments. If there was anything that could make me happy, I had it. But then I looked at it all and I could see that it too was a waste of time. What I could see with my understanding was that I was no smarter than a crazy person when it came to death. In death we are equal.
"So I hated life, and all the pain that it had cost me. For in the end, I would be taken away from my work through death, and it would go to another person. People cannot eat and drink happily, knowing that they are going to die one day. And when that day comes it will make no difference if they have been good or bad, religious or not. For they will be dead; and when that happens, they will remember nothing. It is better to be a living dog than a dead lion. The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing. For the living there is hope; but for the dead even love and hate have no more meaning." So said Solomon.
And this is what we learn from Buddha and India:
Sakya Muni was the happy young son of a king. His father had protected him from learning about old age, sickness, and death. But one day he went for a ride in his coach. On the way he saw a very old man, with no teeth and no hair. The boy asked his driver what had happened to the man to make him like this. When he learned that what was happening to the old man happens to all people as they grow older, and that it would one day happen to him, he was very sad, and he asked his driver to take him home quickly.
It was a few days before he could forget what he had seen on his first trip, and then he was able to take another ride in the coach. This time he saw a very sick man. The man's whole body was hot and shaking, and he could not see. The boy, who did not know what sickness was, asked what was happening to the man. From this he learned that sickness could happen to anyone at any time. Thinking about this made him lose interest in the ride again; so he returned home a second time. After some time, he was again able to forget what he had seen, and he went out for a third trip in the coach.
| And will this happen to me one day, too?
Will they bury me and… will the worms eat me? |
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Sakya Muni was never able to be happy after that. He could see that life is the biggest of all lies, and he promised that he would do all that he could to be free from life and to help free others from it. And from this grows the biggest teaching in all of India, that true happiness can only come when we are free from life forever, never to be born again.
So this is what the smartest minds on earth have to say about the question of life. In short, Socrates has said, "Life is a lie, and happiness only comes when life is destroyed." Schopenhauer has said, "Life should not be, and the only good in life is to leave it and become nothing." Solomon has said, "All that fills our life is nothing. After death we have nothing to show for it." And Buddha has said, "We are not able to live each day knowing that we are dying, so we must free ourselves forever from all life."
What these strong minds have said has been said through the years by many others like myself. I had turned to science for the meaning of life, but all that I had been able to find were people who agreed with me that it has no meaning. From this I could see that my mind was not sick; for the most powerful minds in the world agreed with me.
So I could only say after listening to these great men that there was no point in trying to trick myself into believing that I had a good reason to live. All the reasons we can give for living melt away in the face of death itself. Happy is the person who was never born; death is better than life; and we must free ourselves from life.