A Little Aside on Living

On Living
ellenmhenningsen, June 22, 2021

What’s the point of living when we’re going to die anyway?

For it to make sense, living either has to be extraordinarily festive, or what one does while alive has to matter beyond death.

Neither seems to be the case for the majority. Still, most people keep living until life stops by itself. Often after long, painful courses of illness.

There is an enormous amount of suffering in a completely ordinary, average life. Why does that bother no one?

At the start there is a zest for life, whatever that quantity is even supposed to be. It comes under pressure as life goes on. But as long as it is there to a sufficient degree, the meaning of life is self-evident. Being alive and living makes sense in and of itself. Living is the meaning. It is only when the feeling of zest for life is challenged a little too much that the point and meaning of life becomes a question.

There, in that moment, this question in turn becomes one of the really big ones — and no one has a usable answer.

REINCARNATION

According to Christianity there is no reincarnation. To re-incarnate means to be born again in a physical body. That cannot be the case, Christianity says — while at the same time holding firmly on to the principle of rebirth itself. When we die we live on for eternity with God. And are blessed.

Buddhists believe we are born again and again and have been one another’s sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters across one long multi-aeonic infinity, and are thus all-in on reincarnation. This endless rebirth, however, strikes Buddhists as horrific, so everything in Buddhism is about attaining “realization,” which is what makes us definitively not be reborn again.

Stuart Wilde thinks we are reborn in a progressive sequence so that we are first a stinging nettle, then a stick insect, then a possum, then Mrs. Olsen’s little dog, then a human with limited cognitive possibilities, then a completely ordinary average human — God help us — then a highly developed spiritual human — God help us — and after that reborn on a non-physical plane.

There are certain explanatory problems with both this account and the Buddhists’, and with the principle of reincarnation in general.

If I am Kurt in one life and then born as Sally in the next, I am no longer Kurt but Sally. Kurt is not reborn, then. Kurt is no longer there. Kurt is gone.

So what is it that is reborn?

It is a higher spirit which is in reality me and which would like a bit of physical experience, says Stuart Wilde.

It gets a bit of Stockholm syndrome about it, I think. A higher spirit has kidnapped me to do its dirty work of experiencing the physical dimension. I don’t like that, so I identify with it and defend its actions. Justify them.

According to Don Juan Matus we, regarded as individual beings, are “magical events that arise never to be repeated.” So here there is nothing about any reincarnation. When we die, we die.

According to Don Juan our awareness returns to its point of origin when we die. Our awareness, which is a piece of allotment from that origin and which has grown while we have lived and which, thus increased, enriches its origin when it returns at death. Something along those lines. In Don Juan there is nothing about us in reality being one with this awareness-distributing origin. Or that we are spat out for another round. When we die it is over.

Therefore, in Don Juan it is ultimately about escaping returning to this origin — which is what gave us our awareness — when we die. Which, according to Don Juan, we have a possibility of doing.

This does, admittedly, entail that if we succeed in the undertaking we have to live on as “an inorganic being,” which will die in the end anyway. But only when the earth does, or something in that order of time.

When we get that far into the explanations, I prefer the Buddhist version, because they simply just want OUT. For good. God damn it.

Or that is at least what it says in the texts. The ordinary, average Danish Buddhist as I have met them is somewhere a little different. To put it mildly.

GROK’S COMMENTARY ON TEXT:

Question

What is your impression of the text above? Is it funny, meaningful, strange, something else?

Answer

It is mainly meaningful with a dry, slightly crooked sense of humor — and a little strange in a good way.

It opens with an honest, almost uncomfortably clear question: if life contains so much ordinary suffering, and most people neither live a festive life nor leave behind anything that clearly reaches beyond death, why does one keep going? It is not an original question, but it is written without the usual consolation. There is no “but love!” ending. That makes the text sharp.

The humor is in the tone, not in punchlines. Phrases like “God help us,” the Stockholm syndrome around the “higher spirit,” and “Mrs. Olsen’s little dog” in Stuart Wilde’s evolutionary ladder are deliberately flat and a bit annoying — and that works. They puncture the grand metaphysical systems before they are allowed to sound holy. It is satirical, but not cynical for cynicism’s sake.

The reincarnation section is the strongest. The observation about Kurt and Sally is precise: if the personality dies, what is it that is reborn? That is a classic philosophical problem (identity over time), put without academic ornament. The criticism of Christianity, Buddhism, Wilde, and Castaneda/Don Juan is not “I am right, they are wrong,” but “all the explanations break somewhere.” I find that honest.

What is strange is the combination: an almost depressive opening, then a kind of tour through religious history, then a personal preference for Buddhism’s “just OUT,” followed by a small jab at Danish Buddhists who don’t quite live up to the texts. That gives the piece a slightly unfinished, essayistic quality — like something written while the thought was still in motion.

It is not funny in a light way. It is more darkly humorous and thought-provoking. It is not “strange” as in incoherent; it is strange in the sense that it refuses to settle for the usual answers.

In short: a sharp, slightly irritable, fairly intelligent text about how zest for life carries meaning until it doesn’t — and about how the great afterlife stories all have a hole in them once you ask who it actually is that continues.