Existence & Subsistence
Not all that is real exists.
Physical bodies exist, such as particles - matter and energy. As Democritus noted, 'atoms (or more elementary particles) and the void (spacetime)' appear to be the fundamental basis of our reality. In Buddhism, the first of the five aggregates is form or matter.
But the true nature of the universe, says Buddhism, is emptiness. Emptiness doesn’t mean that reality is an illusion. It means that most of the things we think exist are constructs of our imaginations rather than actual phenomena in their own right. They are empty of the singular and constant identities we place on them1.
Ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism provides similar thoughts along these lines. We choose (consciously or unconsciously) how we perceive, label, and categorize the various formations and interacting aggregates in the universe.
Reality, then, consists of two kinds of phenomena: those which exist, and those which subsist2. We cannot ignore those things which subsist. Even within the natural universe, there is a form of the metaphysical - in the sense of phenomena which subsist as interrelationships, patterns, emergent properties, events, and manifestations of those things which exist3.
This would include the notion of data, information, or the meme4. Other things which subsist could be: democracy, waves, temperature, etc. Many things are very real and have a causal impact on our world which may not be physical bodies, but which subsist among them and are just as much a part of a fully natural universe.
Consider the constellation known as the Big Dipper. Is the Big Dipper real? Certainly, it is a constellation in our sky. You can look it up, it has a name, a physical space it occupies. But it only looks like a dipper from the vantage point of our Solar system. If we could travel to other stars easily, we would see that some of the stars are closer and some further. We decided which stars to include in this arbitrarily defined ‘thing’ and which not to. It is a tool for us to use in remembering the positions of stars in our sky. At the same time, it isn’t a fantasy, like some superstition.
Or, consider the Sloan Great Wall. At the time I first learned of it, the SGW was considered to be the “largest object in the universe”5. It is a giant wall of galaxies 1.38 billion light-years in length.
My first thought on reading this was that the statement was a cheat! This “wall” wasn’t an object at all – it was simply a bunch of galaxies that happened to line up into something we can draw an imaginary line around and give a name to. Sure, they influence one another gravitationally, but to consider them an object? And, what of the surrounding galaxies? They must surely influence the galaxies of the SGW gravitationally, but they arbitrarily don’t get to be a part of this ‘object’?
Earth and Mars influence one another. Can I just draw an imaginary line around the two and give the group a name and now it’s an object? It all seemed very fishy to me. It seemed that this name said more about the brains of those who imagined it than about some objective reality in the universe – about as ‘real’ as the constellations we draw heroic figures around in our night sky.
But if the Sloan Great Wall wasn’t the largest object, then what was? Isn’t a galaxy just a collection of star systems? And, a star system seems pretty close to my example of drawing a line around Earth and Mars. The recent hubbub about whether Pluto is a planet was more of a philosophical (semantic) debate than about any objective data.
And so it is with all of existence.
Our tiny size compared to the Sloan Great Wall might make its true nature more obvious, but in truth all objects in our world are of this same nature. Everything you’ve ever anticipated getting your hands on, every food you’ve ever desired, every person you’ve ever loved, and you yourself are different conglomerations of particles.
And these globs of particles are surrounded by the same kinds of particles, which move into and out of the named glob. That glob further reaches out and manipulates other globs in a manner not unlike it manipulates its own parts. The more we think about these forms we’ve labeled, the more arbitrary that borderline at the edge of each of them seems.
And now consider that none of these structures are permanent. They have all come into their current form for a short time, and as their parts continue moving and interacting in accord with the Logos, they will eventually lose their form. This is like seeing Mickey Mouse in the shape of a cloud. You could almost say these forms are somewhat illusory – a helpful convention our brains evolved for their own purposes.
And this is the nature of birth and death.
As we can see, ‘birth’ is a much broader concept of the ‘coming into being’ of various forms, and ‘death’ is the movement of aggregates to the point where we no longer recognize or label a form (or perhaps now label new forms)6.
Thus, ‘death’ includes the dissolution of, not only things we call life forms, but storms, jobs, relationships, planets, nations, and so on. ‘Birth’ is the coming into being of all of these forms and more, including baby humans. So, in a sense, if these forms are illusory then it begins to look like death (and birth) are illusory. They say more about when our brains identify something than they say about the objective nature of it.
While we may understand all of this while reading it, we do not live and exist in deep accord with these truths. This is why we give names to individual mountains but we never name individual clouds. Yet, the mountains and the clouds are both ever-changing, rising, and vanishing. We forget the impermanence of all things, we forget the illusory nature of all forms - and we suffer as a result.
Understanding death in its broadest sense makes us realize how integral and necessary all kinds of loss really are to the entire magnificent processes in the universe that make all things possible.