Wanting to not be
This began as a brief and, for me at that time (2015), relatively rare online dialogue I engaged with someone who posted a statement to the comment thread of a YouTube video, expressing his interest in hearing various spiritual teachers’ views concerning the potential metaphysical ramifications of suicide. The statements in bold italics are his, and have here been reduced to just those portions of his original posts that my replies specifically address. There are three separate, numbered comments from me, though only the first two were actually posted by me to the thread, because my third reply got too long and didactic for such a forum.
— 1 —
“Even if you would offer me the happiest and most ecstatic existence that the universe
has ever witnessed—for eternity—I would still prefer total and absolute non-existence.”
I completely agree with this, though it has been my torment to recognize that death in general promises no ultimate release from the burden of existence. Why? Because if “absolute non-existence” is that which would preclude even the potential for something appearing as a subject experiencing objective qualia — and I believe it is — then this present something would never have appeared in the first place, and thus something in whatever form is impossible to escape. At root, this doesn’t refer so much to any particular individual expression of something (such as your experience or mine) as to the universal principle of pure subjectivity which is ever implicit in it.
As for suicide — multiple close encounters with which over two decades led to the above recognition — the truest response is always “I don’t know,” but my sense is that it’s an act of sheer metaphysical futility. There’s an old Sufi saying to the effect that you meet your fate on the road you take to avoid it, which I believe expresses a fundamental cosmic principle. I feel that, to whatever extent suicide is motivated by an urge to opt out of existence — essentially, to avoid the suffering inherent in it — the enterprise will somehow cosmically backfire, and one will find oneself gobsmacked by the utter folly of it, even if only at the penultimate moment of this life.1
— 2 —
Thanks for your thoughtful reply and kind words. We do seem to share an orientation that is both uncommon and understandably disquieting for most, while yet having enough perspective to appreciate why Buddhism (which I don’t practice) and sound common sense (which I occasionally do) converge on the view that outright craving either existence or non-existence is a recipe for suffering. In reference to that view, you say:
“… it is an approximation of that recognition without
which methinks any true liberation is impossible.”
For what it’s worth, my view at this point is that “liberation” is a state-specific palliative that applies to the present life, and anything beyond that is speculative and even dubious. The conventional Buddhist notion of eventually being able to clear the karmic books, cash in one’s chips and take the prize of no rebirth seems to rest on the assumption of a subtly reified something that can either be reborn or not. How is this any different in practice from the Christian idea of a soul that can attain salvation? As one writer mused, “karma is just Original Sin in a sari.”2 There may or may not be a soul, but its existence rests on imputation.
Even more critically, there’s something internally contradictory in aiming to terminally undermine one narrative — this present separate self, which is seen to fundamentally not exist — while implicitly supporting a meta-narrative — the liberation of an even more subtle version of this supposedly non-existent self from numberless rounds of birth and death.3 But it does at least have the merit of giving one a pretext or motive for striving to alleviate suffering right now. In this sense, the fact that it’s probably always going to be a speculative article of faith, open to interpretation, takes a back seat to its aspirational utility. And yet, ‘I’, as in the universal principle of subjective apprehension intrinsic to any imaginable or unimaginable appearance whatever, will indeed never not be because, in a sense, it’s the only game in town. It’s the specific flavor of one’s pathology — whether one craves being or non-being — that will determine whether the eternality/immortality of this ‘I’ principle is regarded as boon or bane.
Ultimately, the whole thing is fathomless mystery. Each of us has a view that’s unavoidably partial and mediated by latent conditioning. And even a fundamental realization (“liberation”) doesn’t completely void one of the reality-filtering that transpires via the conditioned peculiarities and biases in one’s views, though it does tend to clear up and recalibrate the prism to some degree. So when you say…
“I want to know from these teachers how their cosmological insights
say it [any metaphysical consequences of suicide] works in detail”
…I trust you have the insight and wisdom to appreciate how that might be an impossibly tall order. Not only will what comes from any putative authority be, at best, a composite of real insight, intuition, and speculation (each in unknown and unknowable measure), but since it’s still their claimed insight and not yours, the most you can reasonably hope to get from any such received testimony is encouragement to carry on, based on the degree to which that testimony jibes with your present sense of what’s true. Of course, whatever it is you might be longing for through all this, I wish it for you.
— 3 —
“…I so wish that we could count on the soteriology of the materialists, yet there again we
would have to be certain of that. Then there would be such a quick and easy end to our plights”
I understand what you’re saying, though I think that assumption of even the possibility of finality overlooks a crucial yet subtle point, one that I’ve alluded to in previous posts, but perhaps too obscurely or facilely. I’ll try again by elaborating on what I see as two cardinal components of this point.
First, underneath all the biographical details that seem to distinguish ‘me’ from anyone else, there is a basic sense of pure subjectivity experiencing life for what seems like the first and only time. Deep reflection reveals that underlying sense of pure subjectivity to be utterly the same in anyone who has ever lived and ever will live. So, even if my light goes out at death, the I-ness of being human (or really, the IS-ness of being anything that can register impressions, however dimly) remains inescapably and unavoidably here so long as there is a platform or medium for being anything. At death, I as me breathes its last breath and at birth another I breathes its first, and yet it’s not "another" I after all: it’s the same I. Not “same” as in a bead connected to other beads on the same thread (reincarnation, as conventionally interpreted), nor even as an interconnected part of the same whole (oneness, as conventionally interpreted), but phenomenologically identical. Each apparent instantiation of this I principle takes itself to be unique, while the template governing the dynamics of its uniqueness is really universal; and each I takes itself to be a temporal occurrence, whereas it’s more an eternal recurrence.4
Second, when I said above that this I principle is inescapable “so long as there is a platform or medium for being anything,” the proviso was a coy or tactically equivocal way of broaching the deeper — and one might even say deepest — realization that that “platform or medium for being” is eternal insofar as something cannot come from nothing,5 because nothing in the absolute sense would preclude not just manifest appearance but any unmanifest potential for appearance as well.6 We are not talking here about a condition-of-nothingness, such as a void or vacuum state, but the utter negation that is the obviation of any actuality or potentiality. This is what I meant when I said in a previous post that if nothing in the absolute sense were even possible, then this — indeed, anything at all — could not have appeared in the first place. Of course, the corollary is that this — as you or me or anyone — cannot cancel itself out "once and for all," hence the sheer folly of suicide. In short, there is no such thing as my nothing or your nothing at death, because there is no such thing as absolute nothing in the first place. I trust you’ll appreciate how this applies to your quote at the top.
Now, to be clear, my statement that something does not come from nothing isn’t a mere assumption, nor is it based on the alleged inability of an existent to conceive of its own non-existence, since I contend that deep sleep, general anesthesia and the apparent void prior to birth are adequate, if imperfect, touchstones for this.7 But neither is it an assertion that can be proven logically, save at the risk of committing some kind of fallacy or other. Rather, it’s a direct recognition that I believe is available to anyone who does the math of pondering the matter with enough depth and innocence for the obviousness of it to dawn.8 Of course, as should be clear from my previous posts, this is so far from being a source of comfort to me — as it seems it would be for the many who long to believe in some kind of immortality or deathlessness — that it’s almost a Sisyphean brand of torment. In this sense, it’s largely irrelevant to me whether my individual narrative ends or continues in any form upon the death of this body because, in essence, I am you, as I am equally all beings anywhere in this world or in any other, in this universe or any other, and indeed I am any conceivable or inconceivable form of sentient anything everywhere and at all times. To the extent that it’s all still something, the particular dynamics scarcely matter.
Not that I wouldn’t rather nirvana than samsara, or better still, the "high indifference" that Franklin Merrell-Wolff wrote about, in which the tension inherent in the preferential distinction between nirvana and samsara (which distinction is the foundation of apparent duality) is resolved in transcendent equilibrium. But if I could make the impossible possible and choose the Unicorn of absolute nothing as defined above and as upheld in the prevailing materialist eschatology, I would. Of course, as this is the ultimate standing-against reality, it’s no wonder there’s still suffering! The only glimmer of hope is my budding intuition that the ultimate source of everything so thoroughly transcends the seemingly limitless possibilities of suffering that this entire crazy light show is indeed akin to the Hindu notion of lila, joyfully and infinitely free to seemingly bind itself and play as Sisyphus, one apparently doomed to endless compulsory and laborious striving. Put more simply, I’m inclined to reject the idea of an underlying reality that’s inherently sinister or punitive or compelling, or even teleologically-inclined, in favor of one that’s empty of all inherency and thus is perfectly free to manifest or not manifest, to strive or not strive, to suffer or not suffer, and which ultimately transcends those or any other distinctions.
___________________________
1 Consider, e.g., some of the Golden Gate Bridge jumpers who survived, saying they felt immediate profound regret as soon as their feet left the railing. But a more disturbing, yet equally plausible* way this could manifest is suggested by the ultra-real-Bardo-experiences-at-the-brink-of-death theme of the film JACOB’S LADDER (based on THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD).
* “Plausible” if one doesn’t subscribe to scientific materialism, which I consider to be an incredibly naïve metaphysic.
2 In that there seems to be no real difference between blaming one’s lot in life on alleged ancient forebears vs. blaming it all on alleged numberless previous incarnations. The quote is from Paul Iannone, ‘Whatcha Doin’? Dying? What you should know before you go…’ Published in BEN IS DEAD magazine; #24, Summer 1994.
3 Even if “soul” or “subtly reified something” are taken to mean a concatenating/serializing tendency akin to the way memory helps to sustain the narrative continuity of identity throughout a lifetime, this criticism of the idea of reincarnation in its more conventional expression is still valid. As long as one is interpreting rebirth in a way that emphasizes a metempsychosic continuity with an implied teleological direction, it really doesn’t matter whether the connecting principle is reified as a “soul” or as a “karmic tendency;” there’s still reification going on in the positing of a trait-laden narrative thrust that prevails across birth(s) and death(s). Most importantly, whether or not any such narrative thrust inheres is almost irrelevant, insofar as it’s superseded by the recognition of the immortality and eternality implicit in the principle of pure subjectivity or ‘I’.
4 This is not a reference to Nietzsche. I haven’t read enough of his work to know whether my use of this term associated with his philosophy bears any kinship with his ideas about it. And I don’t much care. The term is simply evocative of something atemporal and paradoxical that I wish to convey.
5 While I consider the question of why there is anything at all rather than not is a question for metaphysics rather than physics, if I were to shift momentarily to astrophysics, it would seem that whatever inhered as a precondition of the alleged Big Bang would still not be nothing in the absolute sense.
6 My attempt to express a radically simple and, one would think, self-evident truth is sounding regrettably circular here.
7 From the most epistemologically sound first-person perspective, deep dreamless sleep, anesthetic unconsciousness and prenatal nothingness seem less like actually-abiding realities minus ‘my’ present experience of them, and more like an absence of all reality which is only retrospectively imputed to have not been absent.
8 The form this pondering has most profitably taken for me is the deconstruction of the constituents of experience; most importantly, the assumptions or tacit givens that are so easily overlooked owing to their developmentally preverbal roots.