Profound, wise and intelligent I am not, and may never actually be, but even in the face of that, I pride myself on my ability to correlate some facts and some things so that I can have a very personal understanding (or at least a quasi-understanding) of what happens around me.
I am happy that I can understand, in a very peculiar way, how absurdly empty our existences are. Take away from the life of a man his prejudices, his (mis)conceptions, his pre-conceived ideas and his personal feelings towards the world- and what remains? Take away from the life of a believer his sense of belonging to a world ordained and mantained by god, what remains? Take away from the life of a rationalist his feeling of pride on his knowledge and accuracy, what remains? Sometimes I find it even hard to believe that we do exist. That our existence itself isn’t but a construction of our minds, which are already a construction of some specific kind- but without a reason or a motive to their existence that we could ever conceive/understand. That leads me invariably to that old weary notion that life doesn’t have a meaning or a purpose. Even if god does exist, our lives are still empty, because we need to believe in him desperately in order to fill our lives with purpose. And we will just wait untill the day our consciences are absorbed in Him. There will be no trace of freedom in this universe too- I mean, a godly universe. There will be just a bunch of quasi-beings waiting for the meeting with the True Being, most likely there will be nothing more to an atheist, a Buddhist who achieved Perfection, only a cold embrace of nothingness.
Immediately after the realization that our existences are utterly empty without our beliefs, without the colors with which we paint life, comes the feeling that life is not worth living. I am yet to see a good argument in favor of it. Everybody says that we are to live, that we owe that to our predecessors who fought to the end and never really gave up, but the difficulty will arise when you’re face to face with the fact that your existence, being just another link in an endless chain, doens’t, can’t make any significant difference. You die- another man takes your place. You disappear form the place where you live- nobody notices that but some people who see you as a dear one. You forgets the world, go to live on a desert, like an ascet, the world still goes round the sun in the same old fashion, because it wasn’t, it couldn’t have been made so that your existence could make any difference. As a mere collection of vain desires and a sickening temptation to live to the day our minds are absorbed by God/Nothingness, as a weary collection of tiresome attitudes and tiresome motivations, this world could never offer a sensitive man a plausible feeling of significance.
Blessed with a merciful ability NOT TO CORRELATE event X with event Y, man can never associate that which he calls his “destiny” with the destiny of the whole. We transform our portion of “reality” in reality itself, and then everything which doesn’t affect us directly simply hasn’t any importance to our lives, it doesn’t change a thing in our lives. The fact that the survival of Y does necessarily depend on the suffering and death of X doesn’t mean a thing, because we are accustomed to think that this is the way things are. When you place yourself above this weak notion of things, when we look at the whole, when we look at humanity as a whole,at the world as a whole, the feeling of sadness, despairing sadness about our miserable existence is unavoidable. The fact that this world is, has always been and will always be worse than any possible definition of hell to the great majority of mankind doesn’t mean a thing because “optimists” tell us things are not this way, that we just like to exaggerate, that things are going to be better and better to a point when the lives of all of us are filled with a feeling of joy, purpose and importance which surpasses mere feelings of disconnection and a mere longing for dying and being destroyed/annihilated/absorbed by spiritual elevation/redemption/revelation. But to call a spade a spade is easy. To strip the masks of these “optimists” away is both a pleasure an a joy. There is no real evidence that optimism does make sense. There is no real evidence that optimism is possible to people who aren’t rich and who owe their richness to the same state of the world they pretend to care about and they pretend to want to “change”. Unhappily, there is no real evidence that the life of the whole is better now than it was some centuries ago. There is no real evidence that our AWARENESS and KNOWLEDGE of things have really grown from the time men looked at the stars wondering Who could have made them and why, without being able to understand that,and then just concentrating in finding a shelter and some food to fill their empty stomachs while the time didn’t come when they could run after the same primitively selfish ends, but with some hypocritical rethorical notion of being superior to their ancestors, while this superiority doesn’t even make a real sense.
From time to time I think life is a miracle, sometimes I think we will never be able to judge how blessed we are for having being able to realize that we are here, that we know that, and that we have such a power that we can even decide how long we want to stay here. But such a feeling is never powerful enough to make me forget the main factor. A sensation of nothingness impregnates me, it has impregnated me definitively now and it is no use to fight it, because even this fight woul mean just that I want to postpone the final deception life will bring me. I will have to give up sooner or later, of course, because a human mind can’t stand such a realization of our infinite meaninglessness, I will have to give up either to insanity or to suicide, but while I don’t do that, this deceptive miracle still has some new vistas to offer me. Sometimes it is just funny to observe how the others do that, i.e., how they succesfully hide their emptiness with some beautiful words and some good purpose. Sometimes it is just funny how I will get to the point when suicide will be unavoidable. How I will be able to live on and to work on the sensation that we need some utopia in our lives in order to make them “real” and “liveable” and that maybe the greatest utopia, believe it or not- is life itself.
[Thanks for the attention.]