Death and Oblivion

Tibetan Sky Burial. Yes that was a person like you or me.

It seems to me that a major function of most religions is to make people disbelieve what they secretly believe to be true about death and meaning. Most people can very concretely believe in the idea of birth, that for billions of years you weren't here at all and then suddenly you get conceived and get born, voila, and that is a definite beginning point. What they are afraid of is that death is the same in reverse: you have a definite ending point. Boom, so long you, so long to all your dreams and hopes in life, the vultures get the dinner bell (if you are Tibetan anyway - I guess different creatures get the dinner bell in Western cultures) and that's effing that.

There is another fear which is that the sudden revelation you were hoping for where you finally figure out what it all means, what it was all for... that maybe nope, you don't get that. Sucker. ;) Another thing is fear of being alone/abandoned. Many people are afraid even to be alone while living, and if this is true then death is even more fearful to them. 

There are several fairly separable issues going on here though, and it is worthwhile to separate them, because a lot of these issues have more to do with us than to do with death. Probably, so I am thinking, separating out our issues which are actually issues with life rather than death might help us a lot.

1. Fear of Insignificance

On this one, I have no choice but to just give you the bad news. You are insignificant. I am insignificant, Barack Obama is insignificant, George Washington was insignificant, Albert Einstein was insignificant, Buddha and Mohammed were insignificant. You are an atom on the surface of a microscopic bug dropping orbiting an English pea. You are one of seven BILLION such specks, none of which are ultimately any more or less significant than you. You were insignificant by birth. Even if you were to live forever and get to watch the final dying stars of the Milky Way galaxy flicker out on heavenly Pay-Per-View as you munch popcorn, you would still be insignificant.

And yet people expend so much time and energy and worry trying not to be insignificant. They develop internal monologues about their own significance to rival epic Norse sagas. I do it too, everyone does. Some people do it to the point where it really messes up their lives and sometimes that of other people. Some of the most tragic and messed up stories in the human experience start with the sentence, "I wanted to be famous."

Why actually do you care whether you are significant or not? One of my favorite lines in all literature is from Hamlet scene ii where he says, 

"I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space,

were it not that I have bad dreams" 

 Hamlet there is really speaking for all of us, in that it is the "bad dreams" that keeps us from being content with being small. Bad dreams of fear. Fear that actually keeps us from fully actualizing the "infinite space" (or near infinite space) that is actually open to us, small though we are. This fear of insignificance is closely connected to the next fear in the list.

2. Fear of Violation

Fear in other words that bad things will happen to us, our dignity stripped, our persons probed and raped and objectified, our property stolen or dispersed in various ways. These violations not only threaten our bodies and relationships and things, but perhaps more significantly threaten our illusions of being sacrosanct. "I'm off limits, kings X, go give that enema of whupass to someone else." ;)

Here again, hate to break it to you, but in some way or another it's definitely gonna happen. It has probably happened in the past, it will probably happen in the future, and it will happen to your corpse when you die.

Here's the thing though: there is nothing in life so bad that fearing and dreading it can't make it almost infinitely worse. Ever see animals at the vet? You would think that since human babies scream at the prospect of needles and such, that animals would do so even worse, but generally that is not true. Animals often take pain a lot better than we do. Why? They don't spend a lot of time dwelling on it and thus magnifying it. They are all like, "okay, this sucks but whatevs."

I'll tell a story that probably tells more about my past than you really wanted to know. ;) Okay, when I was a young man I had to take these big whopping needle injections with these like really big needles in the butt, and Mom used to give them to me. And they weren't fun, the needles were real big, and the stuff to be injected was very thick and viscous, like injecting peanut butter. So one day I was tripping on LSD and Mom said "time to do the shot" and I was like, "cool" and so we went through our whole intramuscular injection ritual, meanwhile I was tripping brains and thinking about the ineffable mysteries of love or some such. And I scarcely knew the injection had happened, that was how little it hurt. Why? Well I think the fact that I was thinking about how much I loved everyone and the whole universe probably helped a lot, I was definitely in an expansive state of mind, but also the shot and pain were just way way down the list as far as things I was thinking about.

Again, this fear is not truly a death issue. This is a life issue.

3. Fear of Meaninglessness

You ever hear the conspiracy theory that when a U.S. President comes into work on the first day they tell him THE SECRET, the big horrible truth of what is really going on and after that he gets a little grayer every day and dies inside a little every day until they have to replace him with a clone or something? Ya, that one. ;) 

Well we all sort of have an inverse fantasy of that in our heads. That after all our pain and suffering and losing loved ones and war and confusion and lost opportunities and the whole mess, that when we die and stand in front of those big pearly garage doors we will get told what is really going on. It will be some truth that will make us all want to say, "oh, well, it's all okay in that case. Gosh darn it, I sure am glad that I know now. It makes the holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide and cancer and taxes and senseless murder and babies with brain diseases all okay now! It was part of the plan all along, that's effing brilliant God!" ;)

What we really don't want to hear is that the universe is muddling through like a government committee, trying to figure it out as it goes along. That there isn't a plan, that there will never be a plan. That if there is anyone "in charge," they are probably just as confused as you are. ;) That the Universe, like the Army, runs on the SNAFU principle: situation normal, all fracked up. ;) Actually the universe is in many many ways stunningly amazing, but sort of the inverse of orderly and planned.

It is sort of a way of trying to believe that all the bad bad bad things didn't really happen. Yes Virginia, they happened. The Universe is a fracking nightmare looking for someone to take a dump on sometimes. If you are looking for the Cosmic Mommy to kiss the boo-boo and make it all better, it's probably not going to happen. Truly bad things really do happen, they didn't always necessarily have to happen, and there is no overarching purpose that makes it okay that it happened. Even if there is life after death, those sorts of things will never be okay, never be compensated for. There is no plan that makes the horror of which life is capable okay.

One of the characters in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov makes the compelling case that (the Christian) God cannot possibly make an atrocity - he used the example of a tortured child - right, no matter what ultimate purpose or harmony was aimed for in the creation of the world. It is very well worth reading his argument, here's a link to a scholarly pdf on the topic. This character, Ivan, says that so long as this offense to the goodness of God exists, the proper response to an invitation to heaven would be to decline it, because accepting it would be to smooth over what can never be smoothed over.

Probably if we were immune to pain and suffering and death, we wouldn't worry at all about meaning. We probably also would not love. Love and fragility seem inextricably intertwined somehow; were it not for fragility, we would neither need love nor need to give love. Love is about nurturing against adversity and supporting in adversity, that goes to the very heart of what love is. Love is a very jealous goddess too, she tends to exclude other things as a primary source of meaning. It is not for nothing that the Catholic Church makes its priests and monks celibate.

An Aside About Love

I often thought in the past that anyone who would allow themselves to fall in love with someone is suffering from a serious lapse of their rational thought processes. This is because there is an immense risk - nay, certainty - of great pain. First off, most relationships fail, and that is pain. Love digs up all sorts of messy human psychology, personal failures and neediness, and that is pain. Love gone awry can be suffocating or stagnant, and that is pain. You might have a very long term relationship that breaks up, and that is great pain. In a best case scenario, one of you is going to die one day and the other will be plummeted into inconsolable grief, and that is pain. This being the case, I decided that romantic love was profoundly irrational and self-destructive and something that no rational being should participate in.

What I didn't think about is the fact that pain is not a problem somehow mysteriously appended to love, it is inherent in love itself. All love. To use one of my recurring computer catchphrases, it is not a bug, it's a feature. You cannot have love without pain. Even non-romantic love is like this. There is no such thing as detached love; Buddhist compassion for instance is a well-meaning smiley face of good wishes without actual connection. If we lived in a world where the above-mentioned fears of insignificance, violation and meaninglessness were never a problem, it would probably be a world without love. Real love exists against a background of the possibilities of pain, insignificance, violation and cosmic ambivalence. It would not be what it is without that background, it would not be as heroic and precious as it is without it. 

Conclusion

These are all fundamentally problems with life, not death. These are life problems. The dead presumably aren't worrying about them. Suppose what everyone fears is true: death is the end. Think of all the things you won't have to put up with! ;) No mortgage payments, no demeaning bosses, no sickness, no taxes, no assholes cutting you off in traffic. Think about all the nasty things about life on Earth that you will be missing out on: politics and face-eating bacteria and bad relationships and cancer and diarrhea and prison and being aware of all the starving in Africa and torture and so on. Is it really all that bad? Seems like pretty much a 50-50 proposition in my book, but then Death and I are old friends. I have been dancing with Death my whole life. When the grim reaper takes up residence in your living room and watches football with you (like I ever watch lol) and has long and thoughtful conversations with you about itself, and invites himself to dinner, he sort of stops being the boogey man and starts being a familiar face. Like a gregarious neighbor. The neighbor who will one day terminate your life signs, but a neighbor nonetheless. ;)

Every animist tradition that I am aware of believes in some sort of continuance after death. Many have varieties of ancestor worship that would seem to imply that the ancestors are around to appreciate it in some form other than fertilizer. This being the case, I have to take such a belief seriously, which is not the same as saying that I am ready to believe it. I am agnostic on the matter, curious but uncommitted. I would like it to be true, but I would like many things to be true.

But what happens when even this universe dies, which it surely will? Will other universes light some sort of candle for it in an ancestor shrine? Does it have life after death in some sort of meta-universe? Actually it might, at least in a fertilizer form. ;) Someone somewhere, and I apologize for forgetting who you are, was writing about the birth of the universe and the death of the universe through vacuum decay, which many scientists now think is a quite likely possibility. There was this wonderful image of universes blossoming up from a true vacuum state, a reality quite different from ours, going through their life cycle and then dying back again through vacuum decay, perhaps in some form fertilizing this ultimate oblivion, this ultimate void and vacuum and yet very pregnant and fertile emptiness. Universes blossoming like flowers and dying and blossoming again. At one point I even sorta worshiped this mysterious ground of universes, which I called Ain. It alone, presumably, was the eternal ground of pregnant nothingness from which all else derived. It alone was perfect, immortal and permanent - a permanent oblivion. Ain the Void.

Of course in the end that was very much like me to want to worship something inhuman, untouchable, immortal and perfect (at least in that it had no definable qualities and hence no definable imperfections). It wasn't very human of me however. This is our world, however painful and horrible and full of hard-won and transitory moments of light and love and goodness. We can no more run away from it than we can run away from ourselves.