Learning to Die, so that We May Live

The Gentle Indifference of the World

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Siesta Key Beach, Florida

Is nature angry? Is she peaceful?

She is neither, actually. A destructive hurricane is not angry and a gold-streaked sunset is not peaceful. They simply are what they are. Nature cares not one bit for our judgements and labels, for our metaphors, for our poetry and our wars.

It is we who anthropomorphize nature. It is we who believe that peace and violence are entities outside of ourselves, entities we can seek or repel. God is the face many of us apply to this need, a being we can look to for answers, pray to for peace, and sometimes for vengeance.

I’m not saying I’m not immune to the impulse. Sometimes I’ll comment to my wife, when leaving the house for a walk, that I’m going to “talk to God.” She understands that I’m saying I need some contemplative time in nature.

We may say that nature is God, or love, and it’s a beautiful sentiment, but the wise author of the Tao te Ching sees things a little differently:

The Way that can be walked is not the eternal Way.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

Nobody really knows why we’re here, what our purpose is, what the “meaning of life” is. Many people think they know; that’s why we have so many preachers and spiritual teachers. When Lao Tzu says “the name that can be named is not the eternal name,” I think that what he is saying is, you cannot know God, for God is unknowable.

And when I say God, I mean any sort of ultimate, over-arching truth about existence.

I’m not setting myself apart; I indulge in illusions and metaphor as well. I speak of peace as something we should spread around the world, as if it were homemade jam we could slather on the earth’s crust, but I know that these chimeras are not going to bring about a permanently harmonious society. I know it is this very same willingness to abandon oneself to concepts and illusions that can bring about suffering, hunger, war, and cruelty. My peace means refraining from committing violence, it means tolerance, but another man’s peace can mean the opposite; holy war, racism, ethnic cleansing, eliminating those who in his view are “not peaceful.”

As long as there is belief there will be confusion and chaos. As long as there is faith in the existence of some abstract but somehow achievable Ultimate Truth or supreme being there will be someone trying to convince us to come over to their version of it.

There may very well be a defining concept, structure, law, or purpose behind all existence. But we’ll never truly know it, because just as life is constant change, we are constant change. With all this change going on, the second we think we know something, it is no longer there to be known, and we are no longer the same knower. This is science. It’s highly doubtful that we can ever completely learn what existence is all about, why we’re here, what lies beyond the fraction of space and time we’ve learned how to measure. We’ve been searching for thousands of years for the ultimate truth and we still haven’t come up with a satisfactory answer!

I don’t think of this as a defeatist viewpoint, however. Because it is also true that, as the French chemist Antoine LaVoisier has shown in his law of conservation of mass, "Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed."*

Why does this give me hope? Because it means that we were never nothing. We come from somewhere rather than nowhere, we were something, many things, before we evolved into our current state of being. It means that we have a history of unknown and possibly infinite origins, and a future as mysterious and timeless. That, to me, is mind blowing. Every atom that comprises my body has existed in this universe from time immemorial, and has traveled through millions, if not billions, of manifestations, and will continue its journey long after I have ceased thinking of myself as “Don Boivin.”

You may say, “Sure, maybe, but it won’t be you.”

This is where some thoughtful reflection on the nature of self may be in order.

Our sense of self seems so... significant, so permanent; of personal, if not worldly, magnitude. It may seem heart-droppingly frightening to accept the fact that we are nobody special, that each of us is just one of eight-billion on this planet, and our lives are short; very short. But considering these facts carefully can open some doors, bring about some liberating insights.

Does it make sense to cling desperately to something we know will be gone soon? Can we not still marvel in the beauty and joy of a baby, a rainbow, a concerto, a friendship, even when we know it’s not ours to keep? I think we can. The wonderful human feelings of love, joy, deep contentment, and profound appreciation can be experienced again and again, each time as intensely as the first. Clinging to these experiences, however, trying to extend them or repeat them, only serves to diminish their effect and bring about unhappiness.

I enjoy Thich Nhat Hanh’s assessment of the character Meursault in Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Meursault, who has been convicted of murder and sentenced to death, waits out his final days in his cell. Yes, he is very much afraid to die. But one day, staring up through the single skylight, thinking about death, he truly sees the sky for the first time.

“Three days before his death,” writes Nhat Hanh, “he is able to touch the blue sky in a very deep way. The moment of awareness has manifested.”

Meursault himself later considers, “...for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.” Meursault has been indifferent to life and to the consequences of his own actions throughout the novel, so this “opening” is something new.

What was it that Meursault saw or felt in this “gentle indifference” that brought him peace? He speaks of being “washed clean” in his last moments, “rid of hope,” and, ironically, “ready to live again.” Meursault is not clinging to life; he’s actually ready to die. So, then, how could he also be ready to live? Has he understood his true non-self nature? Touched the unity of all things? Experienced his own immortality through letting go of the narrow view and embracing the wider one; that we are not just this?

We may not ever know what we in fact are, but we are certainly not just this. The indifferent world may not care if I die at thirty or seventy, but that is because, on a cosmic scale, it really doesn’t matter; I will be absorbed into the larger whole, of which I am already a part.

Nhat Hanh writes, in his book, You Are Here:

“You can live every moment of every day deeply, in touch with the wonders of life. Then you will learn to live, and, at the same time, learn to die.”

What does this gentle monk mean by “learn to die”?

That is where releasing our tight grip on self, on our definition of “me” comes in. And to be fair, I don’t think this is an easy notion to convey in words. It has to be experienced, felt at a visceral level. But I’ll try.

There is a Buddhist concept called emptiness. It teaches that all things, including humans, are empty of separateness, empty of any single element that distinguishes that one thing from all other things. Take a chair, for instance. It takes a separate observer to say, “That is a chair.” The chair itself is not a chair; it is only a formation of elements, meaningless to things that do not sit, that do not need a chair. In other words, chair-ness is in the eye of the beholder, the observer, not in the object itself. It’s only a chair because a group of people has agreed it is, not because it’s intrinsically so.

Likewise, we are empty of me-ness. The observer, in this case, however, is ourselves, so it’s a little more difficult to grasp objectively. We say, “I am me,” and in our minds it feels very, very true. The idea of me is so deeply ingrained in most people’s psyches that my words may sound insensible. But in fact, though we are skin, bones, organs, molecules, water, we are not “me.” Our brains perform a function called thinking. And that brain—which is just another organic formation of flesh and blood and molecules—thinks, imagines, our selves into existence. If you have ever heard someone on the spiritual path say, “There is no self,” this is what they mean.

Nature, too, is empty. Nature is not a place we can visit, like a store, to get something we believe we lack. We already have everything we need because we are nature. When I look at nature from the deluded state of seeing it as separate from me, that is when it is “empty.” Nature is full when I see it as a whole of which I am a part. But when I see it that way, I don’t need anything from it, because I am it, and then emptiness versus fullness becomes an irrelevant question.

And I understand that nature’s peace, as well as her anger, are my peace and my anger.

Summary

We needn’t fear death or the passage of time because, First; one day of life, one moment, experienced deeply and with the whole of our being, can be enough for a hundred lifetimes, and, Second; because we are not only this. If we soften our stance on what myself truly is, on its unique importance and cruciality—in mindfulness, called letting go, or non-clinging—then we can take comfort in the fact that we have existed, and we will exist, forever.

DB

*(I credit Thich Nhat Hanh for this frame of reference.)

BOOKS MENTIONED

Thich Nhat Hanh, You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment
Albert Camus, The Stranger

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Always a pleasure!