Some time ago I fell in love with Being. And this is a thing I've been failing to communicate to people ever since. This falling in love thing. With capital B Being. This how I went from thinking that the being alive was maybe a bit of a not even an especially funny joke to perceiving long stretches of moments of breath and consciousness and thought as staggeringly, transcendentally beautiful, maybe not continuously perceiving this but reliably, that moments of being are self-evidently filled with awe and laden with meaning, grounded, large, rooted in time, rooted in space, connected, rich, and good, exactly. It came down mostly to eyebrows lifted at angles and cocked heads and wry smiles to signify a thinking person's sophisticated scepticism. And that maybe can they have some of whatever I was on, please.
But then they always say this of people in love.
But so I take my validation and approval from books, however. And this life affirming love of living is something many millions of people have arrived at over the years, independently. Here's, for instance, Virginia Woolf:
Or here's David Foster Wallace in this is water, the spirit of whom I'm currently being inhabited by, in case you couldn't tell.
Or indeed here's Leo Tolstoy, whom if you find yourself judging and deriding and dismissing because of the God references in the paragraph below, then maybe perhaps best to stop reading this right now, because this whole philosophical essay is maybe just about beyond you at this point in your character-building journey. I'd venture to tender.
Because the language of mysticism sort of works here and maybe is needed here, to hint appropriately at these mysterious facts of being. The language of music, the language of the visual arts. The language of the beyond-articulated-meaning and so on.
Because this life-affirming love of Being is an in-place gestalt in perception rather than a journey to some elsewhere [q.v. M. Proust "The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another" etc]. It's a telling of a better story from the same set of facts, as it were, to paraphrase another of my heroes. But not in the self-delusional sense of believing a lie rather than having the steel cohones to face the meaninglessness of existence, like a real man, I should like to make clear.
Because the fact of the matter is that the meaning of existence is not an illusion. It's always there, if you know how to look at things. Through this seeing with the new eyes.
Because meaning then reveals itself to you like the 3D object in a magic eye picture. Can you see it?
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| Deviant Art |
Stereograms are the perfect visual metaphor for this, I think.
Some people seem to simply get it.
And just for the record I should say that I consider myself an atheist and not intently given to any lust for magical thinking, I don't think; but I have sympathy with the religions on this. Because I suspect the Christian tradition was right, allegorically, that this way of looking at the world is not beyond anyone who genuinely wants it. But rather is democratic. Every religious tradition that I know of seems to have a version of this idea. Mindfulness and meditation, say. Apparently Carl Jung said that people do not see God because they don't look low enough.
Every moment is inexhaustible.
And I should also like to stress that this is not to be confused with hedonism. It's not meant to be hedonism, anyway. Because the hedonistic view of living is only half the story. The other half is our duty to protect Being. And a sacred duty at that, for lack of a better adjective. We are, more than just metaphorically, mere stewards of existence, really: we carry the torch of Life from one moment in time to another. We live just long enough to carry this torch for a while. And so may as well try our best not to become hell-bent on putting it out, the torch, if we can manage it. Try our best not to be resentful of what a stupid mission this is and painful and pointless, this carrying of the torch. Because while it might be, at times, (stupid and painful and pointless), but beside that it's also sacred: because Being must continue Being, you see. Because Being is good. Whatever Being is, i.e. whatever it means for something to be living and un-rock-like: it's worth having. On balance.
This is an axiom, by the way: that Being is good and worth having.
Accepting this axiom is what the religious mind means by the expression `leap of faith`, is what I gather from Mr J. B. Peterson. Live your life as if Being were good and worth having, says he, and every moment of being (an expression of Being) will reveal itself to you as meaningful and joyful and worth every bit of the very real and unpleasant hassle of living it. As overflowing with meaning, these moments, as ripe fruit overflow with juices. Something like that. Or maybe better that you listen to JBP preach about it, in much more articulated form, in this lecture series.
But so anyway, accepting this axiom is a choice, though.
The interesting thing is, being inclined to dismiss these non-hard-numbers-and-science-y ways of looking at things myself, I didn't actually arrive at this conclusion via the religious route, exactly. Though what the difference is between the religious experience and the aesthetic experience is not precisely clear to me yet. But let's anyway say I arrived at it via psychology. Via philosophy. And via the I thought secular wisdom of literature, I guess.
You could say it started with Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game, which as far as I'm concerned is all about epistemology and a lot more fun to read than the corresponding entry on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (which I never had the dedication to finish). How do we know what we know, and cetera. Though in higher probably it actually kicked off with the untold numbers of hours I spent listening to Alain de Botton's butter-rich voice telling me how I was in fact OK and everything was OK and always had been OK and feeling finally unconditionally loved and regarded and accepted. Or likelier still with the unconditional love and acceptance lavished upon me by my existential phenomenological therapist in the US of A.
But so anyway it's still probably fair to say that epistemology consumed me somewhat at this time in my life. And fancying myself, as I said, weary of mysticism, I turned to philosophy. Well, popular philosophy (I'm not that either smart or patient). Q.v. Truth, by Simon Blackburn, and Think, and Ethics, which I returned to. And David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, which I've written about before. Et cetera. But it was Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, fast and slow, I think, which made me a bit more willing to consider that perhaps maybe this psychotherapeutic view of the human psyche wasn't entirely unscientifically deluded. Because here was psychology and cognitive science and neuroscience as I gathered it from Mr. Steven Pinker's several books corroborating the psychotherapeutic claims, or so it seemed like. And anyway reading Carl Rogers, and Brene Brown, and Leo Tolstoy made me feel so beloved and OK and accepted and so on.
Though it was probably War and Peace that finally sealed the deal, for me, I think. Something in that book managed to help me see Being in a whole new lighting. Or not new light exactly, as just a new framing. A wide framing. An all-encompassing framing.
Because, that's the nub and essence of it, I think, of this loving of being. It's that before I loved being consciously, I was narrow framing. I thought that Life was about my life. And it isn't.
I'll pause for a moment to let you take that in.
Being is not about my being. And the good of Being is not about the extent to which my own being is not (let's be honest about how we consider things) not even good, but pleasant. Something like that. Life, in its entirety, is miraculous beyond expression, is the right way of looking at it, I think. And so no sooner I'd thought this than I began to see evidence of this everywhere. In watching London go about its life, in city lights glittering on the river, in the staggering strangeness of people going about doing their people things, in standing besides and marvelling at the ethereal beauty of Ttéia 1C and so on. I mean, it's everywhere, once the scales fall from your eyes, this truth and beauty and meaning.
And it occurs to me that I may have hated Being because I used to think this: that if my life sucks therefore Being sucks also. But in fact this is invalid. Just because you are suffering doesn't mean that everything and everyone suffers everywhere. No, indeed, there are at any given moment, scores of people in the world, non-trivial numbers of people, who are truly and actually happy. And I don't mean deluded-happy. I don't mean distracted or drugged up or horse-like beheld by the carrot of future felicity. I mean happy. And there are places on this planet of breathtaking, transcendental beauty and people beholding these places right now, and feeling nothing but hug-from-God-like bliss and joy and pure unadulterated happiness. Really.
They say it's only at around age 2 that children begin to realise how their own emotions do in fact end at the boundary at their own bodies and how other people around them can, and in fact are, feeling differently from themselves in all sorts of ways, most of the time. But I, for one, didn't quite internalise that lesson.
But of course the thing about appreciating the marvel of Being is that you have to give up your resentment. With all the associated feelings of anger and self-righteousness and occasional malefic glee, which feel nice, to be fair. And just enjoy the possibility of happiness vicariously, if so it happens to elude you, personally. Maybe.
Though just to be clear, this celebration of Being does not in fact entail, for me at least, entering some permanent state of bliss a la Eckhart Tolle. I'm not saying life isn't suffering, because it is. And I'm not saying you should resign yourself to the suffering and injustice of the human universe, because you shouldn't. This is not about turning the cheek and accepting everything unconditionally and going into denials that there's any such thing as evil or tragedy.
(Though it's probably worth noticing that suffering is a lot oftener due to the axiomatic tragedy of being, rooted in the inherent vulnerability of all things living, than it is due to deliberate malevolence and evil. Since this helps with the giving up of the resentment project.)
But anyway back to the clarification, loving Being isn't to deny that evil and tragedy are real. The whole thing comes down to avoiding narrow framing: just because evil and tragedy are real, doesn't mean that bliss and awe-inspiring splendour of existence aren't real also. They're both real. Concomitantly.
Q.v. the concept of ambivalence.
Which is interesting because not so unlike what is required for the falling of actually in love, in the more parochial sense of with another human person. Realising how to embrace this ambivalence towards your own self as well as another's. That is to say, realising & accepting that you are both flawed creatures by necessity, mere intermittently-rational primates with a long and comprehensive list of unseemly inadequacies.
But that maybe if you really tried, you could just about make it. If you really put your mind to it and tried, putting aside your self-pity and resentment and fear for a moment, and fear of responsibility and fear of inadequacy to the side for just one minute, and actually tried sincerely to do the loving for once, active tense loving, without waiting around to be loved, and if you decided to love and participate in The Project of Being, and if you did this, at least some of the time, then maybe just maybe, you could just about make it, and manage to carry the torch of life from one end of your lifespan to the other, successfully.
