The brain is numb. The brain is alive. Numb to the ebb of emotions within.. pulsing with sizzling electricity to delve beneath. Lifeless to the eye but dissecting out life itself. Can the utterly materialistic and the utterly metaphysical coexist? Can one contemplate the futility of emotion driven angst while in the throes of it?
What is life? Is life defined in our incessant efforts to feed and clothe and luxuriate oneself? Or in the pursuit of a higher purpose such as altruism when in effect all altruism is but the ego crowning itself? Or an amalgamation of the two, with wealth enough to disperse and earn the sash of nobility.
Or perhaps the high drama of a tumultuous relationship between lovers, siblings, friends or even fanatically held views on religion or politics. Whether it’s one or another or a blend thereof, that’s the bread and butter of life as we know it. Like the ocean, always in motion, always crashing onto the shore high tide or low.
Life is in essence a battlefield of desire vs ethics, of self vs communal, of being vs nothingness. What better place to contemplate the irrelevance of being alive or dead than amidst the battlefield of life itself, with one’s very life at stake. Trying to hold on to life while fully aware it doesn’t mean a damn once dead. Why do we eschew death and not life when death has ironically more meaning than this drama we call life. After all nothing is certain in life but for death.
By design or by chance, by the divine or by default, life isn’t particularly amenable to being pried open and it’s workings demystified. We chisel on at the surface thinking we are sculpting a life out for ourselves when in essence the bulk of it remains unknown and unknowable. We may decide what clothes to wear or what emotions to express or even pretend to meditate on it but rarely do we get a say in what genes our very own cells express or the path of a hurricane. In any case, to those who live at the surface of it all, merely but merrily mired in everyday dos and don’ts, ethos and ethics, children and professions, going beneath the surface seems to be a wasteful exercise.
Afterall, the realization that our everyday ups and lows, desires and disappointments have utterly no meaning in the grand scheme of being, may very well detonate the very life we try to make sense of – as we know it. It would take the zing out of lovers pangs, the bling out of every deal. So you can surely choose to let it be, not sift through to the bottom of it all, losing the heap in the process. Live. Love. Suffer. Happy. Sad. Such is life.
If meaning and the very purpose of a meaning cease to exist outside the confines of the here and now, is it even worth contemplating?
However to realize the meaninglessness of the life and yet decide what the heck, let’s live anyway, in full pursuit of happiness, love, wealth and the entire repertoire of worldly pleasures as they are called, now that is true detachment – detachment from the very need for a purpose. An hermit in essence and a pebble in paradise. Nirvana.
(A sequel to http://thenakedsoul.org/2018/07/12/the-humble-pebble-the-lofty-hermit )
