Philosophy

Forgive me if this seems a preachy post. It is part confessional, as everything mentioned here are things I struggle with, so it’s not as if I am spouting some dark judgment upon the rest of the world from some lofty superior position of perfection. But we can’t get past our faults if we’re too afraid to even look them in the eye.

This is obviously not a conclusive list, but it’s what comes to mind at the moment. You’ll probably also notice that they’re all related to each other in some way.

Wanting stuff

Ah, the smell of a new book! A new blu-ray! Ah, too look upon my collection of books on the bookshelf! Perhaps small compared to many others, but much more than most people who’ve ever lived ever had. Oh, but I would like more! Yes, my Amazon wishlist is bountiful. And when I see pictures of laptops and gadgets and huge-screen TVs, how my mind doth dream. And, when I get really daydreamy, how attractive those mansion photos seem. Ah, to live in luxury!

But such desires can never be fulfilled. There will always be something else. And when I am lost in a daydream, a daydream of pure desire, I am gone from the moment. I cannot deal with what is now, and I paint it all black, as if the now is dreadful darkness undeserving of my mental presence. I ignore my present fortune, especially my very existence in the first place. I make them worthless to me.

Solution: I’m sure I’ll still buy stuff. And I’m sure daydreams will still creep into my mind when I’m not paying attention. But no more entertaining them. No more getting lost in them. It is rotten.

Caring too much about self-image and worldly success

I must be a better person. I must be successful. The world already told me that that is the best thing to be. “You’ll go far!” they told me. “You’re talented! You’ll be something! You’ve got gifts! You’ll be rich!” They told me I was creative! “Remember us when your famous!” they said with a smile.

What do they want me to do? Actually become famous? Make tons of money? Win a prestigious award? Were they just mocking me? If they don’t really want me to want that stuff, why do they glorify it? Why do they make me feel as if that’s what I must achieve to be “successful” to them?

Wikipedia doesn’t have a page on me yet. I guess I’m not successful. And if I’m not successful, I guess I’m not “worthy” yet. Worthy of what? The love of the world? The love and respect of even myself? I must do some specific something to be worth something to myself? I must have some great honor of wealth or fame bestowed upon me from smiling approving older people? I must have been places and have known famous people? I must have interesting things to say on social occasions?

I must achieve something, hurry! I must hurry up with writing that book! I must consume all books and media I see that look half-interesting! I must be an expert on something! I must have other people say about me, “Yes, that guy is smart!” Every moment I should be working on something, working towards some goal, and every moment that I’m not, I should be ashamed of myself for having wasted time! I must treat myself harshly, and stress myself out.

Solution: The world was wrong. They burdened me with their own daydreams, and I thought they were worth carrying. I thought if I could give them what they wanted, I’d become something greater in their eyes, as if they had something else to offer, a gift of some greater love they were holding back on until I proved myself worthy. I held it back from even myself. But they were wrong. I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to be a millionaire, I don’t have to become famous, I don’t have to win some award. I don’t have to write a book, or direct a movie, or make some great discovery. I don’t need a Wikipedia page. All those things will turn to dust in the end. Why burden myself with building the perfect snowmen when they will melt away? The love that’s worth the most to me is the love that’s offered completely free. Unearned. Otherwise it’s not a gift, and cannot be love.

Being afraid

Sure, there are the natural fears, the stimuli that make the heart beat faster. Heights, fights, bees, and pain. Pointy things coming at me fast.

But more deadly are the mental anxieties. Will I ever “make it”? Will I have everything I need, and not have to work too hard for anything ever again? Will I have enough money? Will the ones I love keep loving me? How do I fare in God’s eyes?

And death! Oh, to wake up in the darkness of the night, to feel my chest rise with my breath and to know the clock is ticking. Someday this body will decay. How will I die? Where will I go? What will I be?

Solution: “Why worry if you can do something about it; and why worry if you cannot do anything about it?” There is no logical reason to be afraid of anything. It is a complete waste of energy. Nothing is gained. Like the wrong of wanting stuff, being afraid depends upon being lost in destructive daydreams that do little more than paint the present moment in shades of black. What do I want that I should be so afraid of not getting anyway? Unfortunately, I’m going to worry. But no more entertaining the worries. Pray them away. I’m not going to ignore potential problems, or stop planning ahead. But no more getting lost in worse-case-scenario daydreams. It is now, and there are much more interesting things to think about now.

Donating stuff to the poor is not in and of itself a good deed. Caring about other people is the good deed, and so giving something to someone else because you care is a good deed. If you don’t have anything to donate, you can still care just as much. (Similarly, if you donate a billion dollars with contempt, you haven’t done anything good. Abu, the monkey in Disney’s Aladdin, gives a small loaf of bread to poor orphans out of shame. This is not a good deed. Of course, monkeys don’t have Free Will, so who cares.) You don’t need to be a billionaire to care, nor are billionaires capable of caring more just because they have more money.

So forcing other people to help each other, such as by taxing them and redistributing their money in the name of moral goodness, or just bothering them by showing them pictures of miserable poor people and asking for their money, does not equal a moral goodness in and of itself. In fact, you can never force someone else to do good. That misses the point of what it means to be good.

“A care with a prayer is worth more than a curse with a purse.”

To believe in an objective difference between right and wrong (God and not God) implies the existence of immortal souls, spirits that exist non-physically, and continue existing even after the mortal physical body dies (naturally becomes unable to continue living in the physical sense). So, in this sense, ghosts do exist. We are, in fact, part-ghost right now, in the way that “ghost” means a non-physical spirit.

But, as humans, it is often tempting to “humanize” our understanding of the nature of immortal souls so that they are understood to exist as humanly as we do now, just without physical bodies, as if they’d float around the physical world and communicate with and/or frighten us physically living people.

This makes no sense. Think about the nature of truth; when something is true, its truth exists outside or beyond the physical constructs of space and time. Its existence is not dependent on a specific location or time the way that physical phenomena is. So it is with the difference between right and wrong, and so it is with God, and so it is with our immortal souls. When our souls separate from our physical bodies, they also separate from the physical constructs of space and time. We can understand this to be true even while it is currently impossible to understand what that sort of existence is like. But it does allow us to understand how the common notion of “ghosts as spirits wandering around the physical world” is at best a silly notion of spiritual ignorance, at worst a temptation away from God (truth).

So a lot of “ghostly phenomenon” does not pass the true-faith-in-God test. Ghost Hunters and such shows may be entertaining, but to truly believe them is to reject the true nature of God, whether it be for the corrupted desire for unnatural powers (that is, the desire to communicate with the dead; not because it can be done but is just dangerous (it can’t be done, but we can easily spiritually deceive ourselves into believing it can, like a spiritual placebo effect, through which we can credit perfectly natural mental abilities (such as talking to oneself) to ghostly activity), but because the desire for that sort of experience is not in union with a desire for God (love and truth)), or simply out of a spiritual misunderstanding of the nature of God and immortal souls (as opposed to the incomplete understanding of the nature of God we all naturally experience as part of our temporary physical existence).

That said, we know that God can interact with us in our physical existence through our non-physical spirits; otherwise we would be incapable of understanding that there exists an objective difference between right and wrong, and would be incapable of believing in Him. (I am considering our “sense” of God as a form of “interaction” — I do not mean to imply that God often physically moves things around in front of us to prove His existence to us — He obviously doesn’t — I do not think He would desire for our faith in Him to be based on tricks of changing the laws of physics, which would probably do more harm to us than good.) God must also, then, be capable of allowing, in proper conditions, the spirits of the physically departed to spiritually appear to or communicate with physically living beings for the sake of the spirit of the physically living (not for a ghost’s “unfinished business”). It is also important to note that, when this happens, it happens through and with God; it is not some departed spirit acting of its own volition, and it is never done in response to a living being requesting or desiring such contact, which, as I stated before, is a spiritually disordered request.

The question is: is the worth of life determined by how good you feel?

While emptying the dishwasher a week or so ago, I overheard some dialog on the TV show Glee in which suicide was a topic of discussion.  The characters went around and stated something they were looking forward to in, I suppose, an effort to thwart depression.  It reminded my a lot of the “It Gets Better” campaign that went around the Internet not long ago.  The message is: your burdens are worth bearing now because it will get better.

This seems to suggest that life is worth living because of the good feelings felt while living it.  So what if you were a 93 year old with a terminal illness and went through excruciating pain every day, and it was only bound to get worse?  Is it OK to go ahead and kill yourself because it doesn’t get better?

There was recently an article in our local paper about a man who had the phrase “No CPR” tattooed to his chest.  Should he stop breathing, he did not want to be revived.  Is that morally OK?  If so, would it not also be morally OK to just go jump off a bridge?  Since both rely on you making a conscious decision about living your life, what’s the difference?  Does the nature of the physical manifestation of the cause of death outweigh the nature of the preceding intent?  (That is, the intent to die to prevent further physical pain?)

At what point is physical pain so bad that it is OK to not want to live anymore?

If you are reading this, you are probably alive.  Do you want to stay alive?  If so, why?  There may be a few possible answers:

– I am afraid of death because I don’t know what awaits in the afterlife
– I am afraid of the pain before death; I don’t want to experience it
– There is joy waiting for me in the future and it’s worth waiting for
– I am experiencing joy right now that is worth remaining alive to feel

Is it not all about joy or the prevention of pain, either now or in the future?

I’ll certainly admit that I do not currently have a concrete set of answers.  I continue to ponder this issue.  But wanting to die to prevent physical pain seems morally wrong to me, at least while such pain does not interfere with the mental faculties that allow you to wish for death.  That is, tattooing “No CPR” to your chest is morally equivalent to jumping off a bridge, though it’s probably less physically painful.  If you are wishing for death, then you are obviously in a mental state in which you are able to think of something other than just physical pain (such as the absence of it).

I do think it helps to not think of the joy of this life as an end in and of itself.  That is, if we can understand that there exists an objective truth outside of our own existence, then our life must be eternal.  (Showing why this is so may make an interesting future blog post, for it’s a leap many philosophers can’t or won’t make, such as Ayn Rand and Bertrand Russell.)  If life is eternal, then it doesn’t end with the death of our physical bodies in this world.  (Though the nature of our existence without physical senses is unimaginable to us at this time, keep in mind that our consciousnesses are already not physical things.)  If life doesn’t end with the demise of our physical bodies, then a lot of things we are naturally conditioned to care about don’t actually matter so much.  Such things include: perfect justice, fame, power, money, attention, school grades, perfect physical well-being, material items, and goals and dreams that are physical in nature (e.g. “I want to be a movie star!”; such materialistic dreams are very much encouraged by American culture, while watching others achieve them is often considered vulgar (“Grrr!  I hate the 1%!”)).  If life is eternal, material wealth and social status are ultimately irrelevant in and of themselves, because death in this life will rid you of such things.

The thing is: we’re naturally conditioned to get joy from these things, and if life is worth living for the joy of it, how can these things not be life-worthy pursuits?

So I’ll claim that, yes, pleasure and joy are worthy pursuits.  But not in this life, where such pleasure and joy can only be imperfect.  One must find joy in something not competitive or physically-based, something that is as eternal as life itself.  (Such as, perhaps, love.  And not just conditional love for some singular sweetheart, but love for all, even those that would do evil.  Talk about unnatural!)

I suppose this all relates back to the old conflict of living in the present versus living in the future.  For the most part, we naturally live in the future.  The reason we do just about anything physically is to achieve some physical end; ultimately joy or the prevention of pain.  But this also brings about anxieties.  You don’t kill yourself or let yourself die to take away the pain you feel now.  There’s nothing you can do about that.  You do it to prevent yourself from feeling the pain you would feel later on if you weren’t going to be dead at that time.  (Of course, if it’s just a few minutes or seconds into the future, we may refer to it as “now”, but it’s not really.)  But if you only live in the present, you wouldn’t eat, for example, and would soon die.

So I’ll further claim that we can’t stop living at least somewhat in the future.  This is necessary.  But we must balance how much we live in the future.  If we find ourselves getting anxious (which naturally happens to everyone), then we are focusing too much in the future.  We must physically live in the future to maintain our lives and well-being, but we must emotionally (or perhaps a better word might be spiritually) live in the present.  We don’t stop ourselves from killing ourselves because our emotions will get better later, but because we’re not focusing on the world in the right way in the present.  Which isn’t to claim that it’s always easy to do so, just that it’s worth living to try to.

Again, these are issues I’m still pondering.  But the thought that life is only worth the joy you’re capable of feeling (or think you’re capable of feeling), whether in the present or the future, strikes me as incomplete.