Forever Suffering (Cut-And-Paste God Knowledge)

From private correspondence, simply too good to leave for an audience of one.

If you're hoping to avoid pain and death, you're on a fool's errand. Life is pain and it ends in death. Okay, life isn't JUST pain -- but suffering certainly seems to be a key aspect to it. If you try and shelter yourself from it you wind up either completely unprepared for it when it comes anyway or so dissatisfied with your safety that like the Buddha you reject the whole concept of safety and declare all of existence to be an illusion.

I am also reminded of an old Sufi tale about this sage on a sea voyage. At some point during the trip the ship hit a really bad storm, and while the boat tipped this way and that, while the seamen were running around barking orders and unrolling sails and bailing out water, while the other passengers were terrified and whimpering and praying, the sage sat in complete serenity. When the crisis passed someone took him to task, asking "How could you stay so calm, knowing that the only thing between you and a watery grave was a thin plank of wood?" And he responded, "I was able to remain calm by reflecting that, at many times, even on the land, there has been far less between me and death." We are all of us at all times living in the shadow of the valley of death.

I knew a kid, my age, he was coming back from vacation summer after 6th grade. He unbuckled his seatbelt for a moment to turn and say something to his cousin in the backseat and at that moment someone hit them. Everyone else survived, he died in his mother's arms on the side of the road. A kid younger than me, one of my cousin's friends, out of the blue dropped dead at 15. Turns out he had some heart defect no one knew about.

I think the healthiest way to handle the idea that terrible things happen is to accept it. You can try to ignore it but still the horrors slip in like a thief through an unlocked window. You can embrace it and spread it, be a monster -- but to what end? You can despair and see that all of life is misery and give up. Or you can accept it as an aspect of life, see it for what it is, and use it to measure the rest of your time. Enjoy what you have because it could be taken at literally any moment.

It's like this: the world is a horrible place. When we came up, the last time we actually evolved, there was nowhere we were safe. There were giant animals everywhere that would catch us and eat us if we strayed from the pack, if we moved too far from the fire. Huge cats and wolves and wild hogs and giant bears and snakes -- watch the middle five hours of the Peter Jackson King Kong and you will realize that all these giant monster animals fears are almost an encoded race memory from a time when things like that almost actually existed. And, over time, we have shone the light of civilization, beat back the threat of bloody nature, "red in tooth and claw." Now when you hear about a giant animal killing a human it is probably an escaped zoo animal or the guy was some nut who tried to live with the bears. It's just not the same anymore. But somehow the state of fear and terror of the external world never left us even as we defeated most of the external world, and today we need to have just as much fear and terror, only it's almost all towards other humans and their artifacts and their actions. For better or worse we live in the world that the humans built, and maybe one day they will realize this and opt to change it into one with less need for fear and terror. This is, I believe, simply the way evolution works as we move from an animal's awareness to the awareness of whatever we will eventually become. Man is a bridge between the ape and the superman, a bridge stretched over the abyss, as Nietzsche said, and it is this abyss that you are attempting to come to terms with.

Good luck, kid, you're gonna need it.