“I believe when we die, we cease to exist completely, no heavenly paradise, no promise of virgins, no nirvana, no hell. We just die and everything goes black.”
‘…everything goes black…’
How might that happen, I wonder?
If this is what happens, it means we go out of existence as if we had never existed at all. So this mind and consciousness we seem to have, they would be finite, competely dependent on the continuation of the body. Everything we think and feel would have to be mechanically-generated. Our parents produce our minds when they conceive our bodies. Their minds must have been conceived by their own parents. And so on back ad infinitum. We must be born with blank slates for minds, but these are slates which start out white and end black – in fact the opposite of slates. If they are created in a way which means ultimately uncreated, then they cannot go out of existence either. So how are they wiped when we die? By whom? Where does the dust go?
Assuming the universe is infinitely existent in time means that mind and consciousness have no first cause. And if they are without beginning they are of infinite duration, which means they do not go out of existence, even when the body dies. So they are not dependent on the body or on some kind of genetic inheritance.
In that case mind and consciousness – the blackboard dust – must be somehow conserved among living entities. If so, then that means our actions in life have consequences. Everything may go black, but not for ever. Maybe not for long. Something comes after the blackness, and if not for ‘us’ as we know ourselves, then for someone else who also has the sense of ‘us’ and who has to live and make the best of the consequences of ‘us’. Someone really rather like us.
If the universe is not infintely existent, then someone must have put mind and consciousness into the original creatures of the universe at its historic inception or creation. If so, then mind cannot be mechanically passed from generation to generation, because it is not inherent in beings, not theirs to create or destroy. What is theirs to create and destroy cannot be mind or consciousness. But if it is so that mind is uncreated, not ours to lose, how can that mind be destroyed when we die? It must have consequences beyond this life, connected with the alleged creator.
If mind goes black at death, the universe would supposedly continue to exist for everyone else in it who is still alive. Suppose some intergalactic virus wiped out every living being in the universe, or every living species simply lost interest in reproduction till there was no one left alive anywhere. Would the universe continue to exist although it had ‘gone black’ for every former critter in it? Matter does not, in a simple way, go out of existence, so would the material part of the universe continue to exist forever, with no one aware of it? If so, if the world continues to exist, then our former actions when we were alive – pollution, architecture, gardening, cooking – would continue to have consequences for the world even though they had no further consequences for ourselves any more, because there was no more ourselves or anyone else.
So the idea that ’everything goes black’ leads to some awkward conclusions. The universe, which is created, and subject to causes and effects, would be indestructible and continue to exist. Whereas mind which is created and mechanical would vanish. If on the other hand mind is uncreated, though subject to causes and effects, nonetheless it would still vanish.
Our actions would have consequences on the fabric of the world, but how we feel about that would be up to ourselves alone, because the universe is eternal and mind is only relative. For the latter reason we need not concern ourselves much with our effect on other living beings either. Then where do human minds get their imagination, in the sense of their fear of death and their instinct for the transcendental, which is supposedly is not a quality, feature or characteristic of mind and therefore ought to be unthinkable? Where does conscience come from?
I never really bothered with the logic of it, It’s merely my experience from my early teens when I sincerely wanted top my self; I sincerely wanted to completely cease existing, so I tried. I guess you could say it was both a success and a failure. I would completely give up. I would go to bed with the motivation that I would never wake up again, sooner or later I’d loose awareness, but I always, always wake up again. I’d try to lay still and not engage with anything for as long as I could, but despite my self I’d get up to eat, piss defecate, and so on… I can’t really remember if this period lasted weeks, months or years, but I eventually came to the conclusion that it wasn’t actually possible to stop or kill awareness, or as I thought of it at the time, stop experience, sooner or later experience would always resurface. And I thought it better to attempt to live in the world I was in instead of killing my self, as I would not know if it would actually improve the situation, most likely I thought that rejecting the life I had could only make it worse. If I kill my self and do wake up what then, has anything really improved.
Samiy, thank you for this open-hearted account. Where the scene opens on your experience, it reads as truly harrowing. How you got into such a state must be a long back-story. But that terrible interlude in your life was not wasted. Far from it. You tapped into a vein of profound intelligence, when you recognised that waking up is always going to recur. And you were right about the reason for that, which is that awareness itself is undying. It was your own nature of mind which informed you about that, and you had the strength of character not to suppress it. That resurgence of strong-mindedness eventually got you out of bed and out of depression again.
You are right, waking up after killing yourself could be painful. The state of mind with which we wake up after death is strongly influenced by the previous state of mind. All religions recognise this, and hence emphasise e.g. deathbed confession and repentance. Vajrayana teachings say that in the bardo between lives we remember our previous lives the way we remember yesterday. ‘Yesterday… hmm… what was I doing yesterday?’ The memory is quickly forgotten because it has become too vague, disjointed and meaningless. It is just like the compacted residue of several different dreams of the night before. That is why it is hard to grasp or reconstruct, or to find an authentic basis for moving on from the place we now find ourselves, unless we used to have strong motivation to spend every day cultivating awareness – i.e through practicing.
If one were to wake up with a hellishly miserable frame of mind and no way of understanding where that came from any more, that would seriously prejudice one’s chances of a successful passage through the bardo of visions.
Waking up has always been an analogy for realisation, which is why the Buddha described himself as ‘the one who has woken up’ (which is what bodhi implies). A characteristic of awakened mind is recognising that, if this is wakefulness, all that other lifetime was spent in a state which was not awake; other people all around are living like that right now and the impulse is to go right ahead and wake them up, explain to them what they’re missing. This was how the Buddha talked to his former meditation companions when he met up with them after leaving the site of the bodhi tree, and one by one they woke up in the light of his explanations.
Yours would make a fine teaching story one day. Meanwhile it is a fine story of how someone came to see the value – and the sense – in being a practitioner.
Lechayim!
Reflecting on the closing question, ‘where does consciousness come from?’, I am torn between two heroes from my reading age (which is still raging, but more buddhistically nowadays): Heidegger and Beckett. The former dubbed the formidable ‘Asking is the devotion of thought’ whereas the second was the weariest of wayfarers in answering ‘on, say on, for be said on. somehow on. until nohow on. said, nohow on’.
Torn in emptiness I stand, clueless whom of the two follow and grant the points of the Dutch jury. Whereas at one point this seemed a great defeat to me, like joining the conceptual bandwagon, I am now tempted to rate this not knowing ‘non-dual’, or, ‘choiceless’. Both of which are nauseatingly vague from the conceptual viewpoint, but nonetheless befit a definite and precise experience. Whereever this consciousness of ours is coming from, it’s a mighty fine no-thing!
Buddhist meditation practice is meant to supply the answer to the question, ‘where does consciousness come from?’. From Dzogchen view one would say that being confident in this answer means one has accomplished the foundation practice. Prior to that however, the path is not supposed to be actually tortuous, in the manner of either of your cultural polarities. The karma of agonising involution cannot possibly deliver the result, effortless ecstatic inherence!
‘Asking is the devotion of thought’ sounds like the endless self-imposed agony the Buddha personally and the whole Vajrayana tradition warns against: making conceptuality one’s cognitive tool in realms beyond its capability. Not that this is obliged to be frustrating. In emptiness, clarity and confidence are the extinction of asking. This is the plateau from which mountains of visionary experience begin to rise up. Theistical culture, however, asserts that authentic visionary experience has its source outside the universe. There is no analogy to Buddhism, a natural transition from philosophy to envisionment. Hereby hangs the uneasy story of the intellect in western culture.
The other ‘pole of heroism’ is a mirror image. Doggedly demanding ’somehow on’ suppresses the urge to pause, to relax, to think, to ask. The two acts of ‘Waiting for Godot’ were once famously reviewed (by Vivian Mercier) as ‘nothing happens, twice.’ Beckett’s two protagonists spend a long time mooching about under a tree, but without any conclusion about nothingness akin to the Buddha’s. In the last lines of the play they finally decide to go; but they do not move. The curtain could rise again after it has fallen at the end of ‘Waiting for Godot’, and the two tramps would still be there, waiting for some deus ex machina like they were at the beginning.
Emptiness leads to compassionate activity. But a temporarily exhausted non-conceptual state can only give birth to apathy – or theism. When it gets its energy back there is a second act, and then the curtain keeps rising again and again on the same stuck scene, the whole theatrical run of samsara.
Emptiness is one-pointed and open in all directions. One cannot be ‘torn’ in emptiness. It is, as you say, both mighty and refined. In the face of oscillating dualism, the cluelessness you mention is itself the greatest clue how to proceed beyond the suspicion of being stuck. Cluelessness, as often in the training of the Mahasiddhas, is intelligent. Buddhism seems to be the only tradition which finds inspiration in such an unlikely, overlooked, neglected phase of human experience.