I’ve been brooding over the pros and cons of facing reality again. When we see reality, assuming that’s possible, how should we feel? And when I say reality I mean Reality, Ultimate Truth, the way things really are. Below I consider three possibilities.
1: Reality Should Make You Glad
Buddha and other sages have assured us that reality should make us happy, no matter what the circumstances of our lives. And not just happy but serene, blissful, immune to the pains that afflict ordinary folk. This is the state known as enlightenment, nirvana, awakening. You plunge into the timeless cosmic consciousness underlying the flux of ordinary mortal existence, and you feel fantastic.
According to Plato, when you escape the cave of delusion and step into the incandescent realm of eternal forms, you’ll feel a little pain at first, as your eyes adjust to the light. But then you will be overcome with rapture. When you go back inside the cave and tell your benighted buddies what you’ve seen, they might think you’re nuts and kill you. But you’ll die happy, as Plato’s mentor Socrates supposedly did.
Spinoza agreed that real happiness comes not from ephemeral things but from contemplating God, which he equated not with the emotional, judgmental, personal deity of the Bible but with the impersonal, rational order of nature. Happiness, you might say, results from worshipping quantum mechanics, relativity, the theory of evolution, and the second law of thermodynamics, which will never let you down.
2: Reality Should Make You Sad
From another perspective, which unfortunately strikes me as more rational, all happiness is delusional, because we are mortal and hence doomed to lose everything we love. Dwelling on the second law of thermodynamics, far from filling you with joy, should make you despair. In an expanding cosmos, we’re headed for heat death, an eternity of cold, dark nothing, which renders everything that we do now meaningless and absurd.
Camus compared us to the mythological figure Sisyphus, whom the Gods doom to roll a rock to the top of a mountain, only to have it roll to the bottom again, over and over, endlessly. At least Sisyphus lives forever. We, in a Godless cosmos, have no such assurance.
And to a hard-core materialist, mystical bliss, like that reported by Buddha, Plato, and others, is a quirk of biochemistry with no revelatory power. In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James pointed out that many mystical experiences are “diabolical” and “pessimistic.” James explained that “instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life.”
These dark epiphanies are usually dismissed as products of insanity. But why, James asked, should we give credence only to heavenly visions and not hellish ones? Good question. Novelist/philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, a subject of my book Mind-Body Problems, was raised as an Orthodox Jew. Although she became an atheist, she misses the consolation of faith in a loving God. When I asked if knowledge brings happiness, Goldstein replied, “It hasn’t been my personal experience.”
3: Reality Should Make You Glad and Sad
Maybe options one and two are both true. Maybe when we see things as they really are, we should somehow feel glad and sad, grateful and despondent, ecstatic and terrified at the same time. Ann Shulgin, a psychotherapist I interviewed 20 years ago for a book on mysticism, pointed out this possibility to me. I asked her which response to reality she considers truer, ecstatic connectedness or terrifying alienation?
“The place I think the Buddhists try and get you to,” Shulgin responded, “is right on the knife edge between the two. That’s where the truth is… The laughing Buddha is your best guide. What the heck is he laughing about? You can’t explain that logically, but you can get into that state. And the final answer you’re looking for is the knife edge, because both exist: that terrible darkness, and that absolute life.”
I have good moments and bad ones. Maybe some day, like a flipped penny that lands on its edge, I’ll end up, through sheer luck, on the knife-edge between good and bad. Or maybe I’ll just become more content with flopping from one side of the blade to the other, the way I have been all my life.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his Scientific American blog, “Cross-check.”
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