The metaphysical exile

Weariness of Death, by Pavel Karlovich

One day, for no reason, we are born. We come into the world, sentient creatures with rudimentary instincts. Birth is not our first awakening, but just one of many that we have throughout our lives. The first occurs while we are still in our mother's womb, when the thalamocortical connections develop to the point that we stop being an unconscious organic mass and become something that moves and reacts to the world, around the twentieth week of gestation.

As the years go by, we become more and more aware of things. However, not everyone becomes aware of everything. Thank goodness, because if everyone were to become aware of everything, they would fall into deep despair. If we were all aware of everything from the beginning of our journey as a species, we would have become extinct a long time ago, perhaps between the mastery of fire and the invention of the wheel. I take back what I said: we shouldn't be thankful, it is a shame that we did not all become aware of everything. We would have been spared a lot of suffering, because our ancestors would not have left descendants.

After we come into the world, we are pampered until a certain age, that is, if we are lucky enough to live in a certain type of society, at a certain time in history, and belong to a reasonably functional and stable family. After that period, we begin to be expected to perform well in life, to be productive, whatever that means, regardless of the type of society or political-economic system. We are also expected to be grateful for having been placed in this world where nothing is free except hurt and where it is impossible to be truly moral.

After all, there are beggars living on our street corners and we do nothing. And even when we do something, we fail to help many others because we can't help everyone. We crush sentient beings with the soles of our shoes almost every day and we do not even realize it. We don't need to be actively monsters to understand that it is not possible to exist without harming other beings and ourselves. No matter how hard we try — and almost none of us really tries — it is not possible to be moral without completely denying ourselves. This is why saints are even rarer than one might think.

So here we are, in this place we didn’t choose to be, in this body we didn’t choose to have, in this life that, frankly, we didn’t choose to live. You may think you chose your life, especially if you’re an adult who took this or that path and did relatively well in material terms, for example. But you didn’t choose much of anything. Maybe you don’t like knowing this and will refuse to accept that you had much less control than you think you did over who you are. People talk about freedom, but there is no freedom when we understand that we are decaying organisms, born without our consent.

We reject our deplorable condition so much that we prefer to believe that we belong somewhere else. Since the beginning of humanity, we have looked at other animals, the brutes, with no sense of right and wrong, without compassion, and thought: there’s no way we’re on the same level as them, that we come from the same place as the beasts that devour each other without mercy. Maybe our bodies come from the same place, but not our essences, we think. That's where religions came from, the desire to reconnect with our true home. How much we suffer wishing to return home! We were exiled to the world of eternal becoming, we committed some original transgression to be imprisoned in matter. At least that's what we hope.

But that home does not exist. The metaphysical exile is both a metaphor and a longing. What we long for is to return to the blessed, undifferentiated “nothingness” from which we came. I put the word nothingness in quotation marks because we are all made of things that have existed before us, yes — particles, atoms, energy that were once part of so many other things, inanimate and animate, dead and alive — but we, as we are now living individuals, did not exist. There are those who swear they remember past lives, and there are those who know that this is nothing more than fiction. And if remembering lives other than our own is not fiction, this ability is part of something even more inscrutable than metempsychosis.

At the same time that philosopher Emil Cioran writes, in The Trouble with Being Born, that he feels like a metaphysical exile for having lived his entire life with the feeling of having been removed from his true place, he asks, in On the Heights of Despair, whether our existences do not make us exiles from our true homeland, which is nothingness. Fernando Pessoa speculated, writing the following: “To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.” In a way, it is a merciful thing, I think, that we are the result of chance and return to nothingness with the dissolution of our bodies after death. Imagine if we really had to inhabit other exiles even worse than this one.

Even those who wish to reach heaven as a reward for submitting to this or that god only want to return to a state in which there is no iniquity and gnashing of teeth, that is, to the state of nonexistence prior to birth. It is not death that we desire, nor heaven, nor nirvana or moksha. Our exile in becoming began when our gestation was successful. It is there, at the beginning of our journeys, that the catastrophe lies. That is why it is impossible to remedy it. We cannot go back in time and abort ourselves. The damage has already been done. All that is left for us to do is choose whether or not to create a new prisoner of matter, a new expatriate of nothingness.

This is how our condition of exile is constituted. Many do not realize it, of course. After all, some exiles are more comfortable than others. But most people do not live comfortably, and they still happily affirm their destinies, content with life, despite all the misfortune that surrounds us. Many of us are not awake enough, are not lucid enough. For them, the lack of lucidity is great, because they can live their lives in ignorance, being grateful for having the opportunity to exist in this vale of tears. For some of their children and grandchildren who will inevitably develop an excess of lucidity, this is terrible, because they understand that perhaps they would not have existed if their ancestors had not been idiots marveled by samsara.

Apart from a few idiots, I think that almost everyone sees something wrong with the world. Not just with the human world in the historical sense, but with the universe itself, with existence, with what I always call the “world of becoming.” This is not new; it is something that philosophers have been thinking about since before Socrates, and in cultures ranging from ancient Greece to Shakyamuni’s India and Laozi’s China. Thinkers and gurus have always tried to find the stable ground that supports becoming. It is no wonder that philosophy and religion have gone hand in hand for so long. For many, they still do.

But philosophy seeks truth, and at a certain point it realized the painful truth that there is probably nothing stable behind our physical universe; and if there is a basis for all existence, it can hardly be equated with some comforting notion, such as a benevolent god. On the contrary: it is only through illogical mental acrobatics that it is possible to imagine existence as being grounded on a benevolent force. It doesn't really matter whether or not there is a metaphysical aspect to reality. We are the product of the same physical — and perhaps metaphysical — forces that produced cockroaches, and any belief to the contrary is nothing more than a chimera. Cockroaches live a violent life in the filth, but they are less unfortunate than us, because they are not capable of achieving a deep understanding of themselves and of the rest.

Paraphrasing the writer Thomas Ligotti: behind the walls of the universe there is something pernicious that makes existence a meaningless nightmare. Ligotti refers to several pessimistic philosophers, but mainly Arthur Schopenhauer, for whom the world of becoming was just a collection of manifestations of a single metaphysical force that sustains all reality: a blind universal Will that has no direction nor a cosmic purpose, a Will that subsists eternally outside of time and space. This, for Ligotti, makes philosophical pessimism a sister idea to the cosmicism of H.P. Lovecraft, a famous horror writer whose stories show humanity as being insignificant and disposable, inhabiting an indifferent universe dominated by grotesque, ancient and extremely powerful creatures.

There is no one watching over us and, for all intents and purposes, our essences do not come from anywhere, because they do not exist or are unknowable, no matter how much philosophers argue to the contrary, even Schopenhauer. As a metaphor for reality, Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the Will is excellent and terrifying. But as an actual reality? It's hard to accept without question. We are, it seems, originally from the world becoming, unfortunately, but we do not need a stable reality beyond the physical to condemn it as hideous and futile—or, in Ligotti’s words, “malignantly useless.” The homeland to which we want to return is the quiet emptiness of the inorganic for which our cells secretly yearn. Life is our exile.

by Fernando Olszewski