The Last Five Breaths

It doesn’t take much depth of thought to see that one’s life is interesting. However, that adjective should not be misconstrued as positive in any conventional sense because human life is still grossly stupid, massively sad, constantly humiliating, and so on… but look at it, the sky or sea or skyscraper, at all those utterly unpredictable things that constantly occur.

There is so much that happens, that it throws an individual mind into a spin. I’m at a stage of my life, 32, where my struggle is paying off, in the way that matters most, in my ability to open my mind like a whore opens her legs.

And death is what gives it all value. It ends, so attention must be paid. Arthur Miller writes exactly that in Death of a Salesman, “attention must be paid”. Our knowledge, that our very own death will occur,  allows us to see that this life is finite, and it is in human nature to see value in finite substances. It is when we forget our death and think that our life will never end that we fail to see it, attention is not paid, and we fail to see its value. And as the amount remaining decreases the amount of value you attribute to it becomes ever greater. The youth are doomed to be ignorant in this matter. And who shall be wisest? The wisest will be those who are in the moment before their deaths, with the least amount of our finite life remaining, seeing its value fully revealed. The clarity that must fill the mind, the longing to turn and open arms to the world and say, You were everything.

Our fear of death obstructs our view of death. We see it as an enemy and not a saviour, not as the true giver of meaning. Socrates was known as one man who did not fear death, and if our shoddy historical record of his life is accurate at all, then he proved this in practice, by drinking a cup of hemlock that was forced upon him by the pillars of his society. We are told that Socrates said, “To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?”

But, in the meantime, we must live, since we choose to live, and while you can find an infinite number of lies in self-help books on the theme of how to live, it is my opinion that Albert Camus, the French philosopher, has saved us all a lot of time by summarising the whole thing into one line in the conclusion to The Myth of Sisyphus, he writes: “The struggle itself… is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

I see that there is a lot more to be said for contemplation of death than the times will accept. In the current day the contemplation of ones death is considered morbid. Historically, in many disciplines and traditions the daily contemplation of ones own personal death was essential.

Attachment. This the mortal sin that we find translated out of the Eastern mystic traditions. Attachment, to things both attractive and repulsive, is the greatest obstacle to true wisdom, we are told. But, alas, the would be Eastern spiritualists found in the contemporary West are either, one, complete quacks, or, two, misguided Christians who believe they are Buddhist. The Christian tradition leaves us with the legacy of “doing good”. In many cases this finds its expression in victimising minorities, burning witches of one variety or another. And the Christian tradition has burnt millions, or is it billions? and we should certainly count the charred remains of the Iraqis among them, as the ignorant cling to plenty of Christian dogma but little or none of its point.

Doing good. Being good. This is what drives Christians and other fanatics. And why? Ultimately, so that they can walk down the street saying, I am good. I am good. I am good. They need to feel that they are good. If they perform certain actions and say that those actions are good then they must be good. But what about other people who aren’t performing those actions, they, therefore, must not be good. And the so-called loving Christian becomes the hater, hater of everyone that does not talk and live his particular brand of nonsense. This is the kind of Christian that I am far more familiar with, in practice. The Christian has a sour eye for anyone who is not a Christian or at least a do-gooder. But the point that I expressed earlier in this paragraph is that the do-gooder/Christian is doing good in order to feel that he/she is good. Was the point to reach a point where you feel that anyone who doesn’t need to do the shit that you need to do, to feel good, is bad?

Imagine your death, imagine yourself falling off your chair right now and looking up at your ceiling for a final ten seconds before you’re gone forever. This moment, in one form or another, is coming for you, I promise, so why not consider it now. You, on the floor, all your dreams and plans and frustrations amounting to zero, as, five breaths left, you think, I imagine, of not much at all, in the conventional sense.

Looking at this moment it’s easy to see that not only are the things you loved on Earth of no value but neither are the things you hated. Thinking this way or that way about things really is a waste of an otherwise interesting experience called human life. Warlords tearing lives to shreds, oil being dumped on seal colonies, floods, earthquakes, Empires. These things are neither good nor bad, but that will be impossible to believe until you are there on the floor taking the last five breaths.

My point is, the good guys aren’t good guys, and the bad guys aren’t bad guys. You are simply an individual saying this is what I want and that is what I don’t want. How you decided what you wanted and what you didn’t want is a process so ridiculous that I won’t bother to go into it. You’ll slay a billion cows and trillion baby sheep in a day so that you can add to your already excessive supply of body fat, but if one drunk captain should accidentally knock off a couple of hundred seals with crude oil he ought to be crucified. Seeing people properly crucified, for their evil deeds, is, of course, right up there on the list of things that a Christian or any other do-gooder must do if they are to have the right to think of themselves as good.

Mortality is the great mind cleanser, realising fully the fact of your death is the great mental enema. You, hopefully, will have a clear, uninterrupted ten seconds before your death to see how fucking full of shit you were.

But oh, to focus on your death is so negative. So negative. We must think positively in order to create a positive world. Happy thoughts lead to a happy future. Well answer this you fucking philosophical S-bend, will thinking happy thoughts change the fact of your death? And could anything make less sense than existence, and more sense than non-existence. What the fuck is life, what the fuck are you supposed to do with it, is there really good and bad or is there just a lot of shit that creates one chemical reaction or another in your wild physiology. It is a mental pigmy, indeed, that thinks there’s a definite correlation between teensy weensy little human values and the great meaning of the universe. The tectonic plates just knocked off 50,000 people in Haiti, that’s just the Universe getting up in the morning, that’s nothing for the Universe. I look up and see shooting stars every night, each one is about the equivalent of ten bazillion earthquakes in Haiti. Do you think the Universe has the same value system as you when quite likely it has no plans to continue the human species, or any other Earth species, beyond another blink of the Universal eye?

Empty your head, that’s all the advice that can be given in the spirit of truth. See yourself as a senseless fool fumbling in the dark, and forget all those false lights, for none of them will guide you to anything but a crèche for morons. You are a fool fumbling in the dark and soon you’ll just be dead, so quit your squawking and feel the everything that only a properly aware fool can feel in this laughably meaningless spot of existence we find ourselves in. If there’s a Tao, or a God, or a Way, or a Guiding Principle then we shall never grasp it in our life and we have only the choice of being.