BOB DYLAN: No matter what gets in the way / or which way the wind does blow / I’ll just sit here and watch the river flow...
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| Image courtesy: circusarts.com.au |
It was Aristotle who famously said, We are what we repeatedly do; Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. And in the context of modern mechanical life, it is perhaps one of the most misconstrued notion which was a humble meditation on perseverance by the great thinker. In a recent post earlier this month, Joshua at theMinimalist.com published an essay titled "100 Days with No Goal". Having gone two months in between jobs at that time, I thought I was in an interesting position to appreciate the idea. So, when it did little more than just scratching the surface --including, almost triggering a depression-- it was apparent that something was out of place, especially when my quitting of job was voluntary.
"Watching the river flow": Even while taking this idea literally outdoors with Shimano fishing rods to the nearby lack for angelical fishing-- I found the time flowing faster than any other perceivable paradigm. The slowdown of everything around you including your Self and metabolism could have a maddening effect, especially when time seems to start accelerating while you are at it (The notion of time is relative. Since it is a contant, it has contrasting effects on your individual perception of "slow" or "fast". More on this on a separate post). Unless your contempt towards your regular (corporate or otherwise) life set around social timetables is extreme, it is rather easy, or even a default response, to translate "no goals" into hopelessness, and then anxiety. It is indeed intriguing, and doesn't seem without intention, that the question "What's the purpose of life?" has deep connotations with hopelessness. (It would be really interesting if you could point out some happy-go-lucky guy, neck deep in spoils of life and wants for more, and yet pondering over the purpose puzzle. There is a 50:50 chance that the guy may end his life, ripe and rife with pleasures, a hedonist's dream personified, and never bothered about that purpose thing; which, in its own rights, may put a question mark on the supremacy of the question.)
For those flying-trapeze artists of the circus, to let go of one trapeze on a simple "hope" that the opposite trapeze would miraculously and timely intervene before gravity vetos the whole affair, can also swiftly become a free fall of panic when the acrobats suddenly realize that someone forgot to tie the safety net below. The spectators (society), on their part, enjoy to pay the circus not only for the acrobatic skills, but also for the (secret) "hope" to eyewitness that fetal crash some day. (A 100% negation of "hope" for that fetal fall could quickly put the circus out of business. But thankfully, while there is "hope", there are hardly any firm assurances and safety in real life, and so the society and the circus continue to attract and imitate each other.)
Repurpose life: On the other hand, the scene may differ if the transition is aided by respective rituals and care from forerunners (Buddhist sects aptly call them tathagata, meaning thus gone before), for initiation into a monastic order. Here, while it may sound like quitting and renouncing, it is more like trading one set of goals for another. Repurpose life, if you like, with the intention of having less of bad and more of good side-effects of your survival tactics onto the society at large. The alternative lifestyle and life-path is not without its risks, and the examples of experiments gone bad are aplenty. However, if you do survive the ordeal, and retain your faculties that can usefully reflect on the state of your previous "social" being, the society stands to gain from your "out of the box" thinking, mainly as a critic. As one of the contributing parameters, this contrasting and opposite point of reference, largely by the way of metaphors, may help the society in judging how good or bad its affairs are.
So, the point to ponder here is: If the promise of Moksha and then Nirvana is true, then the fully monastic order of a society is destined to disintegrate given sufficient time and a healthy success-rate of "release" from samsara. In other words, an end of the world for man. On a slightly lighter note, it would also be somewhat boring in such an order since there would hardly be enough people to preach to; not to mention that (unknighted) Sir Darwin would be utterly mad at such an evolutionary impasse, with impending exit.
Catch the concluding Part 2 of the post here.