Grounds for Hope

Although I remain non-foundationalist in the sense that I don’t think that any sort of elaborate philosophical, scientific, or religious theory can be an adequate cornerstone of a life well lived, I am starting to think that science might give us some grounds for hope which we would be harder pressed to find without it. Although science debases all our illusions of humanity being separate and special, it offers something priceless, something of incomparable value—a vision of continuity. Our world is continuous, in time, in space, and in mind. I think that evolution shows that the difference between the mind of a human and the mind of an animal is merely one of degree. Furthermore, I believe that the differences between unconscious matter and mind is a continuum as well. The fact that our consciousness arose from aggregates of inert wave-particles has become a notion of immense comfort to me. In a way, all is one, in that everything lies of different parts of a grand continuum. There is no longer a fine line between self and other—the gap has been breached, and with this breach comes a vision of beauty that is hard to rival.

I think that Buddha was right about self and the afterlife, in a sense. Buddha lived in a time when there were two conflicting schools of thought about the nature of the afterlife. The Eternalists believed that we all possessed a “divine spark”, or Atman. This was tantamount to a soul of sorts—we are reborn again and again, but retain the same divine spark which never changes and never dies. The Annihilationist held the opposite view—we are temporal beings. As I gather, the materialist perspective was like this—we have selves, or egos, that are in the “on” position during life, and switch to the off position at death, and remain as such forever. The Buddha denied both these theories, teaching that the self was an illusion; that what we mistakenly call self is an aggregate of qualities such as mind, matter, sensation, etcetera. In this view, death is not an eternal nothingness, because there is no contained thing for death to be a nothingness for. In the end, death is absolutely nothing more or less than change, albiet change to a greater degree than anything that happens in the course of a life. It is change of a sort that, seen correctly, destroys the illusion that we are self-contained entities, islands of ego amidst a sea of other.

I think that the conflicting schools of Eternalism and Annihilationism, and the middle path in which there is no ego, is very applicable to the modern world. On the one side are the Religious individuals who believe us to be immortal units of soul. On the other side are the materialists who believe we are mortal units that shine briefly, only to be snuffed out forever. I think that there is reconciliation, the realization that we are part of a grand continuity, and that life and death are different ends of a spectrum.