If I want to die, why am I still alive?
Because what I want is not to die, but to be fully alive—knowing what life is, and what I am.
This is what the wise have always wanted to know. But they usually assumed they can never know it while they’re alive because while they live their minds are clouded by desire.
Socrates said philosophy is a training for dying—a purification of the soul from the body’s attachment to this world in preparation for its return to the real world from which it came. Then we’ll once again know all that we knew before we were born into this world of illusion. He assumed we’re strangers in this world—souls that wander through it for a while, lost, until we return home. A strange illusion to imagine this world is an illusion in which we alone are real. No wonder the wise have seldom loved the world.
I remember that moment when I lay under my grandfather’s apple tree, looking up at the blue sky, and knew for the first time what I was, and what it was, and felt love for it, and for my self—the self that knew it—flood into me. Ever since that moment I’ve wanted to know it better, as the religious once wanted to know their god—in a union, or reunion, of self and other in which we have perfect knowledge of the other because self and other are one.
Yet all my life I’ve stood back from the world in order to see it entire. To become one with it—to lose myself in it—would have been disrespectful. The other needs the self to know it and love it, as the religious used to say god needs us to know and love him.
Now I tell myself I want to die because I’m tired of the world. It hasn’t changed, but I have. I’ve seen too much and know too much. I know not only what it is, but what it could be; and what it is isn’t enough for me any longer.
I tell myself it could change—everything changes—and it does change; but only in small ways, and usually for the worse.
We made the world what it is, so we should be able to change it by doing better, being better. We tried to, over and over again, and always failed. The golden bowl is broken and can't be mended.
Because what I want is not to die, but to be fully alive—knowing what life is, and what I am.
This is what the wise have always wanted to know. But they usually assumed they can never know it while they’re alive because while they live their minds are clouded by desire.
Socrates said philosophy is a training for dying—a purification of the soul from the body’s attachment to this world in preparation for its return to the real world from which it came. Then we’ll once again know all that we knew before we were born into this world of illusion. He assumed we’re strangers in this world—souls that wander through it for a while, lost, until we return home. A strange illusion to imagine this world is an illusion in which we alone are real. No wonder the wise have seldom loved the world.
I remember that moment when I lay under my grandfather’s apple tree, looking up at the blue sky, and knew for the first time what I was, and what it was, and felt love for it, and for my self—the self that knew it—flood into me. Ever since that moment I’ve wanted to know it better, as the religious once wanted to know their god—in a union, or reunion, of self and other in which we have perfect knowledge of the other because self and other are one.
Yet all my life I’ve stood back from the world in order to see it entire. To become one with it—to lose myself in it—would have been disrespectful. The other needs the self to know it and love it, as the religious used to say god needs us to know and love him.
Now I tell myself I want to die because I’m tired of the world. It hasn’t changed, but I have. I’ve seen too much and know too much. I know not only what it is, but what it could be; and what it is isn’t enough for me any longer.
I tell myself it could change—everything changes—and it does change; but only in small ways, and usually for the worse.
We made the world what it is, so we should be able to change it by doing better, being better. We tried to, over and over again, and always failed. The golden bowl is broken and can't be mended.
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