Illusions

A remarkable passing  

A passing is marked by reflection on the role of ideals and goals in our lives, and their pursuit 

By Michael Nenonen  

My grandmother’s heart, having faltered several times in the last year, finally stopped beating on June 18, 2006. I was with her on the last day of her life, just as she was with me on the first day of mine. Her physical and mental dissolution, already well advanced, accelerated in her final week. It seems to me that there have never been hands as withered as hers, or arms as feeble. Those arms once carried me in Eden. With her passing, the garden’s soil turned to sand, and her footprints blew away.

Grief is a strange thing. I was prepared for sorrow, but not fear. For several days after her death I became frightened of all sorts of things, of climate change and corporate rule, of societal cruelty and cultural rot, of the myriad flaws in my body and mind. I was afraid of loss and of loneliness, of humiliation and abandonment. I felt unreal, and threatened by my unreality. My desire for substance, for solidity and fullness in my being, was painfully insistent. Though it was unexpectedly heightened, this feeling of unreality wasn’t unfamiliar. It’s been with me all my life, like a melody playing continuously just below the threshold of consciousness; my grandmother’s death simply turned up the volume.

During times like this it helps to have some familiarity with Buddhist philosophy. According to Buddhism, unreality is a defining feature of human existence. In fact, it’s a defining feature of all existence, human or otherwise.

Buddhism teaches that the ego—the sense of having a free, enduring, and self-sufficient identity—is illusory. Like everything else in the universe, we’re really emergent phenomena, momentary expressions of vast patterns of causality, much like waves upon the ocean. Like waves, we undergo constant transformations. Just as a wave passes through innumerable water molecules as it moves across the sea, so do we, as we move across our lives, pass through countless generations of cells, thoughts, memories. Nothing about us is fixed or independent, everything is fluctuating and contingent.

Normally we’re only partially aware of our true nature. We know that we exist in some fashion, but we don’t really understand how. We identify with the emergent phenomenon rather than with the causal patterns from which it arises, with the wave rather than with the sea. In short, we identify with our self-images. This identification is precarious and easily shaken. Such things as vulnerability and death remind us of the causal processes into which we must inevitably dissolve. We interpret these processes as non-existence, and recoil from them. If we’re waves, then we’re waves that are afraid of the deep.

Our lives are driven by the desire for eternal solidity, but this yearning reveals its own futility. To “want” means to lack; lacking reality, how can we possibly achieve it? Wealth won’t do it: the one who dies with the most toys still dies. Strength and glory are equally incapable of doing the job. Not even the fulfillment of our most precious ideals, regardless of whether those ideals are political or religious, romantic or philosophical, will rescue us from what we are. We can’t save a wave from drowning.

This isn’t to say that our ideals are useless. Indeed, they’re often quite worthwhile. Despite this, they must be kept in perspective. Too often we pursue them as though they’ll substantiate us, remedying all that we lack and making us whole. Our ideals are religious in nature to the degree that we turn to them for metaphysical grounding, regardless of whether they’re focused on this-worldly or other-worldly objectives. The atheist who hopes to “become somebody” through personal achievement is just as religious as the theist who hopes to achieve “salvation” through piety. As long as we misunderstand the nature of our suffering, we’ll turn to ideals to provide something they can’t. This sets us up to feel terrified when our ideals are seriously challenged, and this terror, in turn, often leads to either depression or rage. In this way our ideals can become traps.

The problem is compounded when we move from the individual to the collective level, erecting social structures upon our misguided strategies for solidifying ourselves. Consider capitalism, the dominant ideology of the age. Capitalism is driven by ever-greater levels of consumption, and consumption, in turn, plays upon our feelings of emptiness. Capitalism encourages us to believe that consumption will fill the void at the centre of our souls. Capitalist advertising is designed to aggravate our sense of lack, and to offer false promises of a cure. It also encourages us to judge each other and ourselves according to our capacity to consume—that is, according to our wealth and our belongings. The consequences of this are profoundly negative. The more frantically we consume, the more damage we do to the environment that sustains us, and the closer we come to ecological systems crash. Poverty is meanwhile transformed from a state of simple misery into an existential crisis: under capitalism, to be poor is to be denied even the chance of becoming real.

But what of anti-capitalist ideologies? I subscribe to the ideals of libertarian socialism. As virtuous as they may be, neither the pursuit of these ideals nor their fulfillment could ever make me “real.” Their metaphysical impotence was driven home by my grandmother’s death. I’d hoped my ideals would secure and stabilize my identity, and thereby protect me from the fluidity of my being. My fears were the underside of my ideals; when the ideals were undermined, the fears asserted themselves. Once I realized that both my ideals and my fears were generated by the same illusion, my fears subsided. I still feel sorrow, but I’m not afraid.

My grandmother, Catherine Westlund, is gone, but the universe that for a time expressed itself through her and that expresses itself now through me and you and everything else, remains. And so, if my grandmother was an expression of the universe, then what of the love I had for her, and the joy I felt in her presence? Perhaps Eden’s soil hasn’t turned to sand after all.