3 — Purposelessness

It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry.

A traveling man, going from place to place, nowhere to call home. How does he feel? Tired, that’s for sure. Somehow glad to be alive, not understanding any of it.

When you hear a joke for the first time, you laugh. When you hear it the second time, not that much. Third time’s the charm, and the charm is gone. It’s just not funny anymore. When you repeat a word too many times, it’s not a word anymore — it’s just a noise. When you’ve been on a train long enough, watching all that land pass you by, you cease to see places — it’s just land.

When a child hears someone say “panties”, they laugh their heart out. I’ve heard “panties” one thousand times, by now. I’ve heard about as many words as you can think of. The world has been a joke heard the third time a while ago already. It takes a lot to laugh.

But doesn’t the sun look good, going down over the sea?

You don’t have to be a traveling man to make the mental exercise for yourself. Our powers of abstraction allow us to see things for what they are, if we try. Stop and think about who you are, what you are, where you are, for a while. Try not to lose track of it — this way, you make sure you will. A bunch of stuff nowhere special, that’s what.

I tried not to forget it myself. Not because it’s so pleasant to think about — it hardly ever was. Just because I felt more honest that way. I know the world is what it is and nothing else. Why am I trying to fool myself? There are no “oughts”. If acting implies belief in an ought, if it implies belief in a different world than the one that actually is, then I refuse to do it. The best is not to act. But how not to act?

Chuang Tzu interested me deeply for that reason. Daoism is all about that. Even without a belief in God, I found some sort of spirituality, after all. One that seemed to flow naturally from my conclusions about science. I felt I could trust it more. The ideal is not acting. Not existing. Yes. But not by killing the body. The body is not the issue here.

It is the self. The issue is that which believes, cares, wants, interprets, interferes, denies reality. If you give up your self, your identity, everything “you” do will flow naturally, as the blossoming of flowers, as the flapping of the birds’ wings, as the seasons of the year. When you give up your self, your perspective, when you recognize it as an illusion deeply enough to abandon it, whatever movements your body might make, they won’t fight against nature.

Acting without purpose is to shed illusion from our being. Purposelessness is not a condemnation — it is the goal, the prize, the ideal state of pure bliss and ending of suffering. After all, if “you” as a psychological construct don’t exist, you can’t suffer. You’ll flow through the air, a butterfly flying in emptiness. You’ll reach weightless ataraxia, imperturbability. You will be able to truly perceive your unity with everything else.

This is what stoics realized as well. Emotions are nothing but wrong opinions. To see the world for what it is, to live in dignity of the reality presented to us, is to cease our selfish illusory wants.

This was the beginning of my transition from nihilism to some sort of spirituality. Finding enlightenment in the darkness of purposelessness, discovering that what fills you most is emptiness, that you become greatest when you cease to be.

All is one. Not only values and colors, but also concepts we might project into the world are not really a part of it. They are just our mind trying to divide it, cut it into smaller parts to make sense of it, control it, manage it. The only thing dividing the chair, the air, the table, the walls, the floor, the earth and all the rest, is you. If you look closer, it’s all a bunch of atoms. No difference at all.

Everything is the same. It’s all one big thing — so big, in fact, that it is literally impossible for us to even conceive it. Which is why, as it happens, we necessarily cut it up when we think about it. Thought is partial by default. Reality is not. Hence the meaning crisis.

This reasoning remains with me as a pillar for my spirituality. The problem of the One and the Many, our relationship with the One, as one of the Many, our realization of our own reality and lack thereof. All these contradictions are amazingly deep to me.

It would come very much as a surprise for me, a few years later, to find all those thoughts present in the writings of christian thinkers.

I first read in Aquinas, studying ontology in university, that every determined substance has a positive being and a negative being: to be “Raphael”, I also need to be “not-everything-else” — and so it is with every single other thing. The only substance without negative being is undetermined. The only being without negative being is Being: pure actuality, the unmoved mover, essence and existence one and the same: God.

I came across Dionysus the Areopagite, who claimed God was a divine darkness beyond the activities of the senses and beyond the activities of the intellect, to be reached only by the most pure and absolute detachment from myself. A divine darkness beyond all being, beyind the light of reason.

This same line of thinking, characteristic of “negative theology”, can be found in St. John of the Cross, Nicholas of Cusa or Meister Eckhart, each with their own twists.

This anihilation of self towards a higher illumination is also present in Paul’s words in Galatians 2:20:

“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”.

The difference with Daoism is that, instead of surrendering to “the universe in its oneness” as the principle through which reality operates, one surrenders to Jesus Christ. But the mechanism of negating one’s self, giving up on selfish ideas, not acting out of one’s own will, all of that is there.

This was a window through which I could look more fondly to christianity. It was a really big deal in my reclaiming of my faith.