laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (01/23/84)
I am writing a reasonably large essay right now contrasting Soren Kierkegaard on despair with Camus on despair. All of a sudden this hit me -- Camus (or at any rate, certain of his characters) doesn't know how to live at all. They think that a life *is* *a* *thing* -- not a process. Thus they are obsessed with death since it is only after this that you can get enough of a view to say "oh yeah, that is what so-and-so really was". I think that this is horrible. It is one thing to be responsible for the NOW, but must one carry all one's past misdeeds with one? Certain moral theories would have this. I remember being told that "god will sit there and tell you all your sins, every last one, on judgement day and you will be responsible for eery one". Hmm. I did a lot of awful things as a child, most of which I would not do now. I am not the same person. I find it hard to take responsibility for things that "the-I-that-was" did -- I have enough to worry about with "the-I-that-is". I can sit with an amused detatchment and wonder at the person that I was, but I feel very little (perhaps none? it is hard to say) attatchment for that person. I feel the same sort of detatched copmpassion that I can summon for any human being. As I move closer to the present I feel more of an attatchment, and the sins of 2 years ago still weigh upon me -- but I can see that in a few years they too will be gone, as I commit them to the past. It is a very eerie feeling. I am sure that I am supposed to "have a past" and "have a future" -- where else would the expressions come from? But I do not feel that I have one. Ought I not feel more connected to my past than anybody else' past? Right now, I can't feel it -- it all seems like some sort of amusing game that was played... Perhaps I am merely in a strange mood, and it will all come back tomorrow. Perhaps not. it rather botches any idea I had of responsibility, though, so there must be something here that I am missing... Anybody been here before? Laura Creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura
rpw3@fortune.UUCP (01/31/84)
#R:utcsstat:-169100:fortune:21900008:000:2438
fortune!rpw3 Jan 31 04:40:00 1984
Laura, the traditional Buddhist view might not cheer you up, but a least
it's neither of your extremes, to wit:
1. You cannot ignore your past actions (even unto previous lives, if you
want to be really traditional), since the trace/echo/residue/attachment
of those actions keeps popping up. (The word 'karma' literally means
'action'. Figuratively it means 'cause and effect'. It does NOT mean
'fate', unless you want to call it 'fate' that the light goes off when
you turn off the switch, or that the water started running when you
turned on the faucet.)
2. On the other hand, there is nothing 'originally sinful' about having
a history of past actions, with all that implies. Your accumulation
of karma (residue/inertia of past actions) just is, like a mountain
or a cocked trigger or a tornado. Meditation practice is a bit like
bird watching, in that you begin to see the (inexorable) patterns of
cause and effect that go on in one's mind.
3. The only hope (having see the mechanistic way we play out our little
movie scripts) is the realization that it's not really solid; we don't
exist as a continual "thing"; there are "gaps". The grip of karma is
in our persistence in playing the thing out, even when we know it
doesn't work. Since there are "gaps", we actually have some choice
about waking up vs. repeating the same old thing. Meditation helps
bias that choice towards waking up; most of our past behaviour (karma)
re-enforces staying asleep (i.e, angry, ignorant, passionate, jealous,
prideful, etc.).
As one who got really stuck for a long time (during the college years) in
S.K.'s "Fear and Trembling", I would now say that the problem of the
French existentialists was (is?) that they had absolutely no sense of
humor, no sense of the absurdity of their "absurd". "The Problem" was
declared to be such a solid immovable "thing", despite the fact that
the fact of their own deaths showed it wasn't solid, either.
(Kierkagaard I'm not sure about. He made such a big deal out of
"cowardice" that I'm tempted to call it laziness, instead.)
So I would agree. They didn't know how to live. Although they WERE trying
to put SOME "meaning" into it (even if they deified it as "meaninglessness").
Rob Warnock
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