But an afterlife seems to me to be a timorous and unwarranted assumption, even by the values of the 8-Fold Noble Path or the Ten Commandments, which are just as good or even better on the "once only" plan that I strongly recommend. Without rebirth, without sure knowledge of results, altruism, generosity, service, the prospect of work without concern for reward, really become something tremendous, because now there is no reward in future incarnations (or in serving others to improve their future incarnations.) There's no getting off the wheel for any of us. There's this lifetime only, without the karmic working off, without a final release. We're in it together.
The "once only" position is by far the more easily sustained. The rigor of the argument is certainly on our side since there is no evidence for an afterlife, and the logic on which an afterlife is based seems so tenuous, so clearly intended to comfort rather than inform us. Perhaps the Buddha and Solomon would both approve of our rigorous rejection in the light of the last 2500 years worth of physical and biological research.
Because of his stand of full engagement, Solomon accepts the suffering that goes with attachment. He affirms attachment as an inescapable part of human nature, part of every life. "You're a horse, so pull" is the essence of it. The existential lack, the gnawing emptiness, the fear is always ready to emerge. It can be shaped and moderated. For brief joyful periods it lifts, but it can never be eliminated, excised, or extirpated without wounding and diminishing the person. So Solomon looks for relative detachment, detachment from the folly and frippery of life, of maturing out of self-indulgence into service perhaps, but not fanatically.
(Ecc. 7:8)
With this relative detachment you can set and hold priorities, and this gives you great patience, and great patience helps you to be firmer in your detachment. To deal with our lives we have to grasp both horns of an intractable dilemma. We have to accommodate ourselves to our intrinsic suffering by dealing with incompletion and meaninglessness, but we also have to frame intentions, make choices, do things with enthusiasm, experience love, pursue wisdom -- and nowadays in a wider ambit than ever before.
The meaningful life, as we have been developing it here, really has to do with how to love and grow wise in a dukkha-filled universe, playing out both the power of the West to individuate, and the power of the East to find peace through detachment. But can it be done? Renouncing social and political engagement would not be an option, because the wider ambit draws us in, and the political world will not renounce its engagement with us even if we would leave it behind. Nor can we be of service or even have much leisure to make our choices. The shortness of life and the precariousness of our own and the planetary situation urge us to move quickly.
Earlier spiritual systems could and did disregard the interconnectedness of all species, and their mutual well-being, ignoring, or even opposing environmental needs. The Christian denigration of nature is said to have had that effect. And Jews have put themselves in an exclusive spiritual category, sometimes to a great remove from shared human concerns. Shneur Zalman, the founder of Chabad, the progenitor of the Lubovitcher dynasty even claimed, in his Tanya, that gentiles weren't endowed by nature with full souls. Clearly the foundation for a valid spiritual life must now embrace a planetary, ecological and environmental ethic at its heart -- an ethic of action to save, renew, repair. But how can we deal with the planetary problems before liberating ourselves from successomania, addiction, consumerism and juvenilization? Driven by the vanity and vexation in the craving for more, we heedlessly devour our resources. But successomania is sustained by the deep inward cauterization of love and wisdom, which has come to pass in a technologically driven and culturally specific form in the West and is now moving worldwide. But love and wisdom, as we shall see, are the source springs of our sense of the meaningfulness of life.
So the experiment we are living becomes: how can we live in the world and keep our enthusiasm for action despite everything we see and all the hurts we suffer? How can we do it without dividing ourselves into fragments, but from our wholeness choose life in the radical onceness of this lifetime, without its compensating myths of final redemption, without bending our minds to mystery and authority? We will now consider the way.
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Copyright 1998 - Ira Rosenberg
Last Updated 09/19/98 (rge)