The way it changes my mind and attention is not to be understated. For both good and bad, it seems like it can completely erase any of my original plans and make me focus on something like the content of this post.
There is a root, well below the surface of the earth in my mind. This root is the seedling of an enormous idea. This is the idea to give up everything in life and simply exist with nothing and no one. This idea isn’t new, and it’s not the first time I’ve noticed it. But somehow today I began to imagine it in a different way.
I imagined making a table like the one below, writing down all the appeals of two lifestyles in separate columns.
| Current Life | Other Life |
| -Material Wealth -Family -Friends -Traveling -Pets -Success -Credentials -Book | -No possessions -No desires besides to learn -Endless time -No responsibilities -No worries about anything except real needs -No pressure to be something -No regret |
On the left is “Current life” and the right is “Other life”. In my current life, I am governed by a thick book of laws, of my own creation. These are all the beliefs I have been taught, and the ones I’ve taught myself, such as the belief that I want a life with a family, lots of money, and maybe even fame. What if I don’t really want any of this? What if the “other life”, one of material detachment and relentless pursuit of understanding is the better life?
As I write down more ideas on the right, it starts sinking in more and more that the second lifestyle might be much more valid than I gave it credit for.
In Jainism, there are those that give up their worldly possessions and even family, to live out the rest of their days as a monk. While I don’t doubt that they know something I don’t yet about spirituality, what if some (or all) of these people are just those that properly understood the life in the second column? What if it’s not even about religion, but rather about finding our true soul by ourselves?
We can’t really live in the modern world without money if we aren’t hunting and possessing at least some materials. To make it possible, monks travel and people who respect them offer food, shelter, and more that is often rejected. So what if I was one of them, just arriving at the start of that journey that took them to where they are now? My realization of the worthlessness of everything outside of this pursuit could be step one of that journey. And is that a road I really want to take?
The idea seems to become more sound the more I try to understand it. As I do this, it’s like clouds are beginning to drop a little rain onto the Earth. That root in my brain is tugging at my attention and pushing its way to the surface. I don’t even think I want it to. I don’t think I want to change who I am and give up the entire left column because this idea became too powerful for me to resist. But I also know that this might be what happens, and it might be the way it happened for all of those monks and other people existing in a similar way in other places.
As a side note, I am not overlooking this train of thought as no more than any other delusion. Perhaps it is, but I am still going to explore it.
What if all of the wealth and praise and success is going to do nothing for me and my soul? It’s likely that it won’t, and I know many are unhappy despite leading what looks like a very successful life. Are we just meant to discover ourselves in this life, and is the rest of it just a distraction?
On the left is so many things that we value in society. House, car, clothes, shoes, pets, security, vacations, sports, job titles, appreciation from others, physical strength, piety, and hoarding memories of all of these things. People even value the appearance of someone they might never be in touch with. It might serve as motivation for a “better” life, but besides that, is there any real value in it? It’s knowledge we add to our mental bank, and nothing else.
I realized recently that controlling the influx of data to your conscious and subconscious is more important than just about anything besides survival. So how many of those things in the left column shouldn’t exist? How many should have never become a fully grown tree, or even forest? How many should never have gotten a single drop of water when they were a root? How many did we accidentally allow to grow over months and years because we didn’t recognize that something we were introducing to our mind was irrelevant on the path to truly enlightenment? And now how many miles have we strayed from that road that we could have been on this entire time?
I must take a moment to consider the idea of us being the universe’s children, or vessels for our DNA, or both. We can’t all be monks, because humanity’s progress must go forward for us to have a chance to transcend this existence. Or maybe if we all became monks, for just a little while, it would radically change how we live anyway. Why wouldn’t we be able to work together to focus our lives on furthering progress while still living a life of pure material detachment and pursuit of knowledge? I suppose we could do both, and not everyone would be required to work anyway. The power of our spirits and technology is undeniable.
As this root tugs at me for my attention, it might get it for 5 or 10 minutes, but it has no chance of lifting me up and out of the left column to place me into the right. It would need so much time to become strong enough to do that. I’m on the left column, in a hole that goes beyond the bottom of the paper. And I keep digging.