You may have heard of the story of the philosopher who one day awoke from a dream that he was a butterfly in a garden full of flowers. Upon waking, he couldn’t help but wonder to himself if he was a philosopher who dreamed he was a butterfly or if he was a butterfly dreaming that he is a philosopher. Such is the nature of our reality in this life, if you really give yourself time to contemplate such abstract concepts.
The joy of modern life under the new norm, is that it has given me more free time to simply sit and contemplate my life. You could call me an armchair philosopher. Perhaps I’m seated in an ivory tower, while the rest of the world toils until the sweat of their brow bears some meagre fruits to survive. Those of you reading this are among the educated and connected folk on the world wide web. Perhaps you also now work from home. We may be able to sit and contemplate such abstract concepts as philosophy, yet all people have – at some point in their journey – the time and propensity to be self-reflective.
“Know thyself” is the ancient Greek aphorism, and to know thyself one has to think about oneself in relation to life in general as well as in relation to all the other people upon the planet. Unfortunately many are still absorbed in the hard struggle for existence and may not have the luxury of time to be introspective, or even the inclination due to lack of education.
However, even a simple person in a small insignificant nation somewhere remote will have some degree of philosophical inclination regarding the great questions of life and the Mystery of why we are alive, who are we, and what happens after death. Such inquiry is the beginning of the search for truth in an abstract sense. Is life but a fleeting dream? Here today, gone tomorrow? Life goes on, even though every person who is alive will cease to exist after their lifespan is over. Such paradoxical truths can lead one to an existential dilemma of sorts.
There are so many unanswered questions that spring up when one contemplates the meaning of life. There may be more questions that are ultimately unanswerable and thus perhaps not even worth contemplating as they only leave us even more dissatisfied than before. Usually we turn to our religious or philosophical traditions and writings for answers. Some wise thinkers of the past have contemplated the same eternal questions about life and have left their insights in our holy books or in the libraries of our civilized world.
Yet conditions on the planet are constantly shifting. Cultures and lifestyles are so diverse and humanity’s search for meaning may be quite varied in its answers or interpretations of life, from one culture or time in history to the other. Therefore what was true at one point in time may not be so in another, from a relative point of view. Of course, there are those absolute and inalienable truths, like all those who are born must die, for example. But all the rest is left to interpretation and speculation.
Like the philosopher who dreamed of being a butterfly, we may ourselves wonder if life is but a dream. Dreams feel so real when we’re in them, with all the joys and fears that they elicit. And yet they evaporate as soon as we awaken. Two curious quotes from the ancient Sanskrit text of India, called Bhagavat Purana, describe life thus:
Canto 4: ch 29: last verse – “Everything happening within time, which consists of past, present and future, is merely a dream. That is the secret understanding in all Vedic literature.”
Canto 11: ch 02: midway through – “Although the duality of the material world does not ultimately exist, the conditioned soul experiences it as real under the influence of his own conditioned intelligence. This imaginary experience of a world separate from Krishna (the original causeless cause of all causes) can be compared to the acts of dreaming and desiring. When the conditioned soul dreams at night of something desirable or horrible or when he daydreams of what he would like to have or avoid, he creates a reality that has no existence beyond his own imagination.
These existential insights may leave us feeling quite empty or make life appear hollow, for despite living our entire lifetime of 70 or 100 years, after that it is gone forever, and so are we by the look of it. So where do we go, or what was the value of even existing if we simply cease at some point. To contemplate our own non-existence is actually quite daunting. Do we look back as we leave the body and see it as no more than a dream, which disappears into our imaginations? Was our life even of any worthwhile significance if it is simply snuffed out at some inevitable point, with hardly a care or concern to anyone on the planet, which rolls on regardless? If so, then what is the value of our current life right now?
Such are the existential anxieties that arise when we contemplate our existence and see nothing but meaningless and insignificance in our fleeting and temporary time on earth. Certainly before our birth, we were presumably non-existent, or so experience shows us. So who are we really? And how important can we really be if all we get is 70 or 100 years compared to the apparent eternal existence of life as we know it?
Paradoxically, even though we see all life terminated in its own time, we ourselves still only know consciousness. We only know what it is to be alive and present. Of course every night we seem to cease consciousness when we fall into deep sleep. Where do we go then? That is like a “little death” in itself for we are certainly not conscious or present at that time. We are dead to the world, as the saying goes. Fortunately that little death is temporary and we awaken without fail...until the last night, that is. On one of those nights, we simply never awaken and death really does take us from those that remain to see our lifeless corpse.
I don’t claim to have the answer any of these existential questions on life and consciousness, except to say that the ancient Sanskrit texts, dating back thousands of years, all clearly state that the real self is an eternal spirit soul that transmigrates from one body to the next over many countless lifetimes. We simply forget them. So that is – to me - the ultimate theory behind what is really going on. Every human that has existed will cease to exist in one life, only to journey out of that body and into the next.
So perhaps that philosopher, who dreamed he was a butterfly, was indeed once a butterfly and now is a human, and vice versa. It appears to solve my personal existential quest for meaning to death by contemplating that phenomena of reincarnation, at least theoretically. We will have to wait until the time of death to really test it out won’t we? Or perhaps we already have, more than once before. I’ll let you know once I have personal experience – and maybe write a blog post about it. Or maybe I just have.
(image pixabay)
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