Figure it out for yourself!

Tolstoy does not have any firm bottom-line on the meaning of life.  As I raced towards the final pagess, the nebulous ending  to the essay was just as I had always suspected; recall that I wrote this in the post where it began:

Of course I don't expect Tolstoy to give me a one sentence answer to that question. It is something for me to figure out.

So, there!

You are perhaps thinking (but are too polite to say it): "if you knew you would not find a cut and dried answer to the question, then why spend time reading it?" And why torture the few readers who are sticking with this blog, right?

I have been convinced for a long time now that it will be a lifelong quest to understand the meaning of my existence.  All I know for certain is that the scientific route keeps uncovering more questions as it tries to explain the different pieces, and the other route will force upon me questions that will be way complicated for my tiny intellect.  Yet, not to examine my life does not appeal to me.  Not to examine the meaning of my existence seems like a wasted life. Reading Tolstoy and others adds that much more to understanding my own existence.

That examination includes, of course, running into situations like what Tolstoy describes:

At that time as a consequence of my interest in faith I became close to believers of various denominations: to Catholics, Protestants, Old Believers, Molokans, etc. And among them I met many people of high morality who were truly believers.  I wanted to be a brother to these people.  And what happened?  The teaching that had promised me to unite all in a single faith and love, this very teaching in the person of its best representatives told me that these people were all dwelling in falsehood, that what gave them life was a temptation of the devil and that we alone were in possession of the one possible truth.  And I saw that the Orthodox consider all those who do not profess a faith identical to theirs to be heretics, exactly as the Catholics and others consider Orthodoxy to be heresy.

If a religion, or a denomination within one, claims it has the truth, then people who live following other religions and denominations are living in falsehood, right?

Tolstoy continues:

And I, who supposed truth lay in the unity of love, was involuntarily struck by the fact that this very Christian teaching was destroying what it should be producing.  

And:

You say to yourself, "It can't be that it is so simple and that still people do not see that if two affirmations contradict each other, then neither one nor the other can hold the unified truth that faith must be.  There is something here.  There is some explanation."

He puts it bluntly with:

Why is the truth held not by Lutheranism, not by Catholicism, but by Orthodoxy?

Of course, we can add a whole bunch to that: why is the truth held not by the Wahhabi, not by Mahayana Buddhism, not by Shaivism, ... To any believer, the other is an infidel.  We are all infidels then!

As much as an infidel, atheist, that I am, I understand that religions have comforted and assured the believers with meanings to their existence.  I am an atheist in the camp of the likes of Camille Paglia, who respect the value that religions have added to the human condition, and not in the militant camp from where the intellectual atheists wage their crusades as if atheism is a religion of its own.  I have always believed that that it is such an approach to atheism that has allowed me to be friends with believers and them with me, and to even be invited to weddings by believing students.

I am at peace with knowing that I do not know the meaning of my life, and I will continue to examine it.  It is up to me to figure out the meaning of my own life.  Merely chanting Om and "अहं ब्रह्मास्मि" (Aham Brahmasmi) won't do it!

Visit with me as I am dying and I will let you know if I figured it out by then--about twenty-four years from now ;)

Going round and round and round and ...

I noted tongue-in-cheek that maybe I should not call my parents because of updates from them about yet another death in the extended family.  Sure enough, there was another.  She was eighty years old.  Some of you regular readers might recall this note from six months ago, where the rambling thoughts were triggered by my visit with her.

"Those who come have to go sometime" my mother said.

The fact that we all have to die sometime is well known to every one of us.  Which was the point of departure for the series of posts that has apparently driven quite a few readers away from this blog! ;)  Isn't it amazing that you and I and the billions of humans continue on despite this definitive ending?  Tolstoy writes:

"But I have lived, I still live, and all mankind is living and has lived.  How can this be?  Why does mankind live when it is able not to live?

Maybe someday science might tell us that even cows are aware of their mortality.  For now, it is safe to assume that only we humans are conscious of our existence and our own death.  Fully knowing that it could all be futile, we continue to live what we think is a "full life."  How can that be?  In such a living, what meaning do we make of our lives?

Of course, asking such questions is not anything new; humans "went on living, giving life some kind of meaning":

Ever since some kind of human life began, people already had that meaning for life and they led that life, and it has come down to me.  Everything that is in me and around me, all of that is the fruit of their knowledge of life.  Those very tools of thought with which I discuss this life and judge it, all those have been made not by me but by them.  I myself was born, educated, grew up, thanks to them.  They mined iron; taught us to fell trees; tamed cattle, horses; taught us to live together, brought order into our life; they taught me to think, to speak. And I, their creation, fed by them; nursed, taught by them; thinking their thoughts and their words, have proved to them that these have no meaning!  "Something is wrong here." I told myself.  "Somewhere I have made a mistake."  But I could not find out where the mistake lay.

My grandmothers lived lives that made meaning to them.  And I question their meaning.  The meanings that people constructed in the past do not often make sense to us now, even though we, our lives, and our thinking, will not be possible without their meanings.

Tolstoy is playing with me by tossing out such ideas.  And he has enough material for me to blog one more post--readers be warned!  Tolstoy has set me up for what is coming with these:

I began to understand that the answers given to faith enshrine the most profound wisdom of mankind, and that I didn't have the right to deny them on the grounds of reason, and that, most importantly, these answers do answer the question of life.

What a strange coincidence that the translator was himself terminally ill when he worked through all these.  In her introduction, Mary Beard writes:

It is a poignant irony that Tolstoy's translator, Peter Carson, was much closer to death and dying when he was working on The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession than Tolstoy himself was at the time he was first writing them.

Beard adds later:

The final manuscript was delivered to the publisher by his wife on the day before he died in January 2013.

Such is life.

What the heck is this life all about?

Having been conditioned in recent years by online reading, and that too reading pieces that are not too long, and where we skip around saying "tl; dr," I was worried that I might have lost whatever ability that I had to read lengthy and deep essays.  Online, I am always tempted to click on a hyperlink, which takes me elsewhere, from where some other hyperlink leads me to something completely different from where I began.

Worry no more for me.  I am doing just fine reading Tolstoy.  But then, it is perhaps a credit to Tolstoy's writings--he has drawn me to a subject that has always been a fascination.  To questions that have always dogged me, for which I am explicitly and implicitly always seeking the answer. Tolstoy writes:

The question is this: What will come from what I do and from what I will do tomorrow--what will come from my whole life?
Expressed differently, the question would be this: Why should I live, why should I wish for anything, why should I do anything?  One can put the question differently again: Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn't be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?

It took me only a little bit of exposure to the world of math and science to sense that those subjects would not give me the answers.  On the other hand, there is no definitive answer via the humanities and the social sciences--at least science gives precise answers for precisely defined narrow questions.  Thus, over the years, I have come to conclude that it will be a lifelong struggle to figure out the meaning of my existence.

I suppose I am really, really enjoying Tolstoy because he is delivering sentences full of ideas that only validate my own jumbled views and writes as if I am undergoing the very experiences that he went through!  Consider this, for instance, that he notes about the sciences:

[They] are precise and clear in inverse proportion to their application to the questions of life, the more precise and clear they are; the more they attempt to give solutions to the questions of life, the more and unclear and unattractive they become. ... These sciences directly ignore the questions of life.  They say, "We have no answers to 'What are you?' and 'Why do you live?' and are not concerned with this; but if you need to know the laws of light, of chemical compounds, the laws of the development of organisms, if you need to know the laws of bodies and their forms and the relation of numbers and quantities, if you need to know the laws of your own mind, to all that we have clear, precise, and unquestionable answers."

Yep. I quit engineering!  I could not figure out the big and fundamental questions via electrical engineering.

What about something like philosophy?

And if it keeps firmly to its subject, then to the question, "What am I and what is the whole world?" it can give no other answer but "Everything and nothing"; and to the question, "Why does the world exist and why do I exist?" just the answer "I don't know." ...
[Although] all the theoretical work is directed precisely toward my question, there is no answer, and instead of an answer one gets the same question, only in a more complicated form.

Yep, only more complicated questions.

This is all exhilarating.  There is so much "life" in trying to understand my existence.  I will end this post with Tolstoy quoting Socrates:

"We will come near truth only inasmuch as we depart from life" said Socrates, preparing for death.

Looks like it will an interesting quest over the remaining third of my life ;)

No wonder Tolstoy became a vegetarian! Will Pope Francis become one?

Last night, I started reading Tolstoy's Confession.  He writes in this highly praised translated version:

My loss of faith happened in me as it happened then and does now among people with our kind of upbringing.  In the majority of cases I think it happens like this: people live as all other people do, and they all live on the basis of principles which not only have nothing in common with Christian teaching but also for the most part are in opposition to it; Christian teaching plays no part in life; one never comes across it in one's relations with others and one never has to deal with it in one's own life; Christian teaching is professed somewhere out there, far from life and independently of it.

I was like, damn that is so right!  My loss of faith began that way, the difference being that it was "Hindu" in place of Christian and "Hinduism" in place of Christianity.

Tolstoy then goes for the jugular:

Then as now the open declaration and profession of Orthodoxy were found for the most part in stupid, cruel, and immoral people who think themselves very important.  Intelligence, honesty, uprightness, goodness of heart, and morality were found for the most part in people declaring themselves to be unbelievers.

Ouch!  It does not surprise me anymore that Tolstoy was excommunicated from the church.

I began to read a great deal and to think very early on, so my rejection of Christian teaching became a conscious one very early on.  From the age of sixteen I stopped saying my prayers and of my own volition stopped going to church and fasting. 

Right from a young age, I had a very difficult time reconciling the wonderful ideals that the religion advocated with the reality of every day life lived by the believers.  I am immensely happy to find that I am walking along the trails that Tolstoy (and others) have cleared for me:

Religions and religious leaders have always had profound ideals for all of us.  But, we humans seem to intentionally choose to ignore them.  Thus, Christians have plundered and killed as much as Buddhists have plundered and killed, even though the founders of both the faiths championed peace and love.

In his latest op-ed, the philosopher Peter Singer tackles one of those aspects of Christian--specifically Roman Catholic--teachings: "man's dominion."  Singer writes:

Mainstream Christian thinking about animals is rooted in the Book of Genesis,where God is said to have granted man dominion over all the animals. St. Thomas Aquinas interpreted that verse as implying that it simply does not matter how man behaves toward animals; the only reason why we should not inflict whatever cruelties we like on animals is that doing so may lead to cruelty to humans.
A few Christian thinkers have sought to reinterpret “dominion” as “stewardship,” suggesting that God entrusted humanity to care for his creation. But it remained a minority view, favored by environmentalists and animal protectionists, and Aquinas’s interpretation remained the prevailing Catholic doctrine until the late twentieth century.

Tolstoy wrote that "Christian teaching is professed somewhere out there, far from life and independently of it."  Singer points out that what that teaching is has been interpreted in many ways.  The latest interpretation is from the current Pope:

Francis has now come down decisively against the mainstream view, saying that Christians “have at times incorrectly interpreted the Scriptures,” and insisting that “we must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures.” Our “dominion” over the universe, he declares, should be understood “in the sense of responsible stewardship.”
Against the background of nearly 2,000 years of Catholic thinking about “man’s dominion,” this is a revolutionary change.

How did Tolstoy deal with his own views?  Were they always the same?  Did they change?

I continued to live only professing my belief in progress.  "Everything is evolving and I am evolving, and why I am evolving together with everyone else will be made clear."  That was how I then had to formulate my faith.

In this evolving faith, Francis has gone one more step, Singer writes:

Now, in Laudatio Si, Francis quotes the passage in the Gospel of Luke, in which Jesus says of the birds that “not one of them is forgotten before God.” Francis then asks: “How then can we possibly mistreat them or cause them harm?” It is a good question, because we do mistreat them, and on a massive scale.
Most Roman Catholics participate in this mistreatment, a few by raising chickens, ducks, and turkeys in ways that maximize profit by reducing animal welfare, and the majority by buying the products of factory farms. If Pope Francis can change that, he will, in my view, have done more good than any other pope in recent history.

This summer of deep reading is turning out to be wonderfully rewarding.  Life is beautiful, indeed!