Paradise Lost
When you really look at life, it appears like a dream. Sometimes, you feel like you’re directing the show, and at other times everything seems highly random and out of control. After some sincere investigation, you quickly discover you know very little about life—why things happen as they do and what purpose the happenings ultimately bear. Digging into the roots of causes and effects will quickly lead to intellectual dead-ends, pointing beyond the outskirts of your knowledge. You don’t know why you are here instead of the other option, whatever that is.
Many people can indeed present some facts based on science and other beliefs on how everything has come to pass. Yet, being true to yourself reveals that intelligence and rational explanations cannot give you experiential knowledge about any kind of reality. Only some indirect clues—grains of knowledge—are scattered on the forest paths of existence, pointing to something utterly unknown. You have no memories from the time before you popped into this world. The idea of death looming somewhere ahead is as thoroughly unknown as your birth is. Whatever happens between those two great unknowns always seems to be anchored in one single phenomenon: the present moment. At one present moment, your young eyes look forward to a life yet to be lived. At another present moment, your weary gaze finds mostly a life already lived. Even though you’d love to argue that time separates those two points of view, a quick reality check reveals there’s no direct experience of the past you’ve crossed or the future you’ll step into. They are just hazy memories and expectations. The present moment is something utterly inevitable wherever and whenever you are. You cannot exist anywhere else.
Another aspect of this dream-like experience called life seems highly obvious also. All material, mental, and spiritual efforts seem to be about escaping from suffering. This often subconscious crusade to fend off suffering appears to be the main reason you so easily drift out of the present moment into a personal interpretation of time. So, my inquiry into reality must begin with the mechanics of this crusade. Suffering as a topic is not always the most gratifying to write and read about, yet it’s profoundly necessary.
Most human life today seems to be spent trying to become someone, achieve something, acquire things, or cling to the things already acquired. Sometimes this search for material or spiritual well-being is entirely justifiable to prevent the great pain of suffering from spilling over. It’s natural to try to meet the basic human needs of proper nutrition, a fundamental feeling of safety, and healthy social interaction. However, this search for well-being easily becomes too focused on the principle of more.
There doesn’t seem to be enough growth, wealth, power, success, fame, or whatever enhances our feeling of “having made it” in life. Counterintuitively, ”making it” in life doesn’t seem to add as much happiness to the human equation as expected. Many achievements do not bring the ultimate fulfillment we so eagerly search for. Our modern oases of well-being might turn out to be rainbows’ ends, full of promises and empty of contentment. While chasing the gold that doesn’t exist, it’s unquestionable that there’s a deep calling within us all for a certain kind of wisdom and stillness. We want to act wisely. We want to be at peace. We want what’s good for us and the planet.
Almost two hundred years ago, Charles Dickens wrote the famous literary masterpiece A Christmas Carol. Before fading away, the Ghost of Christmas Present, the second of the three spirits appearing to the protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge, reveals something that is as essential today as ever. He briefly introduces Scrooge to Man’s Children: “This boy is ignorance. This girl is want.” The spirit tells Scrooge to beware of them both, especially the boy, for “on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”
I see the boy as a counterpart of the wise actions we pursue and the girl of peace we yearn for. Despite our pursuits and yearning, ignorance and want seem to devour a considerable part of our awareness, hence their name Man’s Children. I wouldn’t go so far as to call anyone ignorant or wanting because I see the essence of Man as something more profound. You can’t be ignorant, even though you can plunge into ignorance. You can’t be wanting, even though you often want things. To put this in other words:
Who you think you are is ignorance. Who you are is wisdom.
What you think you need is want. What you are is stillness.
Curiously, ignorance and want are so small a part of our being that they’re practically non-existent when really searched for. Our cherished ability to think gives them life, yet their nature is as fleeting as thoughts’. Can you find a thought when you really look for one? If you stop to consciously wait for your next thought, how long do you have to wait? In this light of awareness, thoughts rarely arise. Ignorance and want recede by themselves. The ominous writing on the boy’s brow is erased. Of course, this sounds beautiful and promising, yet normally, thoughts can be very persistent in their arising. So, we must dive deeper into this line of investigation.
Way too many expressions of Man’s Children—the murmurs of the human heart—exist to deal with in a short book like this. I must approach my inquiry into reality with an even more abstract analogy, one single phenomenon with ten thousand faces that fuels all sorts of confusion. This glass ceiling must be broken before anything close to reality can come through. I call this glass ceiling a paradise lost.
Many of our religions and folklore convey a common idea of a primordial earthly or heavenly paradise in which sentient beings were exceptionally happy and delightful. Then, in one way or another, human beings suffered the fate of Adam and Eve and were exiled from this paradise. Other prevailing ideas tell of a certain kind of golden age at the beginning of each cycle of human existence, going round and round, like a Ferris wheel in the amusement park of existence. Some stories describe a paradise inhabited by gods who created human beings either deliberately to express their powers of creation or as an irresponsible accident after some heavy drinking and celebrating.
The idea of paradise is almost always something left behind in the dawn of existence once and for all. It might be something acquirable in the afterlife or sometimes a cyclical one that passes time after time. Be it one way or another, your present experience of life implies that you are not there anymore. Instead of a paradise, you’re subject to all kinds of sufferings. From the painful moment when your mother pushed you into the world to the painful moment when your body and brain cease functioning, all sorts of painful moments take place.
I don’t mean to be pessimistic—life certainly holds love and all kinds of pleasures as well, many of which seem to make life worth living. Yet, the idea of the primordial paradise never includes painful moments. Life was or will be perfect there. No matter how glamorous and beautiful your life “here on Earth” is, it can never sincerely be considered perfect.
All human beings seem to yearn for paradise lost. Who of us doesn’t strive for a good life blossoming with morally acceptable pleasures? Can you think of anyone who would not avoid suffering and pain when possible? Most, if not all, of your actions, are governed by a vague remembrance of a life of perfection:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
William Wordsworth describes the most profound conflict of human life in his poem Intimations of Immortality. There once was a time and place where everything was painless and filled with magic and wonder. I can’t help but think that this lost paradise we all try to regain in most ambiguous ways—for example, eating and drinking in excess, seeking to couple with a perfect partner, expressing ourselves on social media, succeeding in terms of money and fame, trying to become ideal images ourselves—is a product of a sense of separation. It derives from an inconspicuous sensation that the umbilical cord between you and your paradise is cut for good.
Now, imagine you lived in a place of soothing unity, where you didn’t have to think about right or wrong. In this place, there’s a particular tree: a tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This tree bursts with juicy and delicious fruits you must not eat. They are strictly forbidden! Maybe some deity has told you so, or you just feel it in your guts. Ultimately, the temptation grows too much to bear.
What do you think happens to the blissful ‘you’ when you taste the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? The bliss of not knowing explodes in a big bang into knowing that one coin has two sides. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a coin! Knowing this, a primordial sense of unity withdraws, and a profound sense of separation arises in your mind. You instantly realize that something else must be evil if something is good. This implies that you can have the knowledge of good only through evil. Maybe a more suitable name for the tree in Adam and Eve’s story would be ‘the tree of the knowledge of good by evil.’
I find an interesting aspect in this story that I’ve never heard anyone actually ponder, at least not aloud. When you gain the knowledge of good by evil by doing something you should not do, you don’t only gain the knowledge, but you yourself are turned into good or evil. You are cast from blissful perfection into imperfection. And why? You counteracted the instructions of the deity or the feeling in your guts. In other words, you did wrong. There must have been the right choice also! So, you spend the rest of your earthly life seeking the right choice, trying to fulfill yourself and regain your personal paradise lost.
The idea of primordial paradise before the birth of separation cannot be thoroughly discussed without drawing in also the other side of life. Death is the ultimate limit of your sight, the horizon of your precious knowledge. Maybe this is why it’s so often connected to the idea of paradise—death is the threshold where your knowledge of good by evil must disappear again. Quite much every religion and spiritual tradition holds ideas of an afterlife. You’ve had little choice but to grow into those ideas, just like you’ve grown into every single idea of your parents and predecessors. You either accept or resist those ideas. Whether you’re religious or an atheist, some idea of an afterlife definitely lingers in the back of your skull. It might be a life eternal, a vision of nothingness, or something in between. Afterlife is so big an idea, usually infinite and eternal that you indeed must prepare for it. How do you prepare for an afterlife, then?
Say you’re a stone-cold atheist and don’t believe in any idea of an afterlife. Maybe you haste to do things, hoard experiences, or acquire stuff because you think you have only this life and afterward nothing. Perhaps you find fulfillment from a mindset of anarchy, declaring that “nothing matters,” all the while resisting the idea of an afterlife, entangled in the idea without even knowing it. Say you’re religious to the bone and follow some of the many prevailing beliefs that instruct you must do right and avoid wrong. Then, if the goddess of good luck smiles upon you, you will be justly judged. You better do things the right way! What would be more terrible than the certainty that your personal paradise was lost forever, that you would never be fulfilled? So, you must do things the right way.
In fear of the unknown, many massive movements of rigid moral codes and encouragement of ”right” activity have arisen throughout the ages. These movements govern much of your actions and decisions today. After all, actions are primarily committed in the personal understanding of right and wrong, of good by evil. Yet, how do you even know what is inherently right or wrong? How do you truly tell apart good from evil when all ideas are good or evil only in relation to each other? All you have is knowledge of the ages stuffed into your head and a set of confusing emotions that you’ve been taught to cherish through this knowledge.
Then comes the inevitable big question that has puzzled us all from the first sparks of consciousness: Is there an afterlife, really? What happens after life? What is death?
If you wholeheartedly contemplate the question and start being sincere with your experience here and now, you must admit that you don’t know. So far, your personal experience is only life and happenings within life—never after life. So, a better question would be, “What should life know of death?”
