Some more in the spiritual vein

What spiritual outlook do I have on life?

I have sided with large overlapping parts of stoicism and Buddhism for a long time. I like and want to believe in God, but try as I might I have not been able to put much sustained faith in a watchful, loving, protective personal deity: indeed, like Tagore, I have only grown more agnostic with age. I don’t understand the Buddhist idea of anatta (the soul is an illusion – if we are told to believe that both the body and the soul must be regarded as essentially illusory, aren’t we actually wishing the whole existential problem away?), so I’d rather hold with the stoic belief that a sensible and at-least-partly rational mind with some agency in the real world (which is not, for all practical purposes, an illusion) does exist, though both philosophies more or less agree that the soul/mind (without quibbling too much over the distinction between mind and soul) must train itself through long, arduous and disciplined effort if we are to find happiness, or at least some peace and stability while we pass through this world.

I agree with both that suffering is real and in the final analysis unavoidable, whether that be through toothache or heartache, and that happiness, if not entirely illusory, can never for ordinary mortals be more than very occasional flashes of joy in a fundamentally dark world. Also, those occasional flashes make the darkness that follows even harder to bear, which is why this world has been called ‘a vale of tears… a bridge, do not build upon it’. Several thousand years of material and social engineering should have convinced mankind that no amount of trying to change external conditions, whether that involves repairing damaged heart valves, or abolishing slavery, or predicting floods, or air conditioning and social media, can make all people substantially and lastingly happy: I hear that in the most ‘advanced’ and peaceful countries in the world, a great many people commit suicide simply out of depression and boredom. So the finest teachers in both East and West have insisted that there will never be paradise on earth; if anything faintly approaching bliss is to be found while alive, it must be through inner engineering – learning to bear the burden of living as lightly as we can. And learning to do that is by far the toughest of all goals; very few of us succeed. I haven’t, not by a long chalk. And of course, a very great deal depends on individual character: the same irritations and catastrophes seem to affect different people very differently, and to a much greater or less extent than others.

Finally, even if you are not a very committed practitioner of some specific code of ethics, I am convinced by now that you really cannot find anything like happiness for yourself or your loved ones if you follow some kind of livelihood and lifestyle that involves lying, cheating, coveting, envying, violence and avoidable cruelty: you must have a coherent and stable moral compass, whether that be the code of Hammurabi, the Ten Commandments, the ashtasheel or the gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.

Most people do not need to dwell upon such reflections – certainly not in a continuous, serious, lasting way. They manage, more or less well, to carry on through life ignoring the hauntings of the spirit, keeping themselves intoxicated with worldly things of one sort or the other: drugs, shopping, family ‘demands’, the pursuit of money, power, sex, tradition, or even that much-glorified thing, knowledge (I want to discover a new species of butterfly, a new polymer, another version of the string theory, a technique for building a million-tonne ship…). Many would in fact claim that these preoccupations keep them too busy to bother about such ‘wishy-washy’, hi-falutin’ things. But not everyone can do that. My type can’t. My deepest, and indeed the only real question ever since I began thinking, has been – is it possible to be happy, despite ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’? If yes, then how? This is as far as I have come yet, and that too, only in theory, not in practice. Was Camus being silly or profound when he wrote ‘Suicide is the only truly serious philosophical problem’?

[Just back from a nice two-day trip to Mukutmanipur. Had nearly finished this little essay before leaving, so I concluded and uploaded it immediately after returning home, over a cup of tea.]