Post #4: Anicca and the Bog of Despond

1 May 2023

A pilgrim's progress will lead not only to sunny veils but also past—or right into—the Bog of Despond. Even the holiest (perhaps especially they) have to pass through their dark nights of the soul. The sun cannot be extinguished, but it can become veiled, as we all know, behind clouds so thick and dark that the light seems to have disappeared altogether. A happy life is not one in which the sun shines all the time, but rather one where its setting does not bring doubts whether it will ever rise again.

Rise it surely will, a little at least, even from our darkest hours, and it is patent nonsense that suicide should be taken, as Camus famously wrote, for the only truly serious philosophical problem. There are many such problems and challenges, but if one can be singled out as the most serious, it is not judging whether life is worth living or not, but how to make it so, not contemplating suicide, but keeping such fatal temptations at bay.

There is a long tradition, as dark as suicide itself, of shepherds doing what they can to frighten the flock out of the exit option by prospects even more dreadful. Even in Buddhist lands that have a reputation for more gentle means, such scare tactics are widely and fiercely practiced. If you kill yourself, you will earn a most wretched rebirth, goes the refrain, and all your miseries and deficits will await you on the other end, with karmic compound interest, as it were.

The emphasis, it seems to me, ought to be elsewhere. Even if you don't see much point in going on for your own sake, do it for others who might be crushed by your ending things in so harrowing a manner. Few are those whose deaths really will not be regretted; more commonly they cut a terrible trail of tears and recriminations through the lives of survivors who are left to agonize over what they should have done differently. (So much the worse if that is the intended result.) If you are truly and incurably alone, with no way of changing your miserable state, it may be a different matter—as are cases of hideous disease and injury, or truly devastating and irrecoverable loss and irredeemable disgrace, so horrible in scale and scope that they amount to living death sentences and just cannot be faced, be it by the resources of love, of courage, of faith, or of equanimity. (I am not drawing any limits for anyone, only saying that they must be reckoned with.)

In such extreme cases, we must each be our own judges, let others say what they may. The more ordinary weariness of life, however, has a rather different texture. There it’s less a matter of all being lost than of things seeming hopeless in those dark moments with which we may all become acquainted sooner or later. Let them run a little too deep or last a little too long, or recur too regularly, let our ordinary defenses be worn down and things can get dangerous for anyone.

There's a better Dhammic angle on this very real and serious human problem than the focus on the karmic punishments for opting out—karma is not meant to be punitive, but merely a law of cause and corresponding effect. And that angle is impermanence, or Anicca. Our minds can adapt themselves to almost everything with time, it seems, and a day of average misery is almost always tolerable to us, bleak as it may look to others. Once again, if this average sinks too low and can by no realistic means be raised, it may be a different matter; but usually the decision to get out, come what may, is not made at such times of average misery, but rather when things dip too deeply and desperately into the momentary darkness.

The dips themselves can hardly be avoided. Our days may be governed by karmic forces, who knows, but they are certainly subject to the principle of regression to the mean. Because the material conditions and mental constellations that produce good and bad moments for us are so complex, they will follow the common pattern of phenomena driven by a great number of variables, that is to say, a normal distribution along a bell curve, more or less. Thus most of our momentary moods will cluster around our typical or average states of misery or joy in life, but even a generally gloomy life will have occasional outliers in a happier direction, and even a generally happy life will bring darker days or darkish moments in the day.

It is when an already low average meets an outlier from the tail end of the distribution that things get so menacing. In an already strained situation, things may descend for a while into the true danger zone where things look insurmountable and nothing seems worthwhile anymore. But by the very logic of impermanence and regression to the mean, these moments will pass, most likely to be succeeded by something more typical and tolerable. The challenge, in other words, comes down not so much to solving what cannot be solved, at the time anyway, or of overcoming what is insurmountable. It’s a matter, in most cases at least, of getting through the night, or maybe even just making it through the next half-hour. Soon enough, things will brighten up again; not greatly, perhaps, but enough to let us shake off the worst of the despond and put one foot in front of the other again—if not joyfully, then at least with slightly renewed resolve. About this part Camus was surely right: there's a boulder to be rolled up the hill, again and again. But at ordinary times that is no obstacle to a reasonably enjoyable life, but rather one of its conditions. As Schopenhauer put it so vividly, struggling with resistance and adversity is as necessary to human beings as digging is to groundhogs.

The case I sometimes bring upwhen this question comes up in discussion is that of Avicii, the late techno DJ. Yes, the fact that he named himself for the deepest and darkest of the Buddhist hell realms did not bode well, and his troubles must have been real enough. (I appeal to parents and other name givers around the world: for mercy’s sake, read the stories carefully that are most prominently associated with the names you intend to give to your loved ones.) I do not slight anyone’s agonies, but a physically healthy, reasonably good-looking 28-year-old with a Swedish passport, world famous and rich by his own art, can scarcely be said to have been undone by the human condition. If he could not make it on account of the harshness of life, then who ever could?

No, whatever demons were tormenting him the night he broke a bottle and reached for the shard at his hotel room in Oman, surely they were of a nature that could, and should, have been fought off. It is not a matter of blaming, him or anyone, but of recognizing that what stood between him and a better, brighter day, was no towering wall of hopeless misery, but a moment. He simply, and tragically, could not get through the next half-hour, or however long it was, on which a life can turn. Had he drunk a little less, persisted a little longer, reached for a sleeping pill rather than the deadly edges of the broken glass, then everything might yet have turned out very differently for him.

It may seem, to some, an unduly dark angle on Anicca, but it does not look so to me at all. On the contrary, I see it as a soothing reassurance of which we should keep reminding ourselves, every moment anew: This too shall pass. Making a habit of this reflection will not only make life easier and better by loosening the desperate clutch in which we tend to hold things to our own detriment—it may save your life one day. And even when it cannot do so, it should help you take your leave from this world more peacefully. Which, to me at least, is a bigger concern than what may come next, of which I know nothing.

PS: I meditated once on the concrete floor of a makeshift concert hall in the upstate New York countryside when Avicii was giving a concert for the tony liberal arts college that I was teaching at temporarily—a tiny town with its own airport for the private jets, a tradition of springtime bacchanalia quite above and beyond its size and place, and the pecuniary means to fly in Avicii for a school concert, of course. May he rest in peace.)