Water, the Antidote to Existential Dread
[NOTE, OCTOBER 2023] :
It has been a bit over 3 years since I first released this article. I’m now 25; I’ve had ample time to reflect and update my beliefs several times over, and I feel that I now have a much better understanding of the topics discussed in this essay. From my current perspective, parts of the essay feel sophomoric, and other parts I still agree with. Instead of updating the essay, I’ve left it the way it was and have opted instead to write the revised follow-up as a full-length book, which is very much still in progress. In any case, I hope you enjoy. — Ryan
“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming along the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ The two young fish swim on for a bit, and eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’” — David Foster Wallace, “This is Water,” 2005
By the end of this article, I hope to explain what the hell Water is (not Wallace’s definition, but similar) by consolidating the insights I’ve had during a long quest for truth into a unified metaphysical theory. In doing so I hope to dispel common myths regarding meaning, including “there is none” and “you have to create your own.” The article is fairly long, but it’s (in my humble opinion) about the most important thing in the world, and I didn’t want to rush it. If you’re currently lost in the darkness of the existential void or don’t know where to even begin thinking about questions of meaning, I hope this article can serve as a flashlight.
As the engineer in me would have me do, I’ll describe the problem before we dive into the proposed solution. This problem is the rather unpleasant state known as existential dread or an existential crisis that most if not all of us experience at some point in our lives: moments when we question the meaning of our lives and whether “meaning” even exists. We can arrive here at any moment by following a chain of why’s:
Why do I go to school? So I can get a decent job.
Why do I need a decent job? So I can earn money.
Why do I need money? So I can live comfortably.
Why do I need to live comfortably? So I can be happy.
Why be happy? It feels good to be happy.
Why fixate on feeling good? Well, isn’t that what life’s all about?
Do you exist on this planet for the sole purpose of feeling good? …*Cue existential crisis.*
The knee-jerk response people often give when questioned about the purpose of life is that it’s “to be happy,” but this begs a very obvious question: why? When we’re children we have no issue asking why, pestering adults by responding to their answers with more whys until we get an exasperated “Because I said so!” Somewhere along the way we stop asking why, which is how we’re able to function at all without dealing with the implications of the ticking time-bomb of whys above. If we ever do decide to investigate, any quick Google search or conversation with a friend fails to provide a solution, which is very puzzling considering how everyone has presumably come across this problem at some point. (In fact, one of the top Google results for “existential crisis” links to a national mental health hotline!)
Instead, the zeitgeist of Western society today holds that our lives don’t have any inherent meaning at all. This is backed up with the philosophies of nihilism, absurdism, and existentialism, which all hold variants of the same idea: objective meaning doesn’t exist. (Existentialism gives the most hope of the three by affirming the existence of subjective meaning, or meaning that a person creates for himself or herself. But, seeing as there are no rules governing what counts as “meaning” due to its subjectivity, people can spend their entire lives searching for this elusive “meaning” without ever knowing if they’ve found it.) What people actually mean, then, when they say “The purpose of life is to be happy,” is “There is no deeper purpose, so might as well be happy.” To see just how far these ideas have permeated our culture, one needs only pay attention to the dialogue in popular TV shows:
“Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s going to die. Come watch TV.” — Morty, Rick and Morty (S1 E8)
“The universe is a cruel, uncaring void. The key to being happy isn’t a search for meaning. It’s to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense, and eventually, you’ll be dead.” — Mr. Peanutbutter, Bojack Horseman (S1 E12)
Thus, we find that instead of resolving our existential angst, society’s default answer only intensifies it. The answer we are given to “Why do I exist, and what is the meaning of my life?” is “You exist for no reason, and there is no meaning to your life, or, for that matter, anyone’s life.” Moreover, these sentiments are expressed as if they are facts. The pervading metaphysical theory is that we’re solitary, fleeting, and utterly unimportant specks in the universe. And we wonder why America has a loneliness and mental health epidemic!
Now, seeing as this gives us no direction whatsoever on how we are to lead our lives and still hasn’t extricated us from the existential crisis, what’s society’s brilliant way of rescuing us from certain despair and paralysis? The only one I’ve ever been given is the BoJack Horseman pseudo-solution of distracting yourself with work, recreation, or other trivialities we come across in our daily lives until we forget that we had the problem in the first place. (That is, until it inevitably comes up again.) This leads to a culture of “sedation,” where people ignore the hard questions at the core of the human experience and instead drug themselves (literally and/or metaphorically) in an attempt to escape their own lives despite the inherent futility of such an endeavor. We’re obsessed with feeling good, and the unspoken ultimate goal in our society is to maximize the amount of time we spend in this feel-good state.
Every day, one comes home from slaving away at the rat race for money and success at work only to sedate him or herself with television, social media, video games, pornography, alcohol, drugs, medication, junk food, and materialism. It’s drilled into us from the day we’re born to the day we die: don’t think too much, just consume because that’s what drives revenue and the system falls apart if you don’t. Sure, you can ignore your reptilian brain and listen to one of those insufferable LinkedIn influencers: go to the gym, work on a “side project,” chase the success that our culture fetishizes to fill the vacuum of meaning. But if you stop to really think about it, you’ll eventually realize it’s just as futile. We think success will fill the hole of meaning, that once we’re rich and famous and accomplished we’ll finally be fulfilled, but positive psychology has proved time and time again that success is a moving goal post: once we achieve something, we want more. It’s why wildly successful Hollywood celebrities often deal with depression, failed relationships, and drug abuse: they haven’t addressed the underlying problem, they’ve just been avoiding it all along. Give a king everything he desires — money, women, absolute power— and he’ll inevitably find that he neither has what he wants nor even knows what it is that he wants. Consider, for instance, how a video game quickly becomes boring once you have the cheat codes.
I have an axe to grind with the status quo. The problem of meaning remains unsolved, and it perplexes me to no end that it seems that everyone’s just learned to ignore it. Much like a physical journey, an existential journey builds character! Since when has ignoring something been a valid solution to anything?
“[T]he ghost of normal everyday assumptions… declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says”—Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
If this ghost of normal everyday assumptions is the specter haunting us all, I’m attempting to play Ghostbuster.
There is, however, a substantial demographic the ghost doesn’t haunt: religious people. In many religious frameworks, keeping alive actually isn’t impossible: there’s Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, or even reincarnation. Throughout history, humanity has relied on religion and mythology to provide us with the answers we don’t currently have. One could argue it’s why religion exists in the first place. But as time passed, scientific discovery repeatedly encroached on the territory of religion as humanity found more and more of these answers. The ancient Greeks, for instance, had individual gods for many phenomena they didn’t otherwise understand: Poseidon for the Sea, Helios for the Sun, Zeus for Lightning, etc. The Greek gods, however, were ultimately unable to stop the Juggernaut of Science as it steadily solved these mysteries: the tide is the result of gravitational interaction with the Moon, the Sun is a ball of fire powered by nuclear fusion, and lightning is caused by large differences in electric potential between the clouds and the ground. With Darwin’s theory of evolution, Science even came up with an explanation for our amazing biological complexity.
Slowly the West destroyed its gods one by one until only one remained: the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Judeo-Christian God. This God is responsible for the one thing science hasn’t been able to answer to our satisfaction: the question of meaning. Where did we come from? Where are we going? What is the purpose of life? How are we to lead our lives? Religion is attractive to many precisely because it gives clear, easy-to-digest answers for all of these questions, whereas science’s current answers leave a lot to be desired. To be specific, they are, respectively: we came out of nothingness with the Big Bang, we are all going to die forever along with the rest of the universe in an inevitable heat death, we exist for no reason at all, and it doesn’t matter how we lead our lives because we’re just insignificant specks in the cold, uncaring universe. Yeah, not super appealing. Yet, as terrifying as these answers are, more and more people are accepting them over what they view as unsubstantiated wishful thinking. Thus, as Nietzsche (in)famously remarked all the way back in 1882, for many people science has already spelled the end for humanity’s last God:
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125.
If you, dear reader, are religious and it works for you — good! You don’t really need the rest of the article unless you’re curious about what I have to say. The reality is, however, that it’s not working for a lot of people. Roughly one-third of American millennials and Generation Z aren’t religious, and this number continues to climb. Over half of the student body at my alma mater UC Berkeley are not religious. Two-thirds of American scientists don’t believe in God. This article is primarily for you nonreligious folks. What I have tried to do in this article is extract the core essence of every religion — the part they got right, something fully compatible with current scientific views so you don’t have to throw the proverbial baby (meaning) out with the bathwater (organized religion).
Before we dive into the specifics, I’d like to establish some preliminaries regarding epistemology, the branch of philosophy concerned with how we ascertain truth. In his seminal work The Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant argues that there are two types of knowledge: a posteriori, which comes from sense experience, and a priori, which comes from intuition. (Most modern philosophers agree with him.) For example, believing that the sky is blue after observing it with our own eyes would be a posteriori. Believing that the sky continues to be blue whenever we blink (during which we can’t directly observe the sky) is a priori — we can’t prove this with our sense experience, but we intuit it to be true. Simply acknowledging that there is such a thing as a priori knowledge is valuable, as Western culture is focused on the more empirical a posteriori knowledge. We have collectively decided that any truth we accept must be the result of rigorous mathematical proofs, logical deduction, and the scientific method, which is why we have such a hard time accepting more religious or spiritual thought. In the absence of a deity, science has mutated from an intellectual tool into a veritable god: we associate it with ultimate truth and regard its criticism as blasphemy. But as far as deities go, it’s not a great one. For instance, it gives no direction whatsoever on questions of ethics, and pursuing science without ethics is a one-way street to nuclear warfare and human experimentation. While I too put faith in math, logic, science and rationality as an aspiring scientist myself, I’d like to challenge the notion that it’s the only acceptable way of discovering truth and thereby cast some doubt on conventional wisdom. Science is a great tool for discovering truth, but it’s not a god.
First, despite our qualms about the term “faith” and its religious connotation, I would argue that at the core of math and science, whether we like it or not, is faith! This is most easily seen with the concept of axioms: statements we accept as true without proof. We like to believe that mathematical and scientific truth is all evidence-based, but any conclusion we draw comes with assumptions, as we prove statements of the form “if P, then Q.” When we trace back the chain of assumptions, we end up at the dead end of axioms, the domain of faith and a priori. A famous example is Euclid’s fifth postulate that parallel lines never meet. We believe that this is true without proof and derive our entire system of geometry from it, but in the 19th century mathematician Henri Poincaré derived a perfectly valid alternate system of geometry where the fifth postulate doesn’t hold. I invite you to think carefully about why we readily accept some axioms (mathematical, scientific, etc.) and are skeptical of others (moral, philosophical, etc.).
Another key player in how we determine truth and reality is language. We define, label, and categorize everything that we conceive to be real into its own intellectual box: this is a cat, that is a book, this is zero, that is one. These boxes’ labels are then related to those of other boxes: a cat is a type of animal, and it has whiskers and a tail and fur. Here we’re employing what Robert Pirsig calls an “analytic knife” to slice and dice reality into the boxes. This system creates two assumptions: (1) anything that exists (including abstract ideas) fits neatly into one of the boxes we’ve constructed, and (2) anything we can’t define must not be real. For example, any statement must either belong to the True box or the False box. (Formally, this is called the Law of the Excluded Middle.) How valid are these assumptions? Again, I invite you to think about this carefully: why does language determine reality when it should really be the other way around? Consider, for instance, that we don’t know if your green and my green indeed describe the same thing.
Now let’s explore what happens when we take our current systems of rationality to their limits and see if they really are as airtight as they purport to be. First, consider the following statement, which we’ll call S:
S: This statement is false.
Is S true or false? Let’s see: if it’s true, then, according to the statement, it’s actually false! Ok, then let’s say S is false. If the statement is false, then the true statement must be the opposite of S, i.e. “This statement is true.” Wait… so S is true? We’re back where we started! If we evaluate the statement according to the rules of logic, we get an infinite chain of True -> False -> True -> False…! This is called the Liar’s Paradox, variations of which have been considered since the days of Ancient Greece. Somehow, it seems that S is neither true nor false, as both lead to nonsense. Is this even possible? Not according to the Law of the Excluded Middle.
As if that weren’t enough, in 1931 logician Kurt Gödel introduced his famous incompleteness theorems that took the world of mathematics by storm. Gödel proved that any “formal system” (including our current system of logic) cannot be both consistent and complete. A consistent system is one in which there are no contradictions: it is impossible to prove both a statement S and its negation !S (pronounced “not S”). A complete system is one in which every statement can either be proved or disproved, assuming the axioms are true. Gödel’s theorems, therefore, state that any consistent system of logic (i.e. one that has no contradictions) must have true statements that can never be proved (i.e. be incomplete). The implication here is that even if logic is entirely free of contradictions (which we’ve already cast doubt on), it’ll never be able to reach all truth that exists. In other words, not only may there exist truth outside of logic — there in fact must exist truth outside of logic!
What just happened? It seems that logic just imploded! How can we find truth outside of logic when it’s our only tool for doing so? At this point in my quest for truth, I figured I had no choice but to put Western ideas on hold and look into some Eastern schools of thought. (From here on it’s going to get a bit experimental and strange, but bear with me. We’re trying to find the meaning of life here.) There I found the concept of non-duality, which refers to the state of being neither one thing nor its perceived opposite (hence, “non-dual”).
Non-duality plays the role of destroying what it perceives as a false dichotomy. Consider a coin: the coin isn’t heads, and it’s not tails either — those are just the two sides of the coin. Non-duality is the process of zooming out to see the coin and destroying the false dichotomy of heads/tails. Non-duality, then, is exactly what we need to resolve the Liar’s Paradox: the incision of the analytic knife is just a false dichotomy! It’s neither True nor False! Now we ought to be suspicious of the analytic knife; what else has it falsely divided? In the West, we’re very accustomed to this binary way of thinking: everything must be True or False, Yes or No, A or B, 0 or 1. Reality, it seems, is more complicated than that. In retrospect, though, we shouldn’t be surprised. Modern quantum theory has given us plenty of scientific evidence for this, as quantum states can be in what’s called a superposition of 0 and 1 — not 0 or 1, but both at the same time. What we’ve empirically observed in Western science, then, is entirely consistent with what we’ve just concluded: reality isn’t binary, it’s quantum.
Okay, now things are getting interesting. At this point I’d like to introduce to you the most unintuitive concept in the world:
You don’t exist.
No, seriously, hear me out. The notion of self — the sensation of an immaterial, permanent soul floating somewhere within your body— is just an (admittedly very convincing) illusion. There are several avenues to arrive at this truth, including taking psychedelics. If you don’t believe me, the concept is the central thesis of several works of individuals much smarter than myself:
- Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit.
- “What Makes You You?” by Tim Urban. (The shortest and most accessible of these; in particular consider the section on “The Teletransporter Thought Experiment.”)
- The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts.
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. (Not for the faint of heart!)
Since I don’t expect you to go read an entire book mid-article, I’ll paraphrase one of the arguments from Reasons and Persons that I found very compelling. Parfit discusses the implications of corpus callosotomy, a procedure in which brain surgeons remove the corpus callosum (the bridge between the left and right hemispheres of the brain). Surgeons have had to do this “split-brain operation” in certain patients to limit seizures to one side of the brain. In some cases, after the operation, the patient begins to experience two streams of consciousness at the same time. Nobel laureate Roger Sperry studied these cases in the 1960s. In one experiment, a divider was placed between the patient’s eyes so that each eye could only see one color: one Red, one Blue. The left side of our brain processes visual input from the right eye (and sensation from the right hand), and vice versa for the right. When the patient was asked how many colors he could see, with both hands, he wrote, “Only one.” When asked which color, the patient wrote “Red” with one hand and “Blue” with the other! In another experiment, when the patient’s left eye was shown the word “Hat,” he was able to pick out a hat from a group of objects with his left hand (left eye and left hand both correspond to right brain). However, that information wasn’t able to travel to the left brain where speech processing occurs, and as a result, when asked what he saw, the patient verbally insisted that he saw nothing! Even more puzzling is that due to the neuroplasticity of the brain, the two streams of consciousness can merge back into one given time.
Parfit asks: regarding the question of self (what he calls “personal identity”), what just happened? Let’s call this patient (who had one stream of consciousness, then two, then one again) Fred. During the “two” interval, there are only four possible cases:
- Fred was only Left Stream.
- Fred was only Right Stream.
- Fred was both Left Stream and Right Stream.
- Fred was neither Left Stream nor Right Stream.
Let’s see what happens under the “soul” theory of personal identity. Cases 1 and 2 would mean that Fred’s soul moved to occupy one stream but not the other. This doesn’t make much sense, as it’s entirely arbitrary which stream would be picked. If both streams believe that he is Fred and share the same memories, it’s absurd to say that one is Fred and the other is not. Whose soul is in the other stream? Ok, let’s move on to Case 3 then. This would imply that Fred’s soul split itself and began to occupy both streams but then later merged back into one soul. This isn’t consistent with Soul theory, which insists that there is one, undivided soul called Fred that animates this particular brain and body. Finally, Case 4 corresponds to Fred’s soul extinguishing itself when the two streams come into being, and then returning when they merge. This makes even less sense than the previous three options. From this, we can only conclude that the Soul theory must be wrong: despite intuition telling us otherwise, there is no Fred, no soul, no Cartesian Ego, no self, that is continuing from one moment to the next. Rather, we are snapshots of physical and mental experience that exist only in the present. As scary as this initially is, it makes sense: no individual cell in your body continues to exist from 10 years ago, so why make a special case for soul dust?
Now we’re in dangerous and borderline nihilistic territory; if we really believe this, who or what am I? How can there be an answer to Why do I exist? if there’s no I?! Let me clarify. You do exist — just not in the way you’re used to thinking about it. There’s still you as a stream of physical and psychological experience with memories of the past and dreams of the future that is capable of thought, emotion, decision-making and interacting with the world. As we saw with Fred, the stream isn’t confined to one channel: it can split apart, come back together, etc. What doesn’t carry over in this continuous stream is personal identity: you are a product of the decisions and experiences of your past selves, but you aren’t them. Both Left Fred and Right Fred were physically and psychologically continuous with Fred, but they weren’t Fred. Much like the ship of Theseus and the two Freds, you are a snapshot existing only in the present. But don’t worry—in a way, the present is all that exists anyway.
Let me expand on the nature of this snapshot, as there’s another far more important dimension of non-self at play: the question of self versus other. Where do you end, and everything else begin? We tend to think that we are closed systems that act upon and are acted upon by the environment, and that there’s this external reality out there indifferent to us and unaffected by us. It’s why nihilism can get away with calling us solitary, unimportant specks. But that’s simply not true. We can see this, for example, when we try to do physical experiments with quantum computers. No matter how hard we try, we can’t get a closed system: there’s always some degree of quantum entanglement with the environment. We think that we can play observer without affecting the observed, yet when we observe a quantum state we force it to collapse to a classical one and destroy that quantum information. (Clearly I’m a fan of quantum theory.) Observation is an active process: the light ray hits the observed before it hits the observer.
Moreover, the external reality doesn’t necessarily even exist without us “observers.” Think about it: without our brains turning the vibration patterns of the air into electrical signals, there would be no such thing as sound. Without our brains converting waves of energy in the visible spectrum, there would be no such thing as color. What I’m getting at here is that there is no fundamental division between observer and observed: they are two sides of the same coin. In other words, Self and Other is a false dichotomy. That’s what I mean when I say “you don’t exist” — you don’t exist as a closed system isolated from the rest of the universe. Failing to see this invites, among other issues, all the confusion we have around the concept of free will: “free will” is the observer controlling the observed, while “determinism” is the reverse; both stances become myopic once we see that control exists in both directions simultaneously. Conventional wisdom, then, has it backwards: instead of being unconstrained in time (i.e. having an immortal soul) and constrained in space, we are constrained in time (i.e. existing only in the present) and unconstrained in space. I strongly believe that this is the capital-T Truth at the crux of everything, the ultimate secret of the Universe. When you reflect on this Truth, even if only for a moment, you can finally see the Matrix. Don’t believe me? Look up the definition of Nirvana, the ultimate spiritual goal of Buddhism. (Spoiler: it means realization of non-self.)
“Only when our hearts are empty of the things of the mind is there love without separation, without fear. There is only love. There is no you or me in this state. There is only a flame without smoke.” — J. Krishnamurti
If you’re still with me, there’s just one piece of the puzzle left. If there’s no Self and no Other, what is there? What’s the flame without smoke? My answer to this is as radical as the idea of non-self, but this time, it’s the most intuitive thing in the world. When we strip away the idiosyncrasies of every religion until we get to the core essence, we’re left with a simple a priori assumption: that there exists some Order to the universe. Not necessarily as strong as destiny—just some sort of principle, law, pattern, or structure characterized by the symmetry, beauty and harmony we often observe in nature and mathematics alike. At first glance, science seems to imply that everything is arbitrary, that Entropy (i.e. chaos) is the fundamental driving force of the universe. The Second Law of Thermodynamics shows that Entropy is always increasing, consuming Order in its path toward inevitable annihilation. Yet the process of science itself— finding patterns, models, and laws to describe the universe — presumes that there’s some underlying Order to observe. Even the Second Law of Thermodynamics indicates Order, as it prescribes a direction for Time’s Arrow: we can’t go back in time as this would decrease Entropy, meaning that the Entropy itself has Order. Failing to see this Order is just another zoomed-in failure of processing the Entropy/Order false dichotomy.
It’s not entirely clear what this “Order” thing entails, but the idea isn’t a new one. In fact, it’s as old as civilization itself. Hindus call it Brahman, Plato calls it the Form of the Good, Robert Pirsig calls it Quality, David Chapman calls it Meaningness, the Shinto religion of Japan calls it musubi, and Taoists call it the Tao. “This mysterious something has been called God, the Absolute, Nature, Substance, Energy, Space, Ether, Mind, Being, the Void, the Infinite… found in almost all cultures at all times” (Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are). To be consistent and emphasize that the concept doesn’t require religious connotation, I’ll call it “Water.” What makes Water such a mind bender is that it can’t be defined—it doesn’t fit into one of those neat little boxes we’ve constructed. The very first sentence of the Tao Te Ching (Taoism’s central text) is “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” It’s a truth outside of logic, something that neither is nor isn’t, something so great and profound that it exists outside the reach of the analytic knife. Since we can’t define it, we’re forced to speak of it in metaphors and parallels. It’s been described as “The Way Things Are,” the underlying pattern in the fabric of reality, the “interconnecting energy of the universe,” the one fundamental metaphysical existence. If the realization of non-self reveals some non-dual Self+Other entity, Water is the nature of that entity.
Perhaps the concept is easiest to convey through pop culture. As silly as this sounds, consider the Force in Star Wars: it’s this mysterious energy that resides in all life and binds the entire galaxy together. Jedi seek to be one with this Force, and they return to the Force when they die. Qui-Gonn Jinn remarks, “The ways of the Force are beyond our understanding… But fear not. You are in the hands of something much greater and much better than you can imagine.” The Force (without the magical telekinetic component) seems similar to the concept of Water! In fact, the Force used to be called the Way, which is the literal translation of “Tao.” This is no accident: just as I’m attempting to do here, filmmaker George Lucas sought to “distill the essence of all religions,” borrowing the term force from the following quote:
“Many people feel that in the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force, or something, behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us, and they call it God” — Roman Kroitor
Obviously the Force is a sophomoric incarnation of Water since Star Wars is for young audiences, but the point is that variations of the concept of Water can be found everywhere once you’re familiar with it. If you’re a fan of anime, I’ve even seen it in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood:
“The Universe is the All, and you are the One. All’s existence and ability to move forward is dependent on this law. The universe is infinite, but little things like structures, planets, people and animals are what keeps it going. If you die, the world continues on: you will decompose, become nutrients for plants, herbivores eat those plants, carnivores eat the herbivores, they die, and life starts over. The Universe always moves forward, a constant cycle. It is the One that binds All together… One is All, All is One.”
Equivalently: Self is Other, Other is Self.
At long last, we’ve found our elusive fountain of meaning! It’s Water, the “mysterious something” that’s been called God, Energy, and everything in between. That irreducible part of the human experience that seems to elude understanding. It flows through us and binds us together, invisible yet crystal clear. Once we open ourselves to the possibility of meaning we can see it everywhere: the stars in the night sky, the way the sea shimmers, a gripping work of art or film, a beautiful melody, a split second of genuine human connection, an act of kindness. Those fleeting moments in which you become aware of some spellbinding yet indescribable beauty. It’s been there all along! We can take a collective sigh of relief knowing that we no longer have to comply with nihilism’s mandate to explain away the meaning right in front of our noses using some intellectual sleight of hand. Of course we matter—the incomprehensibly vast Universe is the All, but we are the One by which it moves forward. We are God: Spinoza’s pantheism makes sense when we expose the false dichotomy between Created and Creator. (Religious people are God too; they just don’t know it yet!)
Now you may be thinking: that sounds great and all, but there’s no proof! Well, that’s precisely the point. By definition, Water is undefined. It can be felt through a priori intuition but can’t be apprehended with a posteriori logic. As Deneen Fendig explains in Netflix’s new show The Midnight Gospel, “There’s a flow to it. You can sense there’s a flow to it. But you can’t unless you’re in presence.” This causes discomfort and with good reason, as we usually reject (and should reject) hypotheses without proof. It’s why skeptics tend to roll their eyes at anything even remotely spiritual. The difference here is that we are operating on the level of a priori assumptions, the realm of axioms where we don’t have proof anyway. “The universe has no meaning” (Entropy) is just as much of a faith-based axiom as “The universe has meaning” (Order). David Chapman calls the former a “Level 4” understanding of meaning, where Level 5 is the goal and between the two lies “a sea of psychological confusion” in which “one recognizes the limitations of rationality, but can’t yet work effectively in meta-rational mode.” It’s the hyper-rational left brain in a vain attempt to surgically remove the more artistic and imaginative right brain from the human experience. To escape the pothole you must doubt doubt itself, i.e. doubt skepticism as the only vehicle for truth.
But, ok, perhaps you still don’t buy all this Water stuff. This is a subtle point, but a crucial one: You don’t have to! The very real physical Universe with its eternal flow of energy and endless wonder can itself be this divine source of spirituality, meaning, and beauty that I call Water. It’s a simple change of perspective, but it makes the world come alive: while Nihilism says nothing matters, Water says everything matters. As one Buddhist describes Enlightenment, “I become nothing, and discover that I am everything.”
Finally we have the tools to combat the existential dread. Let’s explore the implications of Water and non-self in the context of the four big questions we had earlier.
1 & 2. Where did we come from, and where are we going? Physically and scientifically speaking, the physical matter and energy in our bodies come from the Universe (we are quite literally made of stardust) and return to the Universe, as a natural implication of the Law of Conservation of Energy. Under the assumptions of Water, this extends to the spiritual dimension — we are made of Water and we’ll return to Water. Stripping away specific notions of the afterlife, similar sentiments are shared across religions:
“Rivers and streams are born of the ocean, and all creation is born of Tao. Just as water flows back to become the ocean, all creation flows back to become Tao.” — Tao Te Ching, Verse 32.
“From God we come and to God we return” — Qur’an 2:156.
Without immortal souls, our conscious experience will end, and this can be terrifying to consider at first. But remember what we really are — we aren’t individual egos restricted within the boundaries of our skin, we are the eternal Self, all of humanity and life and matter as One! What this means, plainly and simply, is that we never die. Our individual containers decay, but the butterfly effects of every little thing we do remain, crystallized in history and the memories of the people we influence. We aren’t solitary atoms in the Universe, we are the Universe—and that truth endures whether we are playing observer or observed. Consider that if we could “zoom out” and see the world in four dimensions (space + time), each of us has always existed and always will exist.
3 & 4. What is the purpose of life, and how are we to lead our lives? We’ve seen that it isn’t success, happiness, or hedonism. Neither is it pleasing a cosmic Master (organized religion), nothing (nihilism), something completely subjective (existentialism), or a question that doesn’t even make sense in the first place (Ludwig Wittgenstein’s view). In a sentence, the purpose of life is to be in harmony with Water. In an even shorter sentence, it’s simply to be present. That’s it! The meaning of life is just to be alive! It’s so simple and obvious and yet so easy to forget. Note that this answer is distinct from all the alternatives explored above in subtle but important ways. It’s also distinct from the advice you see on any old blog about being mindful as a stepping stone toward success or happiness. Here, the radical presence itself is the goal, and the reason for this is simple: presence distances the real “you” from your Ego, and existential dread is only an issue for the Ego, which fears its own inevitable demise.
But practically speaking, what does it even mean to “be present”? Often it’s enough to simply tell the voice in your head (i.e. your Ego) to shut up every now and then—again, as established in the “you don’t exist” section, that voice isn’t really you. But what if we want to do an even better job? Let’s return to the “harmony with Water” expression. As American professor Joseph Campbell once said, “The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the Universe, to match your nature with Nature.” We can do this by (1) continually building our understanding of the ideas of non-self and Water and (2) transferring them from the realm of intellectual contemplation down to the level of pure instinct. The goal is to not merely glimpse the Matrix but to be cognizant of it at all times. That’s what it means to be Enlightened. It’s certainly not an easy task, given that it’s difficult to even hold on to the ideas in the intellectual domain in our world of endless distractions and influences. It’s what David Foster Wallace was referring to with the “didactic little parable-ish story” (as he calls it) quoted in the beginning of this article: the fish are swimming in Water their whole lives and don’t even realize it. It’s painfully obvious and yet invisible, forcing us to constantly remind ourselves like a mindfulness bell, “This is Water. This is Water.”
When we do this successfully, we liberate ourselves from anxiety, desires, and distractions and become fully and absolutely present, one with our surroundings. We realize that there’s no Great Reward waiting for us on the other side of death, or success, or some epic quest for meaning — this is it, it’s right now and right here and all around us, hidden in plain sight. “It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top” (Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). We become the Master described in the Tao Te Ching, he who has “stepped back from [his] own mind and thus understands all things,” his actions in perfect harmony with the Tao (Tao Te Ching Verse 10). Morality becomes a no-brainer when we see all other humans, living things, and the environment as extensions of ourselves, giving credence to Christianity’s Great Commandment to “love thy neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39). We accept the Way Things Are— the pleasant and the unpleasant, the uncertainty, the impermanence—abandoning our obsession with control and our victim mentality and understanding that things don’t happen to us, they just happen. We finally obtain our much sought-after purpose, gratitude, and fulfillment as mere byproducts of mastering this state, as the nagging questions of purpose, the fear of death, and the existential loneliness all dissolve. After all, how can we be afraid of death if we never die? How can we feel alone when we’re One with the whole Universe?
I leave you with a quote from legendary logician Bertrand Russell, mostly to prove I’m not the only one fond of using water as a metaphor.
“The best way to overcome [fear of death] — so at least it seems to me — is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.” — Bertrand Russell, “Portraits From Memory and Other Essays”
Thanks to Graham Hughes and Ishan Saraf for feedback on previous iterations of this post. If you want to learn more about these ideas, check out the references below, listed roughly in order of accessibility:
“The Egg” on YouTube.
“What Happens When You Only Pursue Pleasure” on YouTube.
The Midnight Gospel, Netflix.
“Religion for the Nonreligious” by Tim Urban.
The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.
The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu.
Meaningness by David Chapman.
Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit.
© Ryan Hoque 2020
