Chapter 2 (The Problem)

What is the problem?

Before one gets to the solution to a problem, one must agree on what the problem is. I will argue that the fundamental problem with the existence that we are in right now is that it is impermanent. The Buddhist tradition probably articulates this situation more clearly than any other. As the Buddha pointed out, in this life we basically have three things to look forward to: aging, sickness and death. This is true no matter how much money we have, how intelligent we are, how good our health is right now, how many friends we have, how many goals or responsibilities we have. No matter how much we care for our physical bodies, they will fail. No matter how many friends and family relationships we have, both they and us will die.

However, we avoid thinking about this. In the Hindu epic the Mahabharata, when Yudhishthira one of the epic’s protagonists is asked what is the greatest wonder in the world, he replies that the greatest wonder in the world is that every day people see creatures depart to Yama’s abode (the lord of death) but live their own lives like their own lives will continue forever. I’ve said to myself that the one of the things that I’ve learned from having cats is that the story always ends the same way. The economist John Maynard Keynes once commented regarding economics in the long run that in the long run we’re all dead. The football coach Vince Lombardi is quoted as having said winning is not the most important thing it is the only thing. In this life, death is not the most important thing, it is the only thing. What happens after death is the only thing that in the end matters.

What happens after death?

The world’s major traditions give three main explanations.

1) Nothing

After you die, you don’t go anywhere. You simply no longer exist. This view found in both eastern and western traditions. It is often associated with atheism in the west. It is certainly a minority view but even in the very spiritually oriented eastern world, a Hindu school known as Charvaka argued that only the things which can be perceived with the senses exist and since we can’t experience an afterlife with our senses, it doesn’t exist. If one adopts this viewpoint then there is nothing to worry about in an afterlife since there is no afterlife and no need for spiritual development as I define it. How do you then live? Most would say you do the best that you can. You avoid pain as best as you can and enjoy pleasure reasonably. That’s all you can do.

2) You live this life once, followed by a perpetual afterlife somewhere.

This is the predominate view in the major western religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. It is also a found in Chinese culture where after death the individual goes to the home of the ancestors. In the west, each individual has a soul generally conceptualized as being different from all other souls. After death, the soul is judged by a God and transported to a heaven or hell, with an intermediate state sometimes an option. Traditions differ in their emphasis on how the individual gets to the preferred state of heaven. Some emphasize that only faith is necessary. Others stress actions or a combination of faith and actions. Some believe that the outcome is already predestined. In the last view, “grace”, meaning destined for heaven, is simply given by God and no amount of faith or action can change God’s decision. In this context spiritual development means finding the right combination of faith and/or action as prescribed in a specific religious tradition. These practices may be combined with meditation and at times a search for mystical transformations. Well defined mystical traditions exist in all major western religions although they are not the predominate mode of practice.

3) We live a series of lives (reincarnation)

The third option is we don’t live just a single life but are reborn in a series of lives. I will spend more time on this option because although everyone in the west is familiar to one extent or another with reincarnation, I think reincarnation is often not well understood or a bit misunderstood. It is also the view that I will adopt for the purposes of this series. This view is held in the eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism, although interestingly in the oldest Hindu texts the Vedas, death was not a major preoccupation. Death was more or less accepted as a fact of life and nothing that should be a source of great fear or anxiety. The purpose of religious practices were to promote prosperity in this life and make the present more comfortable. What happened to the individual after death wasn’t that much of a concern.

This attitude changed somewhere around 1,000-800 B.C.E, when in India, thinkers began to ponder about what might await the individual after death. For them death became a central preoccupation. Different viewpoints were expressed but by about 500 B.C.E. in the Hindu texts, the Upanishads, a more or less consensus viewpoint emerged. This viewpoint held that within the individual there is an element known as the atman (soul, the closest English translation). The atman is immortal and cannot not die. It represents the true us, the true self. At death only the physical body dies. The atman lives on and transmigrates or reincarnates into another body where it continues on in another life. Life in that body eventually ends and the process continues with more deaths and rebirths. Rebirth was possible not just within the human realm but within a broader set of realms that included at least six domains consisting of gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts and hell beings. An individual could be reborn into any of these.

A second essential concept that emerged was that what governed where one would be reborn were the laws of karma. Karma means “action” but karma in this sense came to be thought of as the value (goodness or badness) attached to any act and any act could mean not only any physical action but any thought as well. One’s actions left traces or karmic seeds. Those seeds might not lead to any immediate consequences but they would eventually return to the individual who generated them. Good karmic seeds would lead to good future circumstances or a better rebirth. Bad karmic seeds the opposite. Effects might not be seen in this lifetime but would eventually return to the one who generated them including determining the realm into which one would be reborn in the next lifetime. Karma offered an explanation for why as we all know that in any individual lifetime the good often suffer while the wicked prosper. However, karmic seeds would return, if not in this lifetime in some other.

While reincarnation in the west is sometimes romanticized as a new opportunity, a second chance to come back and get it right or live that life that we didn’t quite have this time around. In the east it didn’t work out that way. After all, most people don’t live happy prosperous lives and even for those who do if they are thoughtful life is tainted with a sense of impermanence and awareness that death is the ultimate fate. The whole cycle of reincarnation driven by karma became linked to the notion of our being tied to a wheel of existence and a process known as samsara. Samsara means to wander or meander as the atman transitioned between the various realms. On reflection in the east, the whole process came to be viewed as wearisome and pointless. The goal of the spiritual journey came to be to put an end to the cycles of death and rebirth altogether.

Generating good karma might raise one on the hierarchy temporarily. However, even if one accumulated so much good karma as to be reborn into the realm of the gods, that birth was only temporary. Although the gods lived long lives and enjoyed enormous power and access to pleasure that karma would eventually run out at which time the individual almost inevitably fall into a lower realm. A consensus view emerged that the way to put an end to this cycle was first of all stop generating karma of any kind (good or bad). Then to allow the accumulated karmic seeds to ripen or burn off. Once there were no karmic seeds left, at death there would be nothing to hold one on the wheel of samsara and the true self would be liberated from the cycles of rebirth. In Hinduism this liberation is known as Moksha. In Buddhism the state attained after release would be known as nirvana. I will adopt liberation or nirvana as the ultimate goal of the spiritual journey as pursued here.