What does the asker do when his question’s answer is to stop asking?
When all the questions boils down to no answer, the question itself dissolves.
Life is just meant to be lived.
There is no real explanation for that, and asking when you already that know that that answer isn’t, is a waste of the time you do have.
HYPOTHETICALLY SPEAKING!
Say the ONLY requirement to get into heaven right now was the willingness to let yourself die. Would you make it to heaven right now or would you resist it’s singular requirement for the preservation of life?
To be in heaven is to be “alive” in some regard. To be alive in any regard is to experience potentially anything, the potential for pain and or pleasure are both presumed and real. To realize heaven is to realize that one can only enter if they are not dead. If you are persistent that heaven is what is after death, then you must be willing to die in order to enter it.
Heaven is either on earth only right now, or only its requirement is death.
A living man can always lie about death, only a dead man cannot.
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.” - Albert Camus
To be fair, I have not read the rest of Camus’ work and do not know much of his philosophy in detail beyond a vague idea of absurdism.
And yet his quote, out of context, relates to the hypothetical I shall present to you now.
Say, imagine you are presented with two options. You must choose one, you cannot choose both and you cannot choose neither, as “both” and “neither” are not the options presented here.
◻️: The continuation of whatever is now. You are offered exactly what you posses right now, and nothing else. With this choice, you are given nothing, implying what it seems. No mystical upgrades, no extra riches, no additional peace, no escape from reality, no cosmic secrets, no nothing! You simply get this moment and its continued chain of events. With nothing, you get to keep life as it currently is, nothing special, just what you’ve already got.
◼️: Unimaginable Perfection. You are offered the singular most desirable thing one can behold, something so beyond perfection, it is unimaginable. However, in order to obtain this, you must surrender everything; every, singular, thing that is possibly imaginable in exchange.
So, which do you choose?
The consequences of ◻️: Nothing. Life remains exactly as it is and you go on, perhaps remembering this experience to be an odd one, perhaps forgetting it. Losing it to the memory of what could have been. However, you never lose the ability to question what ◼️ is, you just never quite get a textbook answer.
The consequence of ◼️: Nothing. Because you have surrendered everything, nothing is all you are left with. You cannot experience, know, see, hear, feel, or perceive your “prize”. You don’t get to enjoy it, you don’t even know it exists. This option means to give nothing by taking away everything. This option is death, the cessation of all.
Do you keep everything you already have, even if it just something, and anything could happen to it? Or do you decide the ◼️ and choose the “thing of perfect” even if it requires total destruct obtain.
The truth of the matter, is that the means of experience, the perception in and of the moment now is the only thing we totally have and it’s already now. If you wouldn’t be willing to trade your literal, entire life (which only truly exists in this moment) in this moment, for the “ultimate prize” then you admit that no matter how small or miserable, life or ◻️ feels, it’s still better than than what’s promised as “ultimate perfection” or ◼️
To pick ◼️ is to willingly choose total and immediate non-existence. Any argument for ◼️ suggests that ◻️ is the superior. By remaining within the moment to argue, you argue exactly why ◼️ isn’t better, regardless of the stance.
The answers and their arguments
“I choose ◻️, because ◼️ is worse.” The survival instinct. You see immediately that ◼️ cannot be better, given that you have to die in order to obtain it.
“I chose ⬜️, because ◻️is better.” The acceptance of life as it is. This is arguably the strongest stance to take, one could argue that death isn’t something to be avoided, but that life has value in and of itself. You choose to have found your everything or at least enough within your slice of something, since that can be anything.
“I choose ◼️, because ◻️ is worse.” The hope for something beyond the pain of life. You take an interesting stance, you argue that you want ◼️, all while actively choosing ◻️. In fact you use ◻️, benefiting from a it’s qualities to argue why ◻️is worse.
“I choose ◼️, because ◼️ is better.” The grand idea of death. You cannot say something is “better” if that thing has nothing to be compared to. You cannot even take the idea of “better” or “perfection”, or capacity to “experience” with you to ◼️. You argue that ◼️ is superior, and yet remains solely within ◻️ to do so. Not to enjoy ◼️, but to enjoy merely the unfathomable, unimaginable, idea of the “perfection” of ◻️.
Deep down, anyone choosing to remain alive, despite their situations and circumstances, prove they wouldn’t want to trade the simple “now” for something “unimaginably perfect”.
And yet as a living man, perhaps this is merely a lie I’m telling about a death I’ve never experienced.
What I experienced, I did not know what to call. And because I had nothing to call it, nothing to compare it to, and yet something to understand, I understood it to be nothing itself.
And yet I was wrong.
To experience something, is never nothing.
And in my searching, I failed, and I failed, and I failed, without failure.
I could only ever conceive of something. And yet because of that, I didn’t understand nothing.
I understood something though, not much, but something.
Nothing is never. Never is nothing.
There is no thing that is purely being, or purely changing all things are happenings. “Happenings” require both the matter and the event.
Nothing is matter without an event, it is never.
Never is an event with no matter, it is nothing.
What happens to be, always and something, as for anything and everything too, is the “now”, the eternal instant.
Simply the moment.
…
That.
…
This.
Any of it.
And none of it as well.
Did I find what I looked for? Well bit too little, far too much, and I for sure don’t know.
Existence itself cannot be totally defined, it’s only experience is as something always.