Chapter 1
Life As A Hell
1
Life is an act made in ignorance. When one chooses to have a child, is such a choice born out of sympathy for the child? Can any progenitor truly say that it is better here than it was there? Life itself is nothing more than a self righteous passion project. If one was to way up both the pain and pleasure of their own life, where can it be said that the most pleasure is found? Is it not in the creation of another? If it is that the happiest moment in one's life is the creation of another, then life as a whole can be thought of as nothing more than an act in selfishness and avarice. As the boulder of sisyphus, passed from one onto another. Is it still not known that this is a summitless mountain?
Consider that which is good; pleasure, relief, the achievement of a goal. It is said that good abounds in the world, that good is endemic to existence, yet it is also said that the bad so too does abounds in this world; pain, grief, apathy. is it that these two parts exist in harmony, that one is as a counterbalance to another? For all pain, is there the same joy, for all failure, is there the same achievement, for all apathy, is there the same fulfilment? Think of life in its most primal form, the act of one animal engaged in the consumption of another, could one say that the joy of one animal outweighs the suffering of another, that satiety is the counterbalance to suffering, or appetite the ally of agony? It is clear here that the pain outweighs pleasure as an elephant outweighs a feather.
Pain is what dominates in this world, it is agony itself that has made existence its resting place. Think of the best pleasure you have achieved, the best love, the best happiness, the best smell, the best sight, the best feeling, think of all good, all that is good, all that was good, all that will be good, and know its embrace. Now consider pain. Give me a cubic centimeter of your flesh and I could give you pain, pain that would swallow you as the ocean swallows a grain of salt, and you would always be ripe for it, from before the time of your birth to the moment of your death.
Pain can sometimes come with a caveat, pain for purpose, endurance of pain until wounds become scars, and then at the end of one's journey, they find respite when they look up to the heights which they have fallen from, seeing those same scars engraved into the heavens. One may strive so that one's reach extends so far beyond his grasp, but I do have to wonder, what is it that they are reaching for? What is it that I am reaching for? what is it that humanity itself is in search of? Humanity moves, this is true, we see ends, and we see beginnings, loss, and gain, but is it true that we are advancing?
An object in motion without a desired destination can never move forward, nor can it go back, no advancement, no retreat, simple, sheer, movement, the constant spinning of a beginningless wheel. it can only be said that we are as we have been, alive. The world and reality itself is merely a wheel, spin it does and spin it must. Spinning, spinning from nowhere to nowhere, always spinning but never moving, spinning now, spinning again, and spinning forever, til motion itself ceases.
The reason for such spinning is a lack of essential constituents. We as individuals might have our own respective goals and aspirations in life, things that we see as being meaningful to us, these meaningful actions however arise from 3 substrates: reference, desire, and terminus. One might find meaning in becoming a doctor, a painter, a sculptor, or a pianist, because he has first seen that others were able to achieve this end, through the knowledge of other's actions he gained the insight that such terrain was pathable, without this knowledge he could have found no such meaning. If one never knows the piano how can he aim to be a pianist?
Knowledge alone is not enough, one too needs desire for the craft, even if a man knows of the piano, it does not mean that he is drawn to make that his life's meaning, there first needs to be an innate prerequisite desire for such actions.
