The Unrealistic Expectation of Nirvana

When we are not focusing on ourselves or some extension of ourselves e.g. our family, our tribe, our favorite sports team, etc, our personal current condition and how this condition can be improved, we (briefly) reflect on attributes of the larger world around us.

This glimmer of circumspection, maybe while reading the newspaper or listening to NPR perhaps, inspires us to project into a future where everything is in harmony. If asked to describe this situation, we would say there is no evil, no misfortune, no worries about potential misfortune, and, generally, contentment abides across the world. Somehow, all problems, or at least the existential problems, have been ironed out through faith, science, common sense, and/or social norming. Maybe God appears and sets the record straight.

As we review the issues of the day, we continually ask, why hasn’t somebody solved this problem yet? Not for our own personal satisfaction, but just because there is a wrong that needs righting and we’re prewired to expect that this is possible.

Also, we expect that all changes are part of a master convergence to a positive end state. Even changes that are short-term bad, have a long-term benefit that moves us closer to some ultimate state of bliss.

Before too long though, we fall into a chasm of dispair, realizing that this unconditional nirvana is unrealistic, at least in our lifetime, So we refocus on our own current condition, hoping that, perhaps, with enough careful planning and manipulation, we can simulate a perfect world in a very narrow way, in our own lives.

In today’s Zits cartoon, Jeremy and his girl friend, Sarah, spend the day together, sun bathing at the beach, sharing a lunch in a diner, driving home in his VW bus, Sarah asleep on his shoulder.
In the last frame, Jeremy is parked in his driveway, he has ripped a hole in the roof of his VW Bus and stuck his head thru it to yell at the sky, the world, maybe to God. He says, “If there is more to life than this, I don’t want to know it!”

This declaration is an alegory to the previous four paragraphs. Since it is a cartoon, it has a last frame that ends the story. In real life, even if we experience such a cathartic moment, it passes. There is always a tomorrow and an associated disappointment. The issues we were ignoring, come back to haunt us.
There is no nirvana.
There are some who, thru an act of mental will, or deployment of vast sums of capital, can insulate their senses such that they convince themselves that the world they live in is in a state of nirvana. They have no wants or cares. I think.

Why isn’t there a reasonable hope for a real, world-wide nirvana?
1. We are human, fallible, mortal, have incomplete knowledge, and are individually weak compared to the forces allied against us.
2. We lack trust in our fellow human beings. We expect that someone will screwup somewhere, probably to our own personal detriment, if not the world as a whole.
3. Some of us at least, understand our timeline. Even though the earth has been around for some 3 billion years, humans have only been around for a few million years and have been primitively civilized into social groups for 4 or 5 thousand years, and some 90 percent of the human population has been born in the last 500 years. The human population is projected to double every 7 years…and the timeframe is shrinking. The basic criteria for human life, food, fresh water, protection from the elements and each other, has stayed the same since we first stood upright. The resources from which to draw these is growing linearly or not at all. They are presumed finite.
So, graphically, we are on this existential trajectory that leads to extinction in very rapid order, geologically speaking. The actual means of our demise is not clear. Maybe mass starvation, mutual annhilation, overwhelm by microbes beyond the reach of modern medicine. Maybe some perfect storm of all of the above.

Barring divine or other extraterrestrial intervention, so far escaping physical evidence, we as a species won’t be around long enough to fix all of the existing problems, let alone future problems yet to be encountered.

There has to be a happy ending to this. I’ll sleep on it.

– jgp