Thirteen Keys to A New Vision of Life

Cultivate your cosmic lack of importance.
All is relationship, everything is interconnected.
Be content with what you have, the way things are.
Love your neighbour as yourself, do not do what you hate.
If you want to be rich do nothing for money.
Blessed are the poor. Do not distinguish between people.
Thoughts are fictions, thoughts are choices.
Nothing remains, everything must be let go.
Flow as the river, without thought; act non-action.
When you see the ordinary as sacred everything is in its place.
Peace is the highest good. The middle way leads to peace.
Now is the time, there is no other.
Know nothing.

These are all actions, how to live life, states of becoming. They are called ‘keys’ because I think each helps unlock something if we take them seriously.


Cultivate your cosmic lack of importance


It all begins with humility. But the first key is not “be humble”. Instead, I speak of a cultivation, a tending to, a concentration on, an ongoing process, something also relevant to every key here. I also speak of a context rather than an abstract. That context is the cosmos, the universe, everything we can imagine existing. In the context of that, what are we? To cultivate your cosmic lack of importance is to groom yourself into a non-egotistical state so that when various people tell you that you matter or that you are important you take it in a context in which it should be more properly set. So cultivating your cosmic lack of importance is not regarding yourself as the lowest of the low or the dregs of existence. Instead, it is an “everything in its place-ness” where that is just to co-exist with all things. It is an inability to concern yourself with status or rank or importance. It is a living, active humility, a non-egotistical becoming.


All is relationship, everything is interconnected


That all is relationship and everything is connected is to recognise and actively embrace that you are not the only thing that exists. Once that is realised, you begin to see things in the context of other things or as a set of interlocking relationships. It becomes the viewpoint of actions and consequences or non-actions and consequences, for, whether we act or don’t act, things must follow. This, then, becomes an existence which is about consequences, relation and interconnection. Since you are not all that exists and since things must inevitably affect other things, a more rounded view than “just me” becomes necessary. So this realisation is also a further example of a non-egotistical existence and a contextualisation of ourselves as a link in a chain or as a set of interlocking relationships. We surely cannot abstract ourselves from everything else for it is everything else, in its possibility, that gave us birth and enabled us to exist but, more than that, that enables existence at all. So such a view is the end of the abstraction or instrumentalisation of both people and things. Instead we think of their linkages, relationships and interconnections in non-egotistical ways.


Be content with what you have, the way things are


At first flush, this might sound cruel or harsh. We imagine any number of oppressive situations or contexts and we ask how the people in those situations could be “content” with them and so accepting of “the way things are”. Indeed, many in our society today preach the exact opposite to this third key that I am here putting forward. They speak of not being content with your lot and the way things are. But this key needs to be approached in the right way to understand what it means. It does not mean to be accepting of oppression or to explain away pain caused by others or the domination of one person over another. Instead, it means to cultivate (there is a lot of cultivation involved in these keys for it is not imagined these are qualities we necessarily have already) a principled indifference to circumstances, to see through the narratives humans impose upon life. It is also to accept that no one person, or group of people, control the way things are or what happens, both things far beyond the capabilities of either. In fact, it is a refusing to rush to settled conclusions about this time, this place, our life and its context. It can also be seen as a seeing things at their best possibility at all times and an acceptance that change is always going on. In fact, this key very much interacts with key seven in this respect. Yet there is also a sense of flexibility here, a privileging of flexibility over possession of something thought ideal which can easily lead to greed for more or an obsession with possession. Indeed, this key seems not to accept that an ideal ever exists to be possessed. Instead, we cultivate contentment in ongoing situations, a training of ourselves, a discipline, a meditation, regarding a process. We treat all circumstances as imposters just the same.


Love your neighbour as yourself, do not do what you hate


These two commandments compounded can be seen as a summary of the entirety of social morality and, indeed, the key to achieving it. The first is famously taken by Jesus as a summary of the Jewish law and exampled by the parable of the Good Samaritan in which he suggests that even your enemy in danger is your neighbour. He thus answers the obvious follow up question to “love your neighbour as yourself” which is ‘Who is my neighbour?’ Yet this is also a third key which focuses on the dissipation of ego. For in taking yourself as the measure and acting to others as you would hope you yourself receive there can be no ego. For here is recommended both an active “love” of neighbour rather than a mandated passive attitude if a neighbour should, by chance, come your way, and an active not acting towards others in ways you would hate, the negative form of “the golden rule” known in human societies since antiquity. In both cases activity, an active mentality, is envisaged. It is a way we are imagined to actively pursue, a path we choose to go down. If growing numbers of us acted this way human societies would be transformed.


If you want to be rich do nothing for money


No one ever suggested that these keys would leave the world as it is with just a little decoration around the edges, as if all that is needed is a few cosmetic changes to a world that is basically sound. On the contrary, that’s not my view at all. Instead of basically sound I see it as fundamentally flawed and one way it is fundamentally flawed is economically. This is far from simply a case of redistribution of wealth, however. Indeed, I seek to abolish wealth, eradicate money, and obliterate commerce. My fifth key takes this from the individual point of view by totally devaluing money and by asking each one of us to find wealth in other things. For the fact is that money is not the inherent way to wealth. Instead, money is a communal agreement to accord value to it from which imagined wealth springs measured by how much of it you have. But, that being the case, we can change our minds. We can choose to find wealth elsewhere. We can forget the dogmas of economics, devalue them and infuse other things with value instead… such as human life and dignity. Money is basically a system of valuations but, as can be clearly seen, it is not one without negative effects. An economic system requires losers and so creates them and holds them up as examples to the rest of what might happen to them if they aren’t careful.


So why do we live in a world where people starve because they cannot pay for food? Is an economic mantra more important than human life? Why do we live in a world where someone might die of a treatable medical condition because they can’t afford to pay for the treatment? Is an economic mantra more important than alleviation of human suffering? And the important thing here is this isn’t a given, an unavoidable fact of nature: its a human choice to value money and economy over living beings. I find that inhuman and I revolt accordingly from any kind of economic system which judges people according to ability to pay or financial means, something our current world does as a matter of course as it credit rates them and judges their current and future earnings ability. In my view, we need to free ourselves of this terrible burden and imagine a world without money, without finance and without commerce and it starts with each one of us forgetting the monetary motive in our daily lives. We could make money valueless and make caring for each other the supreme value if we wanted to. Its in our gift to decide how society should run. We should dare to dream of better rather than settle for worse or imagine that our course is set. For that, of course, is what the haves in an economic system will always want the have nots to think. But how about we remove such structural inequalities whole and entire? If you really want to be rich do nothing for money.


Blessed are the poor. Do not distinguish between people.


I would describe this as a reversal of the current world order, a bottom up rather than top down ethic. “The poor” I regard as the ordinary mass of people, unassuming, perhaps existing from day to day, week to week, month to month, which is most of us. They are those you would not raise above others. They are not famous, they have no status, they are those who must be active to maintain their circumstances. But this ethic goes further than that. It is not just about treating these people, these ordinary, every day, regular people as blessed, and blessing them by your actions towards them everyday in friendship and community, but it is a refusal to admit notions of status, rank or standing to our social ethics and morality at all. People should not be compared and judged better or worse based on judgments about things like race, creed, colour, gender, physical and mental ability or sexuality. There should be no method or idea which splits people up along ideological lines in order to have “the better” and “the worse” or “my side” and “the other side”. Not distinguishing between people entails the abandonment of any and all partisanship. Instead, the prevalent creed here is one of common humanity, even common life if we see ourselves as living things like so many other things that are alive. And so this can also broaden to encompass an ecological dimension as well. But it is important we begin with those in the worst circumstances and work up rather than the other way around. In caring for the worst off we care for ourselves, for we are all the same. To add value to another’s life is to add value to our own. What you do to another, you do to yourself.


Thoughts are fictions, thoughts are choices


Everything you think is wrong. Everything you think is an imposition of thought, that is always related to the thinker, imposed on things outside that thinking. Thoughts are interpretations and interpretations are not inherent to things as essentials of the things. Instead, they are rhetoric about things, ways to explain things, possible descriptions, meaningful understandings. But in each case they could be different. Our thoughts about a thing or situation are not the thought or situation or even equivalent to the thought or situation. They are just one possible set of thoughts about it. So everything you think is wrong. But only because there is no right. So thoughts are both fictions, sometimes useful and sometimes not, and thoughts are choices, in the sense of things that didn’t have to be and in the sense of other options (redescriptions, reinterpretations) are available.


The consequences of this are huge. For example, if some thought is giving you a problem then rethink it in a different way for the first way was neither the only way nor the essential way. There is also the thought that we need not think at all, at least not in the way we have formerly been taught, as if life and truth and knowledge are about having the right thoughts and, having collected up all the right thoughts, thought itself then ceasing to be necessary. Taoism speaks of non-mind and non-thought and these are important concepts for this particular key. In thinking we are not seeking a thing called knowledge or truth which we can possess and thought itself is not about possession. Indeed, here we do not seek to wall ourselves in by the artificial boundaries of thought which lead to knowledge at all. We seek only an emptiness which is an openness. That which we “know” is accorded no status. It is not ranked in a hierarchy. Our minds should not hold onto things but, instead, let them go. This encourages becoming and avoids the ossifying lack of flexibility that “knowledge” or “truth” promote. In thinking, it should not be imagined we gather the essence of anything for our thoughts are merely temporary and ephemeral, impressions as we pass by. High understanding comes from not understanding at all.


Instead of knowledge as facts that can be possessed and may be accorded the supposed honour of “truth” this ethic valorises knowledge that is experience. It is an experience in the moment that we each can have. It is not based on academic learning or a canonical narrative. It is not about building up a collection of right thoughts you distinguish from the wrong thoughts. Here possession is loss, not gain. Here every moment has its own integrity simply because it became and it is about its own natural authenticity. Reality, imagined by scientists or philosophers, does not exist. It is artificial. What is real is what you experience as you experience it rather than how some commentary, any commentary, may describe it. Commentary is interpretation and interpretation is never foundational in any intrinsic sense. Commentary is boundary rather than openness to reality. There is no reason why reality need be, or could be, reflected in words. So there is no need to seek truth. Simply cease to cherish your own opinions, a further anti-egotistical move.


All you know is wrong. All you know is fiction. All you know is choice. Thinking can only ever imprison you in a room of your own creating. Freedom, and, ultimately, peace, is not-thinking not-thoughts with a not-mind. Here I promote mindfulness, the aware, balanced acceptance of present experience. Epistemology is abandoned in favour of possibility in which there is nothing to gain and nothing to know. Thoughts aren’t fixed realities but simply movements of a mind that is thinking and so we see thoughts for what they are: the passionate attachment to unreal and non-substantial things, the creation of fictional identities that fade so that only the energy remains. We must realise that nothing is as it seems, that what we think is not the same as what is.


Nothing remains, everything must be let go


This key is an observation, a context, one it is imagined the reader should take note of. This is that everything is moving, changing, passing away, in every moment of our lives. Of course, we are doing these things too and none of this has anything to do with how we feel about it, whether we believe it or whether we have knowledge of it. For this constant change is not something constrained by us or our thoughts. Rather, it is the other way around. The mountain range we observe may seem solid and eternal but over millennia it wears away to dust. It doesn’t just happen one day; it is always happening until it doesn’t exist as a mountain range anymore. So nothing remains and everything embodies change. But, that being the case, it is sensible to adjust ourselves to this situation by having minds appropriate to it. The things we hold in our heads, both as objects and ideas, must also be let go. For, just as we cannot stop the mountain range wearing away, so too these ideas and objects pass away as thought and language changes over time. Here we combat the conservative notion to freeze things in time and give them an eternity and a fixity which is strictly inappropriate to them. All conservation in the end is a wanting to have things forever as they are now or in some other imagined better state and this is always a fight against an unstoppable force, the force that is change. The issue is, however, that our nature, nature itself, is change and we must accept and internalise that fact if we do not wish to lead constantly dissonant lives. We must learn that nothing remains, all things must pass and so all things must be let go.


Flow as the river, without thought; act non-action


Here is a metaphor and a concept. The metaphor is the river. The river just flows. It goes wherever the water will go and adapts to circumstances as they are come upon. It has no purpose and does not want anything. It just flows, never holding on to the ground it flows over, always continuing on the way. The concept is non-action, wu wei in the original Chinese. This non-action, so I understand, is an active quality. It is not a doing nothing. That is why the second half of this key is to act non-action. In a way, the river is itself a good metaphor for this too. For the river acts, it flows. But none of this is deliberate. Flowing is what rivers do even as the flowing that is living is what human beings do. Yet do we live as the river flows, with non-action, an unintentioned lack of concern with where and how and why and what for? Non-action is lack of intention, lack of care or worried concern, but, more than that, an indifference to such things, a cultivated lack of intention. Should the river care if it flows this way or that, here or there? So within this key is also a hidden warning: beware the dangers of care, of desire and of intention which can lead us astray and disrupt our lives. Be as the river.


When you see the ordinary as sacred everything is in its place


The key here is to see every moment as a special moment, to fully inhabit and experience each of those moments. It is also not merely to see the ordinary as the sacred but to see the sacred as the ordinary, to not section off bits of life as special but to allow the special, the meaningful, the valuable, to infuse the whole of life. This then becomes a recontextualisation and reconstitution of life itself. Some bits aren’t more important than other bits; each bit just happens as it will in an ongoing process and each is indebted to what came before as will that be which comes after it. Sacred and ordinary therefore become synonyms rather than opposites.


Peace is the highest good. The middle way leads to peace.


This is a key that I have thought long and hard about. In fact, its not an exaggeration to say that my whole life has been spent thinking about it. The issue is “What is the highest good?” and my answer, after almost one half century, is that, in the end, it has to be peace, personal, social, planetary, cosmic. There are other values or qualities we might wish to take that place instead (like love or compassion) but, ultimately, these are things which lead to peace in themselves by their existence and their being in evidence. So, finally, it is peace I take as the goal and this goal is the unspoken goal when I speak about all of the other keys.


But if peace is the goal how is it achieved? The answer seems to be that it is by avoiding extremes and hence the preference for the middle way devoid of intention, desire, care, concern, worry. In ancient Greek thought there was sometimes a dichotomy presented between reason and passion, logic and feeling. But I reject this bifurcation as inaccurate and misleading. There is no such thing as a passionless reason or as a reasonless passion. When operating by logic, so it is imagined, we have not then turned off our feeling, as if it was something we could ever turn off in the first place. What we are is organisms, holisms, that include both reason and passion, feeling and forms of logic, at all times. There is no turning these off. They are always there. So the peace that we seek must always appeal to both or neither equally for there can be no one without the other. Here too we must follow a middle way rather than appeal to one thing at the expense of another.


No doubt this involves appealing to more than yourself for even a person who has isolated themselves still has surroundings. So there is an element of co-existence to this, a sense in which peace is about more than simply your own, settled state. Can one be at peace if elsewhere others are not? This is an important ethical question that we should be concerned with. For myself, I imagine that the more people who are at peace, the more they will be able to share that peace with others - and so increase their own. Peace, then, involves fraternity, co-existence, holistic thinking, a “middle way”, that is in the midst of everyone and all things.


Now is the time, there is no other


Existence is always in the now, this present moment. We never exist in the past we imagine or the future we expect or hope for. We live in an ever present that rolls on. When we die and our identity fades our matter will still exist (some think our consciousness will as well) in that ever present but we will not. This key is really nothing more than a fresh realisation and emphasis of this, that now is the only time we ever exist in, the only time we can ever influence or experience. So we should enjoy and experience each moment of now for there will never be another time. Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it now.


Know nothing


It is a long held insight of philosophy that wisdom is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom. The keys I offer here, especially this thirteenth and last, are broadly anti-epistemic but not anti-wisdom. They take a dim view of knowledge as it has been valorised and rhetoricized in the Western tradition, they see through its puffed up, egotistical claims of insight and importance. This key challenges us to take the same attitude and do the same thing, to throw off canonical narratives and fictions imposed by personal and organisational authorities, to see that life is not something we need a set of hard and fixed rules for. Understanding, might I suggest, is not something that anybody needs to have. Bean-counting up the universe and writing the complete set of facts in a book that we can call “The Book of Knowledge” is literally an unachievable aim. One can be happy, or at peace, without reason. As the Buddha once claimed, “There is nothing to stick to.” (He said this because “Everything changes”, by the way.) “If you understand,” runs the proverb, “things are just as they are. And if you do not understand, things are just as they are.” So what is the difference?


The issue is that knowledge as a general category is very prone to being used egotistically. This key, by the way, is nothing to do with knowing how to do things. When I say “know nothing” I do not mean “do not know how to do anything”. On the contrary, this key is about how we view knowing and knowledge philosophically, what place we give to them, what stature we imagine they have. Enlightenment here is regarded as knowing what you do not know rather than counting up all the things you suppose you do. Knowledge, under this rubric, is never a cause for pride. Indeed, often knowledge is regarded as a trap or a blind or a stumbling block. So sure are we of what we know that this knowledge becomes a bind and a stumbling block that has been self-imposed. Better than knowing, then, is an empty openness to all things. Here the ethic is that if you change how you see you will be able to see how you change. Knowledge, on the contrary, is not about change at all. It is about setting in stone. But in a world of change can that ever lead to peace… or only to ever increasing dissonance? So this key is to see knowledge more as experience than collected facts and to see this insight itself as a piece of wisdom. What you possess, you lose.


Note

These thirteen keys should not be read separately as if they were distinct items. Instead they should be read interactively and in relationship with one another, holistically. Then one can, hopefully, see the consequences of one for another. It is the thirteen keys together which unlock a new vision of life, the world and existence.

Everything is Futile!

Its just like old times today on my blog. Not old times for the blog, but for me. Today I'm going to be reading something from the Bible and talking about it. In the 1990s and early 2000s you would have found me doing this normally because it was my academic education. I learnt Hebrew and Greek, studied history and literature and learnt about things such as "textual criticism" (which is the history of the reception and modification of ancient texts). But it all came to a couple of abrupt halts and now I barely do it at all. That is not to say that today is to be all about God. The book of the Bible I'm going to talk about, Ecclesiastes, barely has any interest in God at all. He is barely mentioned and more simply assumed. Were this not a book in the Bible you might not have much cause to think that the speaker in the book even thought that much about God himself. And, as we shall see, the God he talks about doesn't seem to do much anyway. This isn't a God who parts the Red Sea, feeds the 5,000 or sends down lightning from heaven. Maybe that's why he's not very interested in him?

"Everything is futile!" is the testimony of the speaker in the book of Ecclesiastes and from now on I'm going to call this person Qoheleth. This is the Hebrew name for the speaker in the book. It just means the speaker at a gathering and its not his real name. The book is headed with the name of Solomon, son of King David, him who was supposed to be full of wisdom, but that's likely just to get the book some attention. It doesn't matter anyway. I'm here for the content not the fame of the writer or speaker. And the content is about filling out the theme of the book which is announced in the very second verse: "Everything is futile!" A book that claims “Everything is futile!” as its opening gambit is a book that I want to read, think and write about. I want to know what it means by that and I want to know how it stands it up as a genuine assessment of anything. Hopefully in the next 10 minutes we will find out.

The book of Ecclesiastes opens like this according to the New Jerusalem Bible:

Sheer futility, Qoheleth says. Sheer futility: everything is futile! What profit can we show for all our toil, toiling under the sun? A generation goes, a generation comes, yet the earth stands firm forever. The sun rises, the sun sets; then to its place it speeds and there it rises. Southward goes the wind, then turns to the north; it turns and turns again; then back to its circling goes the wind. Into the sea go all the rivers, and yet the sea is never filled, and still to their goal the rivers go.

All things are wearisome. No one can say that eyes have not had enough of seeing, ears their fill of hearing.

What was, will be again, what has been done, will be done again, and there is nothing new under the sun.

Take anything which people acclaim as being new; it existed in the centuries preceding us. No memory remains of the past, and so it will be for the centuries to come - they will not be remembered by their ancestors.

Sounds quite modern, doesn't it? Life is a bag of shit, right? No god to be seen. Life is just drudgery. Recurring drudgery. What's it all for? ("What does it profit?" is a recurring theme of the book as is futility and "chasing after wind".) It seems like 2,500 years ago, somewhere in the Middle East, things weren't so different after all. And back then they couldn't pass the time by tweeting cat pics either. Quite often in life "futility" is taken as the thought of naive and depressed teenage boys - and thus thoroughly (and all too simply) dismissed. But this statement is here being made in a major book of a world religion (or two if you also include Christianity which would controversially come to claim all things Judaism as related to itself). So this is not something that we can brush aside if we wish to take the considered thoughts of our fellow human beings seriously. I find it intriguing in the extreme that such a statement should be found in such a place. Ecclesiastes is one of those Jewish books regarded in its traditions as a part of the gathered earthly wisdom. So what is the wisdom in saying "everything is futile?"

A translation of the word here rendered “futile” is sometimes the word “absurd”. This is not absurd in the sense of funny. Its absurd in the sense of “inscrutable without end” - something which literally makes no sense - and so becomes a futile pursuit. The idea here is of things ungraspable - no matter how much you try or how strong your grip is. The Hebrew word at the root of all this is “Hebel” in English transliteration, a word which suggests an insubstantial fog. Life is fog. Everything is fog. And you can’t grasp fog because it will always slip through your fingers. Its insubstantial. There never was anything to grasp.

The thought is unpacked further beyond the bold statement. The reader is asked directly “What profit can we show for all our toil, toiling under the sun?” The book is thus addressed to everyone and is asking about life generally. This is not some dusty tome for a few clerics or academics. The book addresses you and asks you for your answer to the question. It seems to me that this is very important. Everyone needs his or her own answer to this question. What are you working for? What do you get from it? What of ultimate value and worth remains? Qoheleth or I or some treasured mind or someone else cannot answer for you. You need your own answer to this question. And, in the end, having your own answer that you feel resonating in your heart is the only one that will satisfy anyway. Psychologists, existentialists and philosophers have said the same thing in previous blogs of mine.

After this we get a series of examples which, to my mind, basically concentrate on an appreciation of time. Time goes on and on forever in its inscrutable, absurd, futile and foggy way. We cannot discern or divine its meaning or purpose. We make no sense of it. All things pass as it rolls along on its way and we become tiny and insignificant and forgotten. Suns rise and fall, rivers run, winds turn. Chapter 3 will tell us, patiently, that there is a time for everything. Life is variety and change. But then a slap in the face: all things are wearisome! Our writer has seen and heard enough, overcome by the deluge of time he, and us with him, have become lost in. Time is a void and in it we are as nothing, lost as the universe goes about its interminable business. These days we have much more time and space as our increased vision has revealed the enormity of it all. But even in his small, Earth-bound world Qoheleth felt insignificant.

This is a great context for us human beings, creatures who constantly need to be snapped out of our self-regarding, egoistic and exceptionalist focus on ourselves. I am sure that each succeeding generation of human beings sees itself as reaching out into the universe, attempting to be gods. Certainly, for some this is true today. We are fallible and trapped in futility, as Qoheleth claims, and yet we have visions of eternity. There are those of us who want to extend human life indefinitely. Others want to reach out to the stars and colonise other worlds. This, for me, is a case of Qoheleth’s “nothing new under the sun”. For it is not new that human beings, in their hubris, seek to grasp the ungraspable. Of course, it may not be that those so minded agree with Qoheleth and his assessment of everything. But then this is meant to be a piece of wisdom and its not always the case that the most knowledgeable are the most wise. We each take from the store of human wisdom as we are able to.

So am I saying that our technological advances and the associated knowledge and learning that come with these things are futile too? From the context of this section of Ecclesiastes, yes I am. The view espoused here is that everything together as a whole in the end makes no sense. This is surely true. And no amount of gizmos, gadgets and technological achievement can or will change that. Living an interminably long time, far beyond what’s currently possible, would not remove the question “What’s the point of life?” anymore than living for the 70 or 80 years we hope to live now. Unless your shallow answer is that the point of life is to live as much of it as you can - calculated in terms of number of years. One day the universe itself will die from heat death - and there will be no escaping that - and so the shallow desire for  extra years gives no satisfying answer to me. Its just one more grasp which grabs only at more fog.

There is a final focus in this opening gambit of the book which lays out its main concerns. This is the issue of memory. Qoheleth is concerned to describe a world in which nothing changes, nothing is new. This, in a way, is a very modern view of the world and of the universe. The universe, it can be said at a fundamental level, is merely the history of differing forms of energy. (This is a level far beyond most humans who see “the world” as being a story of human beings. Arrogant, stupid and wrong.) All that is is because of energy, because of energy in its varying forms. So nothing is new. The universe is just energy doing its thing until it gets so cold that all meaningful activity ceases.

Qoheleth sees this as a problem. And its a problem of meaning as most things in this book are. This is why clever people with their science and technology or their philosophies based on knowing things are somewhat impotent here. For meaning is not a subject which requires a PhD or science degrees. The question of meaning is a human question that addresses each one of us regardless of earthly status or egotistical qualifications. I myself regard the question of meaning as the fundamental human question of life. Put simply, we are thrown into the world and from that point on each one of us has to wrestle with questions of what things mean - and what everything means. These questions, and our ability or inability to find satisfying answers, will shape our lives. It is clear that they have occurred to Qoheleth too and his survey in this book indicates they seem to be generally occurring.

In this situation it is somewhat grievous for Qoheleth that nothing is remembered. Things are forgotten. Even today with our vastly increased archiving capabilities all the fine details fall through the holes in the sieve that is our ability to collect and preserve things. We may be able to save some things and a few facts. But we no longer know what things felt like. Memory is more than being able to reconstruct an event or tell a story just as understanding things is more than being able to measure or re-create them - which is what science basically does. Its to know what it was like to be there, how things felt. And that will not be remembered. As people pass away so their ability to explain and express dies with them. We are just left with relics, a very incomplete and insufficient record of past times. We fall inevitably into time’s void, unable to escape its irresistible magnetic pull. This is the way it is, Qoheleth plainly states. All things must pass. Time is a treadmill and we must take our allotted steps along it before being shot off the back to be forgotten.

In chapter two of the book Qoheleth decides to try pleasure and see if that can bring relief in a world of futility. "And this was futile too." So no joy there. He muses on the fact that the wise and the foolish have the same end. And so what really is the difference between them? This reminds me of something I blogged about before, thinking of life as a matter of moving from Point A, birth, to Point B, death. For Qoheleth it is grievous that this path is the same for all people. There is no benefit to being wise in terms of an outcome. Both the wise (which can also mean the morally good) and the foolish (which can mean the sinful) have the same end. At the time this book was written there was no conception of Hell as a place for the wicked. All alike went to Sheol, the place under the Earth which was just for the undifferentiated dead. Later Hell would be developed to make the choice of wisdom on Earth a more consequential one. But Qoheleth knows nothing of this when he writes and concludes that all one can do is get the happiness one can get from eating and drinking and enjoying such achievements as life grants. And that's it.

Chapter three is a musing on time and an interesting distinction is drawn between Men, who must simply take what fleeting pleasure they can get, and God, whose ways are eternal and inscrutable. Men are likened even to animals, since they both draw the same breath, and we are no better off than our fellow beasts. The Bible, as a collection of books and as a handed down tradition, of course knows that human beings were created and especially chosen by God and are the pinnacle of his creation. But that thought is not reflected so much here and we are far away from the thought of the book of Genesis. Here human beings are much like animals. They know as little about eternal truths as a sheep or a pig. God seems as far away from them as he does from the rabbit or the horse. Qoheleth even muses if human beings and animals go to the same place after death, so entwined does he see their positions relative to God. "The way God acts inspires dread," says Qoheleth, struggling under the weight of the eternal, something so very different from the life he sees around him.

Chapter four lapses into a familiar literary style, that of the Jewish wise man, and there are some snappy sayings such as "A threefold cord is not quickly broken" which praises the strength of togetherness. The section as a whole is loosely labeled as being about "society". Here, too, there is futility. It is futile how much injustice takes place and how people are robbed and cheated with no one to help them. Qoheleth is shocked at the amount of "power their oppressors wield". Again, this is all very modern and its easy to think of current situations that this description fits. Qoheleth congratulates the dead that they are beyond the injustices of life and even more so the unborn that have never had to see them. Life is full of jealousy and ego for Qoheleth and it poisons life. How true. How very true! Everything is futile and a chasing after wind. Life is not fair, it doesn't add up. Today we would be cynical about this as if it was a given. Qoheleth is not. He is trying to do the arithmetic on life and make it add up to something sensible. But he can't. There follows in chapters five and six various truisms about life. They add up only to more futility. But Qoheleth can contradict himself. Later on he will say "Better a live dog than a dead lion" and we can surely see the sense of that.

The rest of the book is a catalogue of observations about life and more traditional Jewish wisdom concerning it. People still have to live and so still need to know how to go about that, to judge between better and worse courses of action and, all things considered, cultivate a little practical wisdom for living. The big statements and overarching viewpoints thus recede as these more every day matters are concentrated on. Here we see that Qoheleth views life as something we are supposed to get on with and take responsibility for. Yes, he thinks that God is in his heaven but he does not think that God does everything for you. He knows that life is struggle and you must do what you must do to survive and that this is your responsibility. Its just that, in the context of the bigger thesis I have outlined, he wonders what it was all for. Qoheleth is a man who is honest and realistic about life. He does not turn away the difficult questions and neither does he fall back on unquestioning orthodoxies. All being said and done, he agrees with most other Jewish wisdom of the time that it is better to be wise than foolish and better to be alive than dead but its just that, even so, these things never amount to anything in the end and we humans remain terminally blind as to the point of any of it.

So this book of futility and frustration, that has expressed the absurdity of life as much as any book from a theistic tradition could do, could be summed up in some words from near the end of the book in chapter eleven:

However many years you live, enjoy them all,

but remember, the days of darkness will be many:

futility awaits you at the end.

The book itself ends as it began:

Sheer futility, says Qoheleth, everything is futile.

And so it is that even in a world of gods the absurdity of a world of foggy uncertainty and blindness, of an emptiness waiting to engulf us all, breaks in and infects every area of life. For Qoheleth the eternal is inscrutable and completely other. It is not for human beings to understand even if they can contemplate it. Indeed, we share more in common with all the other creatures of the Earth than with anything that could. We are weak and limited beings. Life adds up to zero for us whichever way we slice it and from whatever angle we approach it. What else can you do, then, but eat and drink and enjoy it while you can, if you can? But it will not be fair and judicious and there's nothing to be gained at the end. It is empty struggle. Is this a pessimistic message? I don't think so. It seems fairly honest to me. This can be summed up in the fact that, as far as I can see, for Qoheleth even believing in his god has got him nowhere in the end. Qoheleth does not live in a world where if you believe in the right god you are saved. Of course, he would still choose to believe in his for he thinks his is true. But, still, life is empty and pointless, in the grand scheme of things, for everyone equally. And surely he was right about that.