What Is Life?
While reading Tim Parks's A Season With Verona, a book about so much more than football, I came across this quote from Schopenhauer:
You can also look at life as an episode unprofitably disturbing the blessed calm of nothingness.
Is this view an indicator of depression? There are several answers that occur to me.
As I read the theory of the Big Bang (and the projected subsequent contraction--the Big Suck?), one can look at not only life that way, but at the whole of the universe as a brief statistical disturbance (albeit considerably larger and longer than a life) in an otherwise infinite void. That would be the scientific view.
As Buddha put it, "All that is subject to arising is subject to cessation." That which is not subject to arising or cessation is nibbana (or nirvana), the freedom from the material, emotional, and intellectual realms, the ultimate peace (void perhaps) to which we should all aspire. That would be the Buddhist view.
As Freud put it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, "all the organic instincts are conservative, are acquired historically, and tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things." That is, that all organisms are driven by the fundamental instinct to escape the ongoing stimulus of living, to seek ultimate peace and quiet. That would be the psychological view.
So based on these views, infinite nothing is what we should expect, what we should seek, and what we in fact do seek. The only hope to counterpose against these views is, as George Harrison among others saw it, some notion of God:
Tell me, what is my life without your love
Tell me, who am I without you by my side
But even he, in "My Sweet Lord" for instance, seemed to long for the end of this life:
I really want to see you
Really want to be with you
Really want to see you lord
But it takes so long, my lord
7:54:03 AM 
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