I know the gimmick here is always “Everything is true here” but… I actually need to tell this here for precisely that rule. The unspoken ambiguity is the only way I can justify to myself why I am revealing what I know, knowing it can only cause pain. So let the unspoken rule be followed, and the unspoken inference be made to its veracity within the mind, and let me tell you how I know that death isn’t worth it.
I had my existential crisis late in life at 19. I should have learned it years ago, the fear of what comes after. I internalized the idea that my grandmother was dead without ever letting myself feel that pain of pure loss, nor the understanding that it might come for me one day. I should have learned it with my cousin, who died in a drunk driving accident in which none of the people in his car were drunk. I should have learned it from the fish I’d had, or the dog I’d seen run over, or the endless cartoons and children’s shows that danced so carefully around the issue to help ease us into the idea that it all ends one day.
I called it my basilisk, once. It was an idea that I could never look at directly once I understood what it was, an idea I could never safely think about without it causing me great pain. Forgive me, if my basilisk triggers yours.
I was bedridden for almost a year. I got up to shower, eat, to work, but there was nothing else that could motivate me to live once the idea of dying was fully understood in my mind. Ironic, that an idea that time is limited should have motivated me to make the most of it, only for it to cause me to squander a full 10 months of life.
I dove into religion. I dove into fantasy. I dove into every video game in my Steam library looking for an escape, any meaning that I could glean to make things make sense. Some things helped; some books, some ideas. I was always an atheist, so religion had never held sway over my beliefs, and an afterlife had passed through my mental fingers like wet slimy sand. It took me until long after I convinced myself that humanity would one day discover the secrets to immortality and perfection of being that I discovered the concept
Samsara
The cyclical nature of life and of being. Reincarnation, an idea I had always scoffed at until I stared death in the face.
I don’t know if I died or not. I just know that I saw it, the dark inky blackness of eternity and oblivion. My face dipped below its surface against my will, the claw of the anesthesia, near medical malpractice, pushing me under with its talons gripped into my hair. I don’t know if I died. The doctors didn’t seem to act like I had, however they note that I had bled a lot during my surgery. I remember it so clearly, the feeling of
nothing
like static upon my face. That numb feeling as if torn from my arms when they fall asleep. It was an echo of my state of non-being pierced into my brain, snapshots delivered like a CT scan one photo at a time.
Why did I bring up Samsara when I said I saw nothing?
It is considered enlightenment to let go of earthly bonds and escape Samsara. The purpose of our earthly existence is to learn enough through our karma that we understand, on the base level of our soul, that we don’t belong here. The physical world is ephemeral, transient, and not worth hanging onto. Once we accept this, we escape Samsara, and escape the cycle of reincarnation.
So why did I bring up Samsara when I said I saw nothing?
Samsara implied that we ascend to a higher state of being when we let go of our earthly bonds. When I woke up from that near-oblivion, I didn’t just wake up. I caught flashes of being from years past. Years and years past.
Years before my years.
I’ve spent one year, five months, and four days thinking on what it meant. And I have only come to one answer that makes sense.
I escaped Samsara.
And there is no transcendence.