No worry, be happy!

“Without seasons nothing ripens and drops to the ground,” writes British philosopher John Gray at the end of his meditation on science and the strange quest to cheat death, The Immortalisation Commission: “The leaves never change their colours or the sky its vacant blue. Nothing dies, so nothing is born.”

So why do most people continue to hanker for deathless life or willfully deny the immutable prospect of their own mortality? In the Mahabharata Prince Yudhishtira calls this world’s greatest wonder (ascharyam attah param). What makes humanity’s life lust wonderful is that it allows Eros or the Lord of Love to triumph over Thanatos the God of Death.

Alas, that ‘triumph’ is illusory. “For nothing is more changeable than the self that is preserved in (our) memories,” Gray asserts. Indeed, according to him, we “might live more calmly and also more pleasantly, if we could see more clearly that the self we want to save from dying is itself dead”. This is also Buddhism’s fundamental insight called Anatta in Pali or Sanskrit Anataman. This is the notion of ‘non-self ’ that the Buddha frequently used in his teachings to emphasise that all things perceived by the senses (including the mental sense) were not really ‘I’ or ‘mine’.

For that reason alone, one should not cling to them. But in reality that negative message has failed to resonate as strongly as the bolder and some would say brazen, exhortation of “go forth and multiply!” This also lies at the core of the immensely popular teachings of Indian epicureans called Charvakas or the Ajivikas.