A Shortcut to Nirvana
By any common standard, Rene Zoblonski was a failure. If you are heavily into Herman Hesse's "Sidhartha" you may, perhaps, consider him to be a marginally lesser failure than, say, an averagely successful businessman, but you would still likely agree that he was a loser. Certainly he was nowhere near attaining enlightenment.
Rene Zoblonski, age 35. Occupation: a night watchman or, if you prefer, a security guard. An alcoholic and a regular drug user and a chain smoker. It is fortunate for him that jobs exist for which the sole qualification is the lack of a criminal record, and the sole requirement is to appear awake. Otherwise, he would be living at a Salvation Army hostel, but his job allowed him to avoid this indignity.
Apart from alcohol, drugs and cigarettes (not to mention caffeine) his sole interest consisted in science fiction and fantasy paper-backs, which he read in humongous amounts, the sole application of his considerable speed reading ability. Why did he choose such a life? Did he even have a choice? Did he, incredible as it may sound, like it? We cannot be certain, for what means have we to look into his soul? How did he describe himself? One could say that he did so without a great deal of coherence, but that hardly answers the question, does it? With enough patience, though, one could follow his digressions and bizarre chains of association that most schizophrenics would envy, and summarize his views as "a reluctant acceptance of reality." Is that happiness?
Three AM find our hero in the men's room on the 17th floor of a big office building, smoking a joint. Lest you judge him too harshly for neglecting his duties in such a way, you must realize that was, despite his multiple vices, one of the security company's best employees. He could speak English (a definite asset, though by no means a requirement in his line of work), he could even speak French, which gave him an extra 50 cents an hour, he was seldom late and never absent without any prior warning and never turned down bizarre shifts and overtime, as long as he could bring in his bag of paperbacks and read. Of course, drinking and doing drugs on the job is not allowed, but what his superiors did not know could not hurt them.
As his coordination worsened and his were
spirits lifted up by the drug, a funny idea occurred to him,
though his state was such that just about anything would be funny
to him. It would be both interesting and entertaining to call a
suicide counseling hotline and see if they can come up with a
logical reason for him not to commit suicide. Rene very much
doubted if they were capable of this, since they were too used,
in his opinion, to calls from desperate
single mothers and lovesick 14 year old girls just dumped by
their boyfriends. You may think that this is a very sexist thing
to think, and you are entirely right: being a male chauvinist was
one of Rene's numerous fault.
He finished the joint and returned to his post, a desk in the huge glass walled lobby on the first floor which always remained him of an aquarium. A lone drunk was throwing up outside, though fortunately not near the door, and while it was not a particularly pleasant sight, Rene was surprised to find that it did not bother him, one of the joint's results, no doubt. His brain was, in fact, too preoccupied with the various reasons for him to commit suicide to fully process the visual input, and therefore the appropriate reflexes were not triggered.
Still, he understood the scene well enough to pull out the security report and write '03:32 An inebriated personage chucking his cookies outside.' His superiors were lacking in a sense of humour and were therefore upset by irrelevant entries of this kind, but not upset enough to start sending him to construction sites instead, which are precisely the reasons why Rene persisted. He will regret it one of these days, no doubt.
Putting the report away, he turned to the phone book, where he found the number for the Distress Hotline, and dialed it. "Hello, Distress Hotline," answered a pleasant baritone voice. Rene pictured the owner of the voice as slightly overweight, in his early thirties, wearing a rumpled suit and a pleasant open countenance.
"Good morning, " started Rene. "I am trying to think of a reason not to end my life, and having very little success."
The baritone voice was confident, and Rene was certain he must have heard this line many times before.
"Well, have you had any pleasant experiences in your life?"
"Why, certainly, but overall I have had more unpleasant ones."
"But could it be that it is the pleasant ones that make one's life worthwhile?"
This is an insipid phrase, it really is. It was
good at one time, perhaps, but the constant repetition has turned
it into a
vapid banality. Still, the quiet and confident baritone voice was
able to impart a lot more life to it than it honestly deserves.
He was very good at what he did - make people cling to life, and
if that required imparting same to lifeless cliches, he could do
it well - a rare and useful talent.
"Its possible. But would not the unpleasant experiences cancel out the good ones. I mean, on the average my life is more unpleasant than pleasant."
It is to the distress counselors credit that he did not try to push the notion that some happiness makes any amount of misery worth enduring, a comforting notion that would probably not be accepted of someone who thinks to take an average of pleasure and pain. A different approach was called for.
"What makes your life so unpleasant? Perhaps you can change that?"
"Well, the main reason has more to do with life in general than with my own life. Take an average being, not just a human being, at random. On average, it will have a thoroughly unpleasant life. Birth and death are both unpleasant affairs for all involved, and in between - for most part hunger, pain, cold, misery ..." his voice trailed off.
The counselor was used to dealing with screwed up 15 year olds, but this cat was screwed up more thoroughly than any of them... He considered arguing the precise point of the universality of suffering, & decided against it - he disagreed with this view, but had no desire to precipitate an argument. Strangely enough, he was heavily into Transcendental Meditation, and thought Buddhism was a really good religion, and yet he did not believe in one of its fundamental premises. In fact, the main reason for his involvement in TM was to pick up girls who are into "sensitive" and "spiritual" guys, although his conscious was not aware of his actual motives. He id, however, knew this very well.
"But what of your own life? How satisfied are you with it?"
"My own life? But why should I consider my own life only? There is nothing that objectively makes me distinct from anything else!"
The man is either a complete asshole, or else is totally out of touch with reality, perhaps both, perhaps on drugs to boot, thought the counselor, not without justification. Despite his essential ordinariness, despite having had no original, or even unusual thoughts for many years, his perceptions were unusually acute.
"You are not anyone else, though. You are yourself, and your perceptions are exclusively your own, as those of others are theirs."
This, while true enough, was irrelevant. A much better argument would be to point out that by suicide one gets rid of oneself only, while the rest of creation still suffers, so what's the point? Of course the logical implication is that everyone in the universe down to starving squirrels, kittens and earthworms should shoot themselves. Definitely not a line of reasoning that the counselor could comfortably deal with.
Rene, however, suddenly realized this counter argument, and its implications. He also realized that there might be a 14 year old boy with acne out there trying to get through, and that he might kill himself if no one assures him that acne will go away eventually.
And who knows, this boy might grow up to be something useful, not a reject like himself.
"You know, " he said, "if I kill myself, that will not get rid of this suffering problem..."
He didn't really want to say this, he wanted to argue that nothing exists outside of his mind, and if he would kill himself that would destroy the universe in its entirety, and no one would suffer anymore. It would be really interesting to see how the counselor would handle something like that... But he had to clear the line for the 14 year old boy.
"You are absolutely right, and if you accentuate the positive..."
Has he ever considered suicide, Rene wondered? Has he ever thought of it other than in a detached way, as something that people who need help do? Who knows? Maybe he is one of those people who tried committing suicide once or twice, didn't like it very much, and now spend much of their time urging others not to try.
"... and there is a book I read recently," the counselor was saying, " 'Why Bad Things Happen to Good People' ..." Rene's drugged mind tuned him out again, than it tuned out the lobby and the puking drunk. He though of the way the city looks from the roof of the building, and idly wandered how far from it he would fall if jumped away from it as hard as he could. "... and you will find that there are a lot of things worth living for."
"Yes, you may be right, " said Rene. He seldom lied, but was definite just as infrequently. "It was very good talking to you."
That was true, but Rene was talking about the conversation's entertainment value. "Good-bye."
"Good-bye, and best of luck."
The drunk, having recovered from his nausea fit, could not understand why a security guard was rolling on the floor laughing.