This article is a follow-up of the “Everyone is a Slave” piece I did, as well as “Rambling on Companionship.” Because War & Peace is such a vast, dense work, it’s only appropriate for me to write something else that adequately covers what I was trying to convey and what I’ve been thinking lately. Although I finished reading it months ago, it has stayed with me, and probably will for some time.
When I say things like “everyone is a slave,” and “there is no free will in life,” what I am getting at is what Tolstoy himself was creating a portrait of in War & Peace. There are two characters in the book that serve as philosophical opposites of each other: there is Prince Bolkonsky, a cynical dude. And then there’s Pierre, who finds god halfway through the novel and can be described as having more “openness” about life. He goes with the flow more and is less inclined to get pissed off about shit when things don’t go his way.
I think, at its core, that is what the novel is really about. The constant dichotomy within man and the challenge we are faced with: wanting to be selfish, or sacrificing your life for others and the world. This duality is what Tolstoy was trying to illustrate, and he was making an argument for the Pierre side (the optimist).
I hope my previous work didn’t paint me too much as a Bolkonsky, because that’s not what I was trying to say. I was not saying I don’t ever want to get married or find a nice girlfriend, I was trying to explain that I wish I could find a partner who made me not care that I was giving up half my life for her. I genuinely believe that the Pierre take on life is probably the best way to go about things. And although not inaccurate, maybe “slave” is too harsh of a word for what I meant in the free will piece. I was trying to explain what Tolstoy did: being a human on this earth is all about how ready you are for change, and your plasticity and reaction to things as they happen. That means subservience of sorts to any crazy shit that happens in your life. It doesn’t mean being happy for your life to be awful, it just means being flexible to that reality happening, because it is very likely to. If there’s a thesis to War and Peace it is: the more open you are as a person, the better things will be for you. People that fight and resist are the ones life is the hardest for because they are going against the will of “god.” It doesn’t matter if you believe in god or not, because god believes in you, and I’m also using the term as a metaphor.
I was talking about this with a dear friend of mine recently (I don’t have many of those left anymore as I get older), and we both came to the conclusion that the big mistake people make is misunderstanding religion and god as it has been traditionally taught all these years. I don’t have all the answers here, I’m just some guy that likes eating tuna, but what I would say is religion works best as a metaphor. I don’t think it does a person any good to sit around reading bible stories and taking them at face value.
What I mean by religion being a metaphor is how we operate as humans on a day to day, boring, minute basis. God is probably not some old white guy just sitting on a cloud, chilling, actively listening to everyone’s requests and prayers. I think god is about one’s openness to the experience of life itself, the things we cannot control, and our response to it. To say you don’t believe in god is like saying you don’t believe in life, which is fucking stupid because you’re here. Atheism is kind of annoying to me because it takes things too literally, and once again, that’s not what this life shit is about. We don’t have to know everything; not everything is explainable. Mysteries exist for a reason.
Heaven or hell is just a metaphor for doing good or bad things in life. If you have a conscience and you do immoral things, you will have to live with those consequences. Religious people have tons more to say about this of course, but in basic metaphoric terms it’s basically just about being a good person. If you are one of the people born without a conscience and you do a bad or immoral thing, you may very well be able to get away with it despite what religious people say. That’s not something I’m happy about either, believe me, but that seems to be the world we live in. Bad people are rewarded and good people often go without experiencing the same joys, I guess. It sucks, but that’s heaven and hell. I will get to this in a second, but on the bright side: everyone dies, so we are all ultimately equalized in the end regardless of our good or bad deeds.
Prayer can be understood as a metaphor for prostrating yourself to what life has in store for you and the act of meditation. Of course they’re two completely different things, but if you look past the fact that religious people think they are literally praying to a higher power it’s actually very similar to meditating. Both of them calm a person down and help you to observe life clearly. If you take god out of the equation, praying amounts to the same thing as meditating because they’re both forms of supplication. They’re both essentially about humbling yourself to the universe, and admitting that you are just one insignificant being attached to a machine that has been around before you were born, and will be there after you’re gone. I think there’s something very noble in both prayer and meditation, and that’s why there are scientifically proven health benefits for both of them: when you are in full awareness about your place on this earth, and how unhelpful your ego really is, it helps to ground you.
God is a metaphor for finding peace in life. It’s quite similar to the prayer example listed above; it’s about having faith that everything will work out in the end. When you consider the fact that we all die, this belief kind of makes sense. Ultimately, for better or worse, things work out in the end for everyone in the same way. Believing in god is like saying you think there is some kind of order to the way things are happening. Religious people think god has a plan and everything happens for a reason. Whether or not you agree with them, you cannot deny that we all die at the end. Even if we disagree on what actually happens when we die: that is pretty much all the knowledge you need in life about god. Things always work out in the end, by virtue of the fact that we’re all cancelled. It could happen after 80 seasons when everyone’s sick of us, or it could happen in our prime when we still had so much to say with our little show, but it always happens. That should not upset you, it should guide your choices and help to serve your limited time a little better. There is a peace in the knowledge that we all die one day even if it sounds dark on the surface.
Anyway, that’s it for this one. I know this was all very messy and lofty, but I like it that way babyyyyyyyy😎😎😎. It’s important to remember: mystery is not your enemy. It should be embraced with open arms and incorporated into your life (which you aren’t the owner of haha).