Life’s Unanswerables
In the stories that I’ve been told of the Buddhist concept of the afterlife, there are six realms into which one might be reincarnated. One of these is the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. The inhabitants of this realm are creatures with emaciated limbs, tiny mouths, elongated necks, and huge bellies. They’re starving, and either no amount of food and water can nourish them, or every time they find or receive food or water, it’s spoiled. The apples in the orchard are rotten by the time they reach the trees. Or the apples are ripe, but their mouths are too small to take a bite, their necks too narrow to swallow what little they manage to scrape away with their teeth.
We don’t have to die and be reborn to this realm to experience ourselves as hungry ghosts. It’s a common enough human state, and we each have our triggers. As a child, I believed in an angry and punishing Christian God. When I was seven or eight, I heard a sermon about fornication that included a graphic description of fornicators standing outside the gates of heaven and watching as their loved ones entered. I was horrified, and I spent the next couple of decades unpacking the idea that I was condemned to hell because of a few things that had happened with the community creep.
This fear seems absurd now. Yet still today the questions that turn me into a hungry ghost are shadows of that early hellfear: How much of the world have I hurt unknowingly? Do our actions matter in any cosmic sense? Is reincarnation real? Is life nothing but a simulation?
If I spend too much time trying to answer questions like this, I open myself to a yawning nihilism, one I know well because I nurtured it through my teens and twenties. Nihilism is one answer to feeling condemned to hell, and nihilism came easy in the early 90s.
I’m not naturally a nihilist. I know that our actions matter. The simplest proof of this is the impact of family stories—our first sense of who we are and where we come from arises from the stories that are told (or not told) about our kin.
Moreover, I choose not to be a nihilist. Even if it was proven tomorrow that life is, beyond a doubt, a computer simulation, I would still have the feelings of warmth and connection that I’ve fostered with my beloveds, my cats, the trees in my backyard. Why give that up just because I’m pixels?
So I keep on my laptop a list titled “Shit I Cannot Know.” The questions I shared above, the ones that can turn me into a nihilistic hungry ghost, are from that list. This doesn’t mean that I never think about these questions. I do. They obsess me. They are the themes that pop up again and again in my writing. But I know to be careful with the questions on this list. I can’t go after them with my intellect and expect to arrive anywhere I want to be. Instead, they’re grist for my subconscious. The single ceremony for hungry ghosts in which I’ve participated involved offering the ghosts great compassion and generosity and forgiveness with the hope that spiritual nourishment might meet their hunger. The ceremony acknowledged that there are certain hungers no food can quell.
As you’ve probably guessed, the writing exercise for this month is to create your own Shit I Cannot Know list. What unanswerable questions haunt you at 3 am? What questions turn you away from the goodness of your own life? What questions make it particularly difficult for you to live this human life? What happens if you take these questions out of your whirling human brain and let them live instead on a page or a screen, nicely fenced in by margins?
Next month, I’ll share a couple of writing exercises that I use with my Shit I Cannot Know list.
This month’s generative writing idea is linked to June’s Keeping Time post. You can read that here if you’re interested.
