Some people are practically disgusted by the fact that I left everything and everyone and just ran after some “abstract” ideal. They think I’m selfish.
But consider this: how much can a prisoner on death row appreciate the last enjoyments before being executed? How much can he enjoy the things that were his life and soul when he knows what’s waiting for him? What satisfaction do his favorite brand of cigarettes hold for him, or wine and cheese, music, clothes, porn, movies or anything imaginable?
If you wake up to the fact that all of us are indeed living on death row, just filling the gap between the present and death, you’ll not be able to really live in this world happily. I remember when that realization hit me the first time. I was maybe 8 years old and we were on our annual skiing vacation in Lapland. I was lying in my bed and I suddenly realized that death will be just as real a moment as is the here and now, there’s only a chunk of time in between that will be gone in no time. I was staring at the dark ceiling and the bed started feeling like a coffin. I’ve never felt such pure, unadulterated horror in my whole life. I got up, gasping for breath and when to another room where my parents were spending the evening with other families, playing boardgames, drinking a little wine, laughing and enjoying themselves, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I crawled back to my coffin and closed my wet eyes.
From a spiritual perspective these kind of experiences are a great thing because they give you an impetus to strive to get closer to what you really are.
Our true identity is eternal and we know it intuitively, but our material identity is under constant attack because change is inevitable in this world. We can’t separate the experience of existence from our material identity, and that makes us scared, because we think we might be destroyed at any time. The struggle for existence is just a fallacy. The only existence we have to struggle for is a false one.
And this is of course only the negative side of the impetus to dedicate one’s life to spirituality. I’m not a morbid or an unhappy person at all, and the positive impetus is really what real spiritual practice should be constituted of.
Also, it’s an easy argument for the skeptics to say that religion is based on fear of death, that it’s a psychological necessity for people who can’t deal with the facts of life. That may be the case if someone’s spirituality is based only on negative impetus, but there are a variety of motivating factors to get involved in this, and the fact that material life is quite unfulfiling in the long run is only a portion of the whole motivation, that may be helpful especially in the beginning when a person doesn’t have so much attraction or taste for the real substance of spiritual life.
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