Why Live?

We are born. We die. We don't have control over the former. We can choose to control the latter. We can choose our death. We can kill ourselves.

Why Live? When life is random, without a concrete meaning. If pain is as pointless as pleasure, if there is no real happiness or sadness, if nothing that we do or not do will make any difference, then why not just die and be out of the misery of living. Who defines that taking one's own life is not correct? Aren't all the viewpoints on suicide just as invalid as all viewpoints on meaning of life?

I was confounded by these questions. I'll attempt to think though the answers.

Life, with its constant transience, can appear as a concept to be reveled in, or as a concept to be miserable in. The instinctive intellectual response is - choose to revel and not to be miserable. But this is not valid - for judging one better than other (revelry better than misery), without adequate reasoning, is just believing what is the popular notion. In fact going back to the concept of transient life, both revelry and misery are of same nature. 

So, if one feels that life is a misery, and should be ended, is it not the right thing to do? No - because, then we are responding to the feeling of misery and trying to end the misery by - so to say - chickening out! We are basically concluding that life is going to continue to be miserable so lets just escape from it. 

Such reasoning is similar to the reasons given in favor of giving in to worldly pleasure and pursuing it with complete steadfastness. There we respond to physical or mental pleasure and try to achieve it by mad pursuit. 

A drunkard, a sex maniac, a compulsive eater, the suicidal - all are in the same boat.

I had always encountered the pleasure side - where the argument is that since everything is pointless, why not revel in all pleasures that are there. Today for the first time I came to face with the misery side - where the argument is that since everything is pointless, why not just die. The answer to both arguments is same - that "pointlessness" of life is being used as a shield to actually either yearn for pleasure or repel the pain. It is actually not looking at pointlessness as it is. It is qualified - made to suit the current state of mind.

If indeed there is no difference between pain and pleasure, misery and revelry, then we should be in a state of indifference towards either ends of spectrum. If we are indifferent and then we say that life is pointless, then we will be equally predisposed towards living and dying. In which state, we will just be. Neither wanting to live to achieve some grand meaning, not wanting to die to shut out the world. We will just be. 

Perhaps that state of being - the state of nothingness. Unqualified, without any attributes - is brahman. For there we are ever present to the moment but not judgmental about how it should be. If we really move to saying that life is pointless without attaching judgement, feelings or meaning to it, then we are closer to truth than we are when we align ourselves with either side of the spectrum.