Martyrs of Reality

Ten thousand martyrs, by Jean Bourdichon

In 2016, Aaron Ng, 34, and Wei Li, 45, were driving through California with their wives and children in a minivan, on what was supposed to be the start of a vacation. At 3 a.m., their vehicle was involved in a minor collision on the highway with a BMW. The drivers of both vehicles stopped on the side of the road, which was on a hill, to assess the damage and exchange information. Aaron, Wei, and the BMW driver were outside their respective vehicles. While they were talking, a truck drove by and struck part of the rear of the minivan, which had stayed outside the road's shoulder. The vehicle plunged down hill. Desperate, Aaron and Wei ran to try to save their families, but due to the damage, the doors were jammed, and the occupants, injured but alive, were trapped inside.

Highway patrol arrived quickly and tried to help them, but the minivan caught fire. The flames soon engulfed the entire vehicle. With their wives and children screaming in pain, Aaron and Wei ignored the officers' pleas to get away and continued trying to open the doors, suffering severe burns to their hands and faces. However, there was nothing they could do. The officers had to restrain them by force to prevent further injury. The two women and four children inside the minivan, who suffered some fractures from the fall down the embankment, burned to death over agonizing minutes inside a twisted metal cage. It was like a scene from one of those grotesque and overly appealing horror movies, but in real life, with real people and real pain.

This case impressed me so much that I mentioned it in the book Procession of Pain (written in Portuguese), which I published in 2023. Reality is truly brutal; there's nowhere to run. And this kind of thing happens all the time. In 2020, in Mumbai, a 5-year-old boy named Mohammed Sheikh was exiting an elevator with his sisters. It was one of those old type elevators, with a pantographic door in the box itself, as well as a door that accesses the elevator shaft. When he turned to close the pantographic door, his sisters closed the shaft access door, trapping him in the narrow space between the two doors. It was supposed to be a prank. At that moment, however, a neighbor called the elevator from a higher floor, causing the boy to be dragged along the wall of the elevator shaft. The drag quickly crushed his body, and his head exploded in the small gap between the elevator floor and the shaft wall. His mutilated body was found all the way down the shaft.

You might be enjoying a day of rest and suffer a stroke or heart attack, and simply pass out. You might get a bullet meant for someone else, or perhaps even yourself. You might be skinned alive for your beliefs by a government or by groups of murderous fanatics. Or perhaps one day, you might wake up unable to put on your shoes due to double vision, and three weeks later, a biopsy reveals that the mass in your brain was a glioblastoma multiforme, an ultra-aggressive tumor, almost always idiopathic. That's what happened to my cousin, Juliana. The average survival rate without surgery and intense radiotherapy and chemotherapy is three months. The average survival rate for those who undergo surgery and treatment is a year and a half. My cousin died seven months after the first symptoms, having undergone surgery and treatment.

All these things may not happen to you, but they may happen to the people closest to you who you hope to see soon. So I say: hug each other and try to be good to each other.

We never know when our mothers will trip on the sidewalk at a bus stop just as the bus is arriving and have their entire faces crushed by several tons of public transportation. This type of occurrence is relatively common in Rio de Janeiro and other metropolises around the world. Mothers, grandparents, spouses, and children, expected soon for cake or dinner, are crushed and torn apart by life. There are those who end on their own accord, too, unable to bear their own lives any longer. Others are ended by other humans in the name of material gain, or in the name of something intangible, or out of pure human malice. And it's not enough to die; we have to suffer greatly, martyrs of reality, with some suffering more than others. Animal life, gifted by nature with nociceptors, has won the jackpot of pain. There is a scale of pain among them, of course, with more basal animals suffering less than animals with more complex nervous systems.

But they all suffer and die.

In fact, all life suffers and dies; some of it, plants, fungi, and single-celled beings, are simply fortunate enough not to have nervous systems that translate discomfort and negative stimuli as pain. But discomfort and death reign supreme in life. Death is so fundamental to life that it's pathetic to see technology enthusiasts believing that one day we'll be able to live forever through new scientific discoveries. Life can be extended, yes, but not forever. It won't happen. Never. Stars die. Ours will die, too, taking with it any possibility of life here. There's no point in moving elsewhere in the universe, since the universe itself will die. It will be in the distant future, but it will die. Commenting on a post of mine on YouTube, someone brought up a fantastic aphorism by the Lebanese writer Khalil Gibran that fits perfectly here.

The aphorism is in the book Sand and Foam:

I said to Life, “I would hear Death speak.”
And Life raised her voice a little higher and said, “You hear him now.”

The fate of all other beings with nervous systems, that is, all other animals, is to live in the eternal present, in a state of instinct or limited consciousness. We, however, have more complex nervous systems that enable us to know the past, present, and future, even if we cannot predict every detail of what will happen in the future. We are all equipped with minds capable of achieving a high degree of lucidity. The luck of the species is that, although our consciousness has the capacity to achieve a high degree of lucidity, most do not achieve it. And even those of us who do achieve it don't remain there forever, thankfully. A high dredree of lucidity is not a place one can inhabit for long without giving up one's own life. We can't stand it. This makes me think about why I like to study and talk about these things, why I preach lucidity and despair, as I wrote in my last essay. It's because all of this has had a positive effect on my life. It's paradoxical, but that's what happened.

I spent 30 years hammering into my head the common notion that life is good and any problems I had with it weren't life's fault, but my fault, or the fault of others, or the fault of the system, or anything else that could be changed, at least in principle. Yes, a huge portion of our problems come from ourselves, from others, and from the systems we're part of. This portion can, in principle, be changed, certainly. Human history shows this clearly. If it's my fault, I can change myself. If it's the fault of others or the system, I can react. But these are aspects of life, not life itself. I'm talking about life itself. What about life? What about being conceived and born without your ever being able to consent, only to experience a world where what moves all creatures is discomfort, pain, and lacking, something that happens independently of systems, others, or ourselves?

In current internet discourse, there's a lot of talk about “exiting the Matrix.” People talk about pills of different colors. I've never used these terms in any of my writing or speaking, and I'll explain why. Although it's been reinterpreted in various ways by fans and even its creators, the 1999 film The Matrix, by the creators' own admission at the time, was heavily influenced by the Gnostic myths of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, which in turn were heavily influenced by Platonism and Neoplatonism. Within humans, souls are trapped in the material world, a make-believe world where one suffers and is not truly free. What are the agents in the film if not representations of the archons, servants of the demiurge who keeps humans trapped in the various Gnostic mythologies?

Well then. The most basic philosophical idea behind all this is the unveiling of a truth not generally accepted by most people. Hence the abuse of the film's terminology to describe various situations of unveiling or supposed unveiling. But there really is no Matrix to escape from. While I like the Gnostics, and also the Dharmics who treat the world of becoming as samsara, I think there is only the world becoming. Even if it is a manifestation of some fundamental reality, like the Will, this fundamental reality is immanent to the world, and we are also manifestations of that same thing. We are part of the prison that surrounds us. The prisoner and the prison are made of the same thing. It is poetic to consider that our most intimate essence was imprisoned in the world of matter by an evil god and that we can free ourselves through knowledge, but it is just that, poetic, nothing more. The Neo of the real world is not trapped in a Matrix; he is part of it, for it is all there is. We can change, fight, and struggle as much as we want within it, but we can never go anywhere else, except perhaps to the nothingness that awaits us after death.

If the idea of there being no escape seems horrifying to you, that's because it is. It's the horrifying truth that we are the product of chance, of blind natural selection, just like the cockroaches that swarm in the sewer in front of our houses. Like us, they have biologically adapted over the ages to live there. We exist, suffer, and die without rhyme or reason; even the wives and children of Aaron Ng and Wei Li, who died burned to death and in considerable pain, may they rest in peace. In this leaky canoe in which we were placed, we were deceived. We were not deceived by some evil demiurge, but by natural chance itself, which produced a mind that creates and projects deep and elaborate meanings into things, even those that have zero meaning. We seek culprits for our tragedies, and often they exist, but no matter how much we seek justice against them, they too are victims, and in the end, the one responsible for everything, the cosmos, cannot be arrested.

So we keep our poems, our myths, because they comfort us. They comfort me, for example, even though I know they're not real, at least not in the same sense that this keyboard that I'm typing with is real, or in the same sense that the poor boy crushed by the elevator and the elevator itself were real, or in the same sense that my death will one day be real. That's what we have left.

Flirting with lucidity has helped me understand that I'm not a defective piece in a wonderful world, but a normal piece within a world that operates under insidious laws, a world that doesn't care about the comfort and happiness of the beings unlucky enough to inhabit it. I like writing and talking about this because I think it can help others, too. But lucidity isn't a state I recommend staying in all the time. Be careful, use it cautiously, or you'll go mad. Lucidity is like any medicine: in the right doses, it cures; in excessive doses, it becomes poison.

by Fernando Olszewski