In the first chapter, I talked about Sisyphus, who was doomed to a pointless existence of pushing a boulder up a mountain. His was the human experience. Most of us keep pushing ahead, searching for happiness in the next activity, the next thing we buy, in the next relationship or the next pleasure, without finding that happiness. The unsuccessful search for happiness will continue, perhaps throughout time, until we stop, look around, and find that happiness was waiting for us the entire time.
In Chapter 1, I suggested that despite his hard life, Sisyphus could be happy. I hope that by now you are starting to believe that this could be true.
Camus and Absurdity
In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus,[73] Albert Camus tries to explain how we can live in what he describes as an “absurd” world, and still be happy. Camus wrote this while a member of the French Resistance. It was published in 1942.
While he was writing this essay, the world saw death and horror on an unimaginable scale, and many asked, “What is the point of all of this? How can we allow millions to suffer and die like this?” During this time, many thought that humans had gone mad.
In writing Sisyphus, Camus asks how we, as rational beings, can continue living in an irrational world. His answer is that we must choose to be happy despite the fact that a reasonable person, in the same situation, would be miserable.
Camus’ essay describes a particular worldview, that of the “absurd person.”[74] The absurd person knows two things in life: that humanity needs to find order and reason in the universe, in terms that humans can understand — and that it is impossible to do so. Camus says that:
The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.[75]
When Camus uses the word absurd, I do not believe he uses it in a judgmental sense. In choosing this word, he is saying that the normal approach to the pursuit of meaning and happiness does not work. The pursuit of ultimate meaning in the world, in terms that humans can understand, does not work. Seeking for happiness by doing things and having things, does not work either. Our normal way of living is absurd, because it does not accomplish what we all desperately want. Because the universe does not work in the way that we expect it to work, the universe is absurd as well.
An apparently absurd universe confronts us. In the face of this absurdity, we have three options: suicide, denial of the absurdity by imagining order and reason, or embracing our fate and living life to the fullest. Camus opts to live life to the fullest. He makes his choice knowing that we have no idea whether anything we do in life has any ultimate meaning.
Humans Want Meaning in Life
The presence of meaning and purpose in life is crucial for all people. We know from Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning,[76] that an inmate’s belief that his life had meaning could make the difference between life and death in the Nazi death camps. An inmate who still had a reason for living could find the strength to go on, despite the daily horrors of camp life.
People desperately want to know what life is about, and why we are here.[77] According to Camus, they want to know so badly that a person will accept even a bad reason, a bad explanation of life, rather than no reason. A world without reason and a life without reason are simply incomprehensible.[78]
People want unity, and a sense that things exist for a purpose. People also want to know the universe in terms they can understand, that they can put in a book and that they can teach to their children. Any other kind of knowledge does not satisfy.[79]
Camus says that this world is without any meaning that we can comprehend. A seemingly meaningless world confronted by humans who want meaning creates the absurd. In other words, the absurd arises from the clash between the human desire for meaning, reason, order, and clarity, and a world that appears to us to be unreasonable and irrational. We must all somehow confront this absurdity.[80]
Confronting the Absurd
The despair of life without meaning can drive a person to suicide. There may be obvious suicides, such as by jumping off a bridge. Sometimes, however, if there is no purpose for living, the body just shuts down and dies.
Frankl writes about death of the spirit in the Nazi camps. When a person had no reason to keep on living, and could no longer see the point in enduring the pain and horror, the spirit died. The death of the spirit eventually led to death of the body.
Viktor Frankl talks about how one knew an inmate had given up when he smoked his last cigarette. Cigarettes were precious in the camps. If you had them, you kept them.
The only exceptions to this were those who had lost the will to live and wanted to "enjoy" their last days. Thus, when we saw a comrade smoking his own cigarettes, we knew he had given up faith in his strength to carry on, and, once lost, the will to live seldom returned.[81]
A second way to confront the absurdity is, as Camus puts it, to cancel part of the equation. If the irrationality of the world creates the absurdity, the answer is to rationalize the irrational. When the world does not provide meaningful answers, you can fill in the missing information with inspired answers, and then encourage people to believe them. Inspired answers form the basis of religion.
For example, since the world does not provide answers, you can just assume the existence of a God that humans can understand. [82] By doing so, you can explain what is impossible for us to know. Even if you cannot explain it, you can provide a reason to trust that all is well, despite the irrationality of much of what happens.
Organized religions provide answers, speaking of unity and meaning where none exist in the world. Camus disdains such answers because he cannot know them with certainty. In addition, answers that were beyond his experience did not mean anything to him.[83]
His choice was a life lived for itself, where a person acknowledges the absurdity of the world without flinching, and then lives life to the fullest. His message seems to be that we too should face this absurdity head-on.
Embracing the absurdity, according to Camus, is the choice of the absurd person. Many of us despair, and many of us turn to religion for comfort, but the absurd person faces the seeming irrationality head-on, lives life to the fullest, and perhaps finds happiness along the way.
The Absurd but Happy Life of Sisyphus
The hero of the Camus essay, perhaps the prototypically absurd person, is Sisyphus. You’ll recall that Sisyphus angered the gods, and they set out to punish him. They condemned him to push a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again. Sisyphus is doomed to eternal futility. Tragically, Sisyphus knows his fate. He knows that the rock will always roll back down the hill, yet he carries on. His appears to be a pointless, hard, and miserable life. However, Camus says:
The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Rational people, looking at the situation in which Sisyphus found himself, would say, “He should be miserable. He should despair to be condemned to a hard and meaningless existence.”
Despite Sisyphus’s tragic existence, Camus imagines he is happy, though he does not fully explain why. So, let us try to understand how Sisyphus could be happy.
An Irrational Ability to Be Happy
Sisyphus remaining happy in spite of a terrible situation is the essence of absurdity. It is an unreasonable way to be. However, in an irrational world, doing the unreasonable thing is a way to resolve the absurdity. Embracing the absurdity of an objectively miserable situation is a way to be happy.
Camus seems to have believed in an irrational power to be happy. Reason demands that Sisyphus must be miserable. The fact that Camus imagined that Sisyphus was happy means that he believed in a power to be happy that does not obey the laws of reason. He seems to be arguing for an ability to be happy that does not rely on good things happening to us, but instead on man’s innate ability to be happy regardless of the circumstances.
I think that Camus is telling us that the absurd person is fully aware of the irrationality of existence, embraces it, and exploits that irrationality to find happiness where there should be none.
As stressed in previous chapters, your mind limits your ability to be happy. Making its home in the material world, your mind demands the rationality and reason that set up the dilemma of the absurd. Your mind enables you to get through your day-to-day existence in this world, but at what cost? It resists the irrational and feels threatened by the unreasonable. It seeks to hold your entire attention and trap you in the comforting illusion of a rational universe, when the real universe is irrational. It limits you to what the rational allows, and denies you the power of the irrational.
What is “rational” in our world is the pursuit of happiness through doing things and having things. It is not reasonable to think that you can have lasting happiness without doing anything to get it. In truth, you have the “irrational” ability to be happy even if your world is falling apart.
The absurd person embraces the irrational and finds there the power to live a full and happy life. He or she finds happiness where reason tells us there should be none. The absurd person finds power to be happy in choosing to take the irrational step toward happiness.
Living life as Camus would have it is living on the edge, without a net. You live this life without the comforting, but illusory, certainty of reason. He would have you admit what you know, and what you do not know.
One of the things you do not know may be the reason you are alive. He asks you to disabuse yourself of all comforting illusions, such as the existence of a “plan” that would explain the apparent chaos of living. He says that, even if there is a plan, you do not know what it is, and you cannot know what it is. So live life to the fullest with what you do know, and permit yourself to not know most of what makes the universe “tick.”
Although you may feel an urgent need to know the final meaning and value of what you do, you can still live well and happily, even if you cannot discern that meaning. You should not try to fill in all of the blanks of existence with comforting illusions.
Learn to Be “Irrationally” Happy
I believe that Camus would have you be absurd and irrational. I believe that he would have you be happy, despite everything. Camus does not tell us how to embrace the absurd and find happiness. However, the practices I suggest in this book have been providing the ways and the means for thousands of years. Using these practices, we can experience something that is beyond the limits of the human mind, and beyond the rational. What we experience does not explain the chaos of the universe or the persistent cruelty of humanity. However, what we experience has the power to give us the happiness we seek.
The practices I describe in this book do not ask you to comfort yourself with illusions. They invite you to learn to see beyond the rational, and beyond the mind. They “show you a way out” of your mind, beyond words and images, and in so doing find your power to be happy. This way of approaching life is the way of the absurd person.
Camus would have you limit yourself to what you know, and live within that knowledge. The practices in this book help you to know your experience. You do not have to believe anything. If you practice shutting off the words and stilling the mind, you sense something wonderful. You become happy, even joyous. This experience does not require believing any dogma, knowing any magic words, or having faith in anything. It is pure experience.
As you come to know the joy available in the practices described in this book, the anxiety of the absurd goes away. What you can find is the sense that you have everything you want and need. Feelings of want and need never arise, because all you experience is a sense of completeness. This sense of completeness comes, in large part, from releasing the hold that the limited rational mind has on you.
The human mind mirrors the material world, and the world reflects what is in the mind. The world is seen as a realm of birth, death, and scarcity. Once you let go of the limits your mind imposes on you, anxiety about these things disappears. The need to know everything about the universe and everything that is going to happen to you creates feelings of scarcity, fear of death, hunger, and lonely disconnection. Once you are beyond the mind, these feelings disappear, and not knowing is no longer a source of concern.
The solution to absurdity, therefore, is to move your awareness and attention outside the framework of the limited human mind so that the despair of absurdity is no longer present. Seek the experience of what will always be beyond human understanding. In that experience, you will find the peace and certainty that you want.
Without a doubt, the core of your being is not rational, and you are beyond human understanding. Seek the experience of the place where human thought cannot go, and where it is impotent. That experience is your true home and your destination. That is where you will find your power to be happy.