ON COSMIC PESSIMISM
August 7, 2024

A cosmic pessimist is excused only if he is supremely comical or ironic in his (perhaps only apparent) pessimism. With humor, the sardonic, the glibly morbid, gratitude shines through; the spell of pessimism is dispelled by exhausting its own resources. Otherwise the pessimist only casts curses, fostering sad affects and weaknesses, betraying little more than his disgust with man and with himself. Without that lightness, he himself is a curse: he represents an abdication before the challenge of suffering, and so promotes a species of man who would rather lament and complain and blame than change his attitudes and ways. Such a one would do better to silence himself and his tragic rant about tragedy until he lighten up a bit—better yet, fix whatever led him to turn resentment into a value.

Once a gnostic has accessed the knowledge that dispels the Ignorance or Deficiency, the basis for his negative view on creation is also wiped away, along with any justification for it. Cosmic pessimism is not a metaphysically clear view but the sign that there’s mud on the lens that must be cleared. This is the real meaning of the snake and the rope metaphor in Vedanta. What was formerly apprehended as the samsaric, omni-regrettable state of change, loss, death and decay, is understood now to have been an illusory apprehension, an unfounded fright; it is replaced by the understanding “Vasudeva sarvam iti” (meaning “All this is Brahman” and not only “Atman is Brahman”, which still risks a gnostic-type pessimism). Upon this understanding, all the higher laws and principles of a gleefully confident negentropy can embark even more heartily upon their mission: to transform the stellar, the chemical, the mental, the physical, concretely, intuitionally, forever…

There are no demons,
no negative forces,
no malevolent spirits,
no bad luck omens,
no drawbacks,
no signs of irreversible decline,
no causes for despair at the conditions of the world,
no grounds for continued discouragement and desolation,
no reason to fear about the future,
nothing at all deserving of such superstitions—

All these valuations are put there by man because he trembles before the unknown and somehow feels too threatened to adopt a conquering attitude, too constrained or suffocated to hone the skills that would take him beyond the comfort zone of his present limitations. These suspicions tear at him because he lacks a goal—because he falters in his allegiance to the highest. But once a man sees more clearly the power of life; once he is energized and regains the vision of his potentiality; once he repossesses the sources of courage in himself, no projection of weariness or doom or bad enclosure, no sense of ill-begottenness or imprisonment or cosmic flaw or failure can survive—they dissipate like thick mist in morning light.

But a man really must choose to put something else into the cosmic equation, must evaluate the panoply of order and chaos differently, more blissfully, if ever he is to reach that threshold beyond which pessimism never reaches him again.

For all about him—and how persistently!—in his environment, his religions, the comportment of his fellows—he is snarled at to beware the numberless bogeymen; to deny his own prospect of an indomitably liberated world-view. If he is not vigilant before this onslaught, these many aspersion-casters will lead him to believe that the spell of pessimism is total, that it will badger him to the last nook and cranny of his soul; that his own hope of light, his own promise to be a supreme happiness for others, is a lie.

Against this drab pantheon of world-haters, he must rally his strength and profess his faith in the saving counter-illusion until it becomes reality: that only to triumph over ignorance and limitation is an acceptable fate here; that to accept anything less for himself would be a betrayal of the gift—the gift of time, of life, of the world, and of his very self.