He was a lonely man. He had no family, no friends, no pet companion.
His only acquaintance (if you could call him that) was the store clerk he saw once every two or three weeks to buy some of the bare necessities he needed. He didn’t need much and most of what he needed he produced himself.
No one knew the man and no one dared to know him. No one knew where he came from and why. He had no name anyone could refer to and everyone who referred to him referred to him as the man in the woods.
He rarely left the woods. Only to get his few things at the store.
He lived in a small wooden shack he built himself many years ago. How many years ago is unknown.
His shack stood on a hill (it’s still there today) beyond the village where he bought his necessities from the store clerk.
The walk from his house to the village took him two hours. Half of the way was through forest wilderness.
His house stood as lonely as him, surrounded by nothing but nature. There were no breathtaking views. All one could see from the house was the surrounding forest and the little vegetable garden that produced tomatoes, paprika, zucchini, and potatoes in a quantity that ensured the man in the woods wouldn’t die from starvation.
There was no running water or electricity. The water he needed he fetched from a river close to his abode. For his bathroom needs, he dug a hole behind his shack.
During warm seasons the forest ensured he was never too hot. During cold seasons he almost froze to death.
Every morning he spent a little time tending his vegetable garden. For the rest of the day, he would sit in front of his house and walk the woods.
He didn’t read or write. He had no hobbies.
His life was an anomaly. It was as close as a human could get to death while still alive. It was beyond living with the bare necessities.
He proved that even bare necessities were dispensable. He proved that human nature was dispensable.
It was hard not to see the pointlessness of this man’s life. In fact, his life was utterly pointless — a waste of resources. While the other animals in the forest would work hard for their survival, the man wouldn’t struggle one bit.
He would wander the forest with perfect aimlessness.
His life was an affront, an insult to the other creatures. Although he would take the minimum measures to ensure his survival, like planting and harvesting vegetables and fetching water from the river, he never did more than that. Sometimes he did less.
Other humans in his situation would have found survival a harsh, almost unbearable ordeal. To him, it was nothing worth pondering.
His life was bleak and uneventful. One might say it was predictable but there was nothing to predict as there was no way to distinguish the events in his life. Calling his life a life was only a matter of speech.
In reality, his life was nonexistent.
And that was true for his outer as well as his inner life and in that they were the same.
One could say he was a hermit. But the true extent of his hermetism would have shocked anyone. It’s simple to describe his experience from a third-person perspective and be baffled by it. But his first-person experience is unimaginable for anyone who has lived a regular human life.
His thoughts were only concerned with the immediacy of his experience and because the immediacy of his experience never needed much thinking, thoughts were a sparse occurrence.
The past and the future were inconceivable to the man. It wasn’t that he didn’t like thinking about them. Thoughts about them would simply not arise, ever.
He had exactly zero imagination. The lack of automatic images in his mind wasn’t the result of focusing on the present moment as one might assume. There was nothing he had to do for it. It was simply impossible.
His emotional range was limited and spanned from mild discomfort to contentment. In between, there was not much. Some people who heard this story believed it was due to the monotonous life he lived. But that was not true.
There was an event in the man’s life many years prior where without warning his entire affective system was wiped out, and with that his self-awareness. While that meant a loss of all the emotional highs, it also meant the death of suffering.
Suddenly, he was no longer human.
All the inner experiences that connect humans, that make us relate to each other, were no longer there. He was no longer able to associate with his fellow humans. The only thing left for him at that time were the memories of the human he once felt he was. And even those evaporated steadily like water on a hot stove.
For a while, he tried to get along with his life as usual. He tried to keep up the mask the world around him was used to seeing. But with every passing day, this became more and more difficult. The energy that used to animate his character was no longer there. What exactly enabled his character to go on for as long as he went on he didn’t know.
One day, without any active intent or desire of his own, the man quite simply stopped. He stopped playing the role he played his whole life. He left everything behind and disappeared.
He told no one. He vanished like a desert fata morgana. No one in his old life knew where he went or what happened to him. I won’t bore you with the details but after some years of wandering, he found his vegetative dwelling, built his shack, and remained there.
You might feel bad for the man in the woods. You might think that he was lonely and sad. But exactly here is what was so horribly fascinating about him: he wasn’t. Calling him lonely and sad is anthropomorphizing.
You could say he was alone, though not in the human sense. He wasn’t alone as in a-being-all-by-himself. He was alone in the absolute sense. There was no one there. Not even him. No being anywhere.
In his forest years, he was as far from a regular human experience as you and I are from a regular octopus experience.
One day he almost got mauled by a bear. He didn’t even bat a fucking eye.
It is hard to comprehend why anyone would live a life like that. But here was another curious thing about this abnormal being: life and death didn’t exist for him. The concepts ceased to point toward anything. Being alive or dead didn’t matter to him. It was all the same.
He didn’t commit suicide because interfering in the natural unfolding of his non-existence was not feasible for him. It simply didn’t occur to him to end his life. Even the words “ending my life” wouldn’t have signified anything to him.
There was no sense of anything having begun or anything being able to end. Neither was there anything that told him, “This is my life.” There was not even the slightest trace of a sense of possession or ownership left in him. The idea that anything belonged to him was no longer possible because there was no “I,” “me,” or “mine,” anymore.
Underneath his skin was an infinite emptiness that disallowed any concept to take root. His was a life of complete freedom from self.
Besides the basic biology, there was no point in labeling him a man in contrast to a woman. Nothing in his experience made him feel more connected to the concept of man than to the concept of woman. He was neither. He was perfectly unconditioned.
He could have never lived this life among humans. It would have been sheer insanity. He most likely would have landed in an institution and been drugged into oblivion.
If you had met him in that forest, you would have seen an emaciated figure sitting and staring at a tree for hours. You would have witnessed the shadow of a human endlessly traversing the same forest. You would have glimpsed the purest expression of emptiness a living being could achieve while inhabiting a body.
As I mentioned, besides a little gardening, he would sit and walk. Saying he did nothing would be saying too much. There was no doing involved. Every day he … nothing. Every day … nothing. … nothing.
After a few decades of this life, the man disappeared once more. What happened to him, no one knows.
Luka
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Sounds like bloody bliss to me!