I am retired.
No need to work again (Inshallah).
Single.
Not in a relationship.
Not planning to start dating.
Do not miss anyone’s company.
Do not see much need to read anymore.
Kinda know the whole enchilada of spirituality.
I understand all of my past — the good, the bad, and the ugly.
I have made peace with my past.
I am not holding on to my past.
I am not wanting the future to conform to I-Me-Myself.
I will let the future be as it anyway is already fixed.
The present is comfy.
The future holds no terrors.
I am ok with whatever happens to this body-mind.
Anyway, what is meant to happen will happen.
In this scenario, what prevents the enlightenment?
I have no skin in the game.
Or, do I?
No, I don’t.
Then, buddy, ask yourself that question again:
Why am I then not already enlightened?
What gives?
Waiting for enlightenment, am I?
Waiting for Godot, am I?
Claude explicates:
Beckett never states a thesis, and the play resists being reduced to one. But its centre of gravity is this: human existence is an act of waiting without any guarantee that what we wait for will arrive, and we go on waiting anyway.
The waiting itself is the subject. Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot, who never comes. Nothing is resolved, nothing is revealed, and the second act largely repeats the first. Beckett strips away plot, setting, and psychology to show the bare structure of a life organized around an anticipated redemption, whether that is God, meaning, rescue, or simply “tomorrow.” Whether Godot is God is almost beside the point; Beckett himself refused to say, and the play works for any object of deferred hope.
Meaning is neither found nor refuted. The play is often called absurdist, and Camus’s and Sartre’s world is nearby, but Beckett does something less tidy. There is no heroic revolt, no defiant creation of meaning. The two tramps do not conclude that waiting is futile and leave. “Nothing to be done” is the opening line, and “We’ll go. They do not move” is the closing stage direction. Speech and action are permanently out of step: they say they will leave, and they stay.
Habit, companionship, and play fill the void. Their banter, hats, boots, carrots, and routines keep the silence at bay. Pozzo and Lucky show the other face of the human condition: power and servitude, and a thinker (Lucky’s collapsing speech) whose learning dissolves into noise. Time behaves strangely: Pozzo goes blind, Lucky goes dumb, the tree sprouts a few leaves, yet no one can say what happened yesterday. Memory and identity are unreliable.
A tension worth holding. There are two readings that don’t cancel each other:
- Bleak: we wait because we cannot bear the alternative; hope is a coping mechanism, and the universe is silent.
- Quietly affirmative: the persistence, the mutual tenderness, the refusal to quit, are themselves the human answer. Beckett’s later line, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (from The Unnamable), captures this.
Since you come to this from Advaita, one parallel may interest you: the play dramatizes exactly the seeker’s predicament of looking outward in time for what is never fulfilled in time. Vedanta would say the waiting persists because the one who waits is mistaken about what is lacking. Beckett, notably, offers no such resolution; he lets the condition stand unresolved, which is part of what makes the play so stark.
