The Meaning of Life

Every once in a while I type into google —what is the meaning of life? Just in case google might surprise me. I've YouTubed it. I've read the Bible from cover to cover, parts of the Quran, and the analects of Confucius. I've studied philosophy and science hoping to garner some inkling of meaning for human existence. I've left a prayer to every god that might hear me. Human civilization as a whole is impressive. As a child, looking at all that we've accomplished, I half expected to find the meaning of life in an encyclopedia, but no such luck.

⸺Human civilization has been around for thousands of years.⸺

—There are billions of people populating the globe.—

                                                         
           








It's surprising that out of all the people on the earth, and through all the generations that have passed, no one really knows what life is all about. It starts so simple when you're a child. You think...   my parents must know what's going on...  or my teacher...       Someone somewhere must know why we exist. You search your mental database for who might have the answers. As a child you're impressed by the regal appearance of court judges, with their white wigs and long robes. They have power and authority over the lives of ordinary citizens. So, you think they must know something deep and profound.

Searching on, your imagination takes you to thoughts of an old man with a long beard, sitting on a remote mountain top, occupying the steps of a Buddhist monastery. Someone of that description must have an old wooden box containing ancient scrolls with the secret to life scribbled right in. When you grow up you realize that they're all just as confused as everyone else and that they don't know anymore than you do about the nature of reality. 

When you search for answers don't forget to search your own mind. Search the corridors of reason and logic. Open the door to possibilities. The possible reasons to why we exist in this mortal state are infinite. We don't however, have an infinite amount of time to entertain that number of possibilities. In order then to devise a practical model for extracting a solution to our problem we must reduce our inquiry to a value of two variable outcomes. 

⸻Binary Code⸻

In a computer information is translated this way through a series of zeros and ones. It only takes two digits. One being the current and zero the absence of a current. One signifying in the affirmative and the other, negative. Leaving no room for miscommunication in a simple system of yes or no, one or zero. 

Let's frame our question first. What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose for human life?  What is the reason for being on this earth...? Now, we're obliged to set the parameters for the possible answers. 

To approach this mathematically we have to reduce all that we know and all that we don't know as well into a set of quantifiable values . That way we have fixed positions for a point of reference. With a set position we can calculate a "vector" between the two points. Vector is a measure of velocity and direction. The direction of life is what interests us presently. Our first value is an outline of the human condition, which is easy to conceptualize since we exist within this paradigm.

The fundamental factors to note are:

• We exist in a finite capsule (body), defining limits on mobility and locality.
• We stay in this form for a finite period of time, from birth until death.
• We have a limited amount of knowledge about our condition.  

1. No memory prior to birth.
2. No information about what experiences, if any, we may have after death. 
3. No reason for why we exist here and now.

In a binary system there's only two digits, each one opposite to the other. The first value is the human condition, characterized mainly by its limited and finite quality. Our second value then being opposite to the first could only be a condition of infinite variegation characterized by its unfixed, unknown, and indeterminate quality. This is an existence where you can be anything and everything, can do anything and are not limited by the laws of physics. 

                                                                                                  

⸻The First Value⸻

⸻Second Value⸻

An infinite and eternal existence and our finite human life are two opposite ends of the spectrum. How can human life not be said to be the opposite of infinite time and possibilities? When weighed next to the immensity of eternity, human life is so short that it can barely be said to have ever happened at all.

We can grasp the concept of our second value because it's a fitting description for our imagination and our dreams. We can afford, I think, to entertain a spiritual and mystical relationship between the need to sleep and the act of dreaming. Not just to understand why we dream and sleep but to better comprehend ourselves and the condition we call human.

—When painting the "picture of your life," don't be afraid to use
colors that are dramatic, bold, and vibrant.⸺

In the dream world lies the infinite potential of the universe, like a palette for us to extract from. Waking life is the canvas whereby we can materialize our creative soul. Done within the confines of physical laws, so that we have a point of reference, to then be able to experience the birth and life of our creative expression. Similar to how language is a point of reference whereby we communicate. Our dreams fade from memory as the day progresses, so that we can fully experience a vivid array of flowers, the sharp throbbing pain of an injury, or the sweet nectarous dew of a kiss. Thus, we may not be distracted by the multiplicity and immensity of the infinite universe.

The ethereal plane (spirit world) is occluded as a matter of functionality, and practicality. We often think of focus as the intentional limitation of being present in one experience at a time. Focus often has unintended, yet practical consequences. This conceptually parallels the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. Simplified, the more precisely the position of a particle is known the less precisely the momentum can be measured, and conversely the more the momentum of a particle is known, with precision, the less the position of the same particle is known. Neil Degrasse Tyson talked about this once on a podcast. He explained, in order to see something there must be light. If it's dark, then you can't see. The act of trying to examine a particle causes its position to be disrupted by the light you're attempting to view it with.

—Pixelation of our operating construct.—

Particles are microscopic. Things on a scale that small are effected by other small things, such as photons. In identical fashion, in the face of the overwhelming polymorphic quality of the world of dreams in contrast to the monomorphic appearance of waking life, focus blurs, and we risk missing the beautiful and great singularity of any moment. In the midst of all the marvelous noise and beautiful chaos, it would be difficult to tune in, to the frequency of the world around us. It would be like trying to hear one person speaking in a large crowd of people all talking at the same time. I wouldn't want to miss my son's first steps for the memory of any celestial event. This is the mystery of human life realized. These special moments with our families, is meant to be, our own microcosmic view of heaven. 

People become distracted by thoughts of a job interview, final exams, a high school crush, and just lackadaisical daydreaming. With normal distractions people have car accidents, they miss the catch, the shot, or the tackle that could have secured them victory. The mind clouded and not one hundred percent focused on the task before us, we fall...  just short of glory. This is a common problem that everyone goes through at some point. Some important event is missed or an important goal is unattained because of the distractions of life that cause us to lose focus.

We cannot focus our full attention and energy into a particular task while being distracted by other events or information. We cannot live life and at the same time be able to see all the secrets of the universe. Let's look at men like Albert Einstein for an example of this. Einstein spent so much time thinking, that he was distracted from performing even the elementary task of grooming. He was well known for his infamous hair style.

This is not to say that we shouldn't think or daydream, but at some point we have to come back from that thought or daydream, to integrate it into our lives. Because the very act of focusing on one thing leaves everything else out of focus. Notice that in the process of focusing there is a point of convergence where the degree of clarity is equal and opposite to the field of obscurity. Look through a pair of binoculars or a scope and you can see that the more a sniper focuses in on his target and the farther away he can see the less area peripheral to his target is visible.

The human paradigm is like the area of vision within a sniper's scope, creating a spectrum of experience within the field of vision, leaving all else outside the field obscured. That way the target can come into focus. When human life comes into focus you are free to experience it. When we dream the scope is removed and we can see all the universe. We can be anywhere or everywhere, we can know anything or we can know everything. Though it's upon such an experience that we lose focus to any one arena of experience, and subsequently our point of reference for common experience, and interaction with other sentient beings.

How can we interact with other beings if we are the size of an atom and they are the size of a planet? How can we relate if we travel at the speed of light and they travel at the speed of sound, or if we vibrate at a high frequency and they vibrate at a low frequency? How will we communicate if we speak in vibrating tones and they speak in flashes of light? You could say, that earth is the commonality needed to integrate the multifarious aspects of the ether into a controlled environment for the purpose of generating valid interface.

It's understandable that all humans crave to know that which they don't know, especially when it is dangled just within intellectual grasp. This is called curiosity. When the explorers of the ancient world indulged desire for exploration and adventure, they first had to leave their homeland before they could embark on that journey into the great unknown. Like an explorer, in the face of visions, memories, and experiences of worlds beyond, magical colors, eclectic sensations, and infinite frequencies of the universe, our present world would fade into the horizon, as we sailed forth.

It seems evident in consideration of the uncertainty principle that our inability to see through the veil of human consciousness is a practical limitation. We could consider gravity a limitation or a helpful condition that keeps us from floating off into space. We could view the confines of time and space as a prison or as a useful system of physical laws that allow us to experience human life. People often become upset by their inability to have the answers to all life's questions, but ironically, and paradoxically we can see that a complete knowledge of existence would undermine the reason for this temporal causational sphere we live in.

The vector between our two opposing values of eternal infinite possibilities and finite human experience is like a vortex. One direction pulling you into something, and the other... pushing you out toward everything. This is like Alice through the looking glass. One world has a pattern of linear progression and the other is like a dream world, chaotic and indefinite. Pinocchio is another great allegorical story that emblematizes well the nature of reality, and how as humans what we value most is that which we define as real. It demonstrates the desire in us to be real, and the yearning for certainty that the connection we share and the love we've found is real, and will endure.

"The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless."                                                  — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The vortex works like lungs, pulling air in and pushing air out, over and over again. Like your heart which pulls blood in and propels it out continually. The vortex is a multidirectional vector that fluctuates between the pull of eternity toward infinity, while dreaming or after death, and the pull of life toward singular experience, when we awaken from sleep, or after we are born. Even while day dreaming we experience the tug of the vortex. We experience forces pulling on us constantly. The effects of:

• Biochemical reactions. 

• Stimulation from music. 

• Hormones in the body.

• Hunger prompting us to eat. 

• Desire arousing us to make love.

• Fatigue enticing us to sleep. 

• Curiosity provoking us to discover.

How many decisions can you say are your own and how many a direct consequence of forces acting upon us? The vortex is, in the abstract, a construct that draws experience into focus and out of focus again like the lens of an eye. It is the portal between reality and unreality.

In between life and the infinite, in the middle of the vortex, is the dilation and contraction of reality. The vortex for me is an abstract, an idea. Not that it isn't real. Numbers are real, they're just not physical. They're intellectual tools and mental material like the software in a computer, the purpose of which is the oscillation of reality. What you observe as a chaotic dreamworld in REM sleep could merely be an encounter with the dissolution of reality as you journey down the rabbit hole into a quantitative domain, which encodes our experiences, and programs our current existence.

 ⸻Down the rabbit hole . . . ⸻

The question to ask ourselves is — why do we need a bridge between the infinite and what we experience every day as human life? Herein lies the answer to the meaning of life. Imagine if you were not human, if you did not die, and were never born, but always existed, and will always exist. What if you could never die, and could experience any number of an infinite possible realities? After billions of experiences, and billions of years of existence, what if you began to feel like you were trapped by eternity? Living forever could leave you lacking something new to look forward to. Would you live life as an alternate kind of life form or in some other reality for a change of pace? Having experienced a timeless existence you would eventually exhaust all methods for overcoming boredom.

People sometimes feel trapped in this life because they don't know what is out there in the far reaches of time and space, and they feel confined to this one tiny experience. This same feeling of being trapped could overtake you in a world where you are infinite. In this state of being you know everything. Wanting to have more and to experience something different is impossible in a universe where you have been everything and have done all things. So, the only escape from existence then is nonexistence. And if you think for a moment, you will quickly realize that life on earth, as a human, is a qualitative experience of nonexistence in a quantified scripted reality. 

Possibly you are eternal and the only real thing in the universe is sentient beings and the manifestation of their consciousness. In this life you are much like a person who wakes up on a deserted island with no memory of how you got there, or why you're there, or even where there is. In life you are born to oblivion, not knowing what happens after you die, or what happened before you were born. A possible desirable condition for a being that has existed forever and wants to experience something new. What if life is the intention of a being to forget all that is, and all that you ever were so that every proceeding experience is new, and life is new and different. This may be one of the reasons we chose to come here to live in this condition. The other reason is to find each other, and to have our attention drawn to each other. To really see someone other than ourselves, to find soul mates, to in the Buddhist tradition, namaste, which is a greeting and act of truly seeing another person.

All matter is made up of atoms, which are made up of even smaller particles. All that we perceive as the physical world is the signal between these particles. The emptiness between particles is vast. Nothing fills that emptiness except for the information traveling between particles. This creates the solidity that we experience as the physical world. The use of powerful microscopes reveals the scope of emptiness between atoms and between subatomic particles.

It could be, all that truly exists apart from us is nothing. It is a possibility that we created this existence for ourselves. All there may be outside of the collective of humanity is the product of thought, and interaction between living intelligent beings, and is a projection of sentient life-force. When I say, "I think we created our own reality," that doesn't mean all people got together and built the physical universe with hammers. The physical universe is a result of the metaphysical. The world is no less physical upon this premise. The world is physical and at the same time ethereal. We are finding out through modern physics that they are both one in the same. Like a computer, it has both hardware and software.

In the movie Paycheck, Ben Affleck has his memory erased. Before the memory wipe he gives up a large sum of money. He then mails himself an envelope with a few ambiguous items inside. The purpose of which is to circumvent his amnesia in hopes of recovering some very specific details from his memory. He realizes that if he would give up all that money and only send himself those items, they must be important and serve a purpose in helping him to remember. If you gave up millions of dollars and just sent yourself an envelope with some random stuff inside, you would know that those items must be important somehow. I think we can take something away from this movie about how to view the world we live in.

If we would put ourselves on a planet with no memory of anything before our arrival here, and no conception or instructions for what will come after, cut off from the rest of the universe, then we can deduce the content of this condition must be important. It reminds me of how an angry parent will send two children who were fighting with each other into a room together, and tell them they are not to come out until they are friends and have made up with one another. There are seven billion people together on this giant orb floating through space. With all the universe out there we isolated ourselves here together. If we would sacrifice all the universe has to offer just to be close to each other then we must have been trying to tell ourselves something about the value of a human being. It's clearly a message, that we value connecting with the universe much less than we value connecting with each other.

We live in a world with one message that all of reality is conspiring together to tell us. The general theme I see repeated in all facets of existence is symbiosis. The organs all working together, trillions of flora cohabitating with the cells, cooperating together in a perfect biologic symphony. We live in a world where every single life form is dependent on every other life form, and would die without the essential nutrients provided and work performed by the other creatures we share our planet with.

  —Each of us needs to rediscover our symbiotic nature.—

Our body bathes in energy from its innate ability to harness the sun's rays. We create nutrients for plants by fertilizing the soil with our own waste. Plants absorb these nutrients from the soil. We breathe the oxygen plants produce, and they absorb the carbon dioxide we exhale into the air for them. Plants grow fruits and vegetables, yielding the materials our bodies need to function.

We gestate inside the body of another person for nine months to even begin life in this world. All our development including physical, emotional, and mental is fostered by the people who take care of us. Our very survival depends upon these same people who feed us and shelter us.

One of the things that motivated me to make this post is how scary the prospect of death can be. It would be a more rational and logical response to our situation if all people were working together to maintain and prolong human life, with death being such a gloomy and looming prospect. (In time of drought don't just pray for rain, dig an irrigation ditch.)

I hope to provoke a renewed passion for searching for what life is all about and finding answers to life's toughest questions through logic and rational thought, using science and experimentation, engaging in debate and discussion.

A philosophical puzzle of sorts emerges when considering the condition of limited time, space, and memory. Proximity is an underlying participant in this human event. We have a range of experiences and memories within our field of mobility. A spirit is something, on the other hand, that persists beyond the boundaries of our memories. If cultural ideas about human beings having an eternal soul are to be believed then why would most of our composition —our eternal rhapsody— reside outside the radius of our existence?

  ⸺Myriad life times amalgamated into the eternal self, shrouded by the cloak of mortality.⸺

Certainly, my memories from ten thousand years ago would be just as important to me and just as much a part of who I am as my memories from only ten years ago. So, out of billions of years of life it seems improbable that any one would inflict upon themselves the condition of only being present in the limited space of a human life span and living only in the memories of eighty or ninety years or so.

For sure there must be an event or person that mattered to me very much from a past life, perhaps from thousands of years ago. Why would I choose to shut them out? Upon admiring someone's freckles recently I was remind of looking at the stars. The way little specks form constellations on the skin, it's as if the body is a fractal, reflecting a larger image of the universe (the microcosmic self mirroring a larger cosmos).

—Reservation for Earth. Table for Seven Billion.—

If I were thinking about someone from my past, from perhaps a thousand years ago, or many such people or events, from many such pasts, these memories would take me from the present as memories often do. I'm sure there are things that happened which mattered to me and people that I cared about. If I thought of them often it wouldn't leave much time for focusing on living in the present.

It occurred to me that we often think it is romantic to shut down an entire restaurant for a private candle lit dinner with the woman you love. When considering life and philosophy we don't often realize how amazing it is that we have shut down eternity, and have sectioned off from the entire universe a private life with the people we love.

Many people search for truth in one church or another. Time better spent on websites such as https://www.khanacademy.org/ or going to college. Truth is uncovered by:

• math 
• logic 
• reason 
• science 
• observation
• and experimentation 

Religion is an exposé into the discovery of the depth of the absence of reason, and an exploration of the boundaries of imagination. Religion is like a language for expression or revelation of that part of the psyche where the corridors of the mind echo with hope for life beyond death, and whirling about are humanities dreams, fantasies, and fragments of the soul. Religion is a kind of Frankenstein experiment to bring to life the essence of fairy tales, and give form to mythology.

Religion should be the combined focus of all people to strive for a better, safer, and healthier society. Imagination should expand and improve our reality through science and logic, not stifle it through superstition. It's fitting that the branch of theology that deals with defending and proving religious doctrines through deduction and debate is called apologetics because they should...   apologize, for using logic to convince people it's in their best interest to adopt a system of thinking that is illogical.

The reason that the leprechaun (as the story goes) put his pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is because, as everyone knows, you can never get to the end of a rainbow. It's very clever to fashion a story from something people get easily excited about like finding gold but have no way to ever refute or disprove in any way. What other magical stories do we know that have people searching for something of value that can never be found? What other stories have we heard that people have no way to verify? No ones eternal fate hinges upon their willingness to believe a story.

Searching for absolute truth in this life you may feel at times like you're searching for that proverbial pot of gold but don't become daunted. Life is a journey, not a destination. When riding a roller coaster you don't obsess over the meaning of the ride. Why does it exist? Why do we ride? There must be some deeper meaning to it. No, we just enjoy it and say, "what a hell of a ride!" Have someone put that on my tombstone, because it is, after all, one hell of a ride!

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Two heads are better than one and three is better than two. So, share what's in your head. Subscribe and share your theories about life in the comments below.