(8) The Selfish Premature Question: The Meaning of Our Actions in Purpose of the Existence of Life

We eventually realize there must be a purpose for our lives. It seems to us that purpose should come before that deep and pesky meaning of life. We then say “But for what meaning is this purpose, this job, this family, this kid with the constantly runny nose that needs me almost every minute of the day?” Our purpose in life can not be satisfactorily delivered to our consciousness until the mountain of data we have assembled is observed from far away.

That meaning that is the tail of those purposeful actions haunts us. But it is interconnected to that huge meaning, although we think it is that tail that we need wiser and sometimes spiritual advice to get a reasonable answer for. Keep in thought: meaning and purpose are interconnected and so save knowing one until you know the other. Sounds tricky.

Now we humans live as the remaining reigning intelligent life form on our planet. The majority of us never fully satisfied we are doing what we should be. In our contemplative history on Earth we are consistently ignorant of what have identified as our true purpose. We feel certainty in the core of our minds that we must have a grand purpose. We strongly tend to be grandiose in our shared perceptions of ourselves. In that immersion of our grandiosity the many answers seem as wrought with mystery as we seem to ourselves.

Some of the many answers seem to be beckoning the suspension of disbelief, to then accept those answers in our forethought, the consciousness we are aware of every minute we are awake. It seems as if we need to be engrossed in a new state of mind to learn the answers, to accept them, but we do not. A transcendental state of pure karmic bliss will not be necessary, not any longer.

After we seekers have spent our days in the church or in the Himalayan mountains we chose to validate our certainty. The strong defense mechanism of denial assists us in this validation. We believe we have validated the great question, the burden of the drive within.

Our many answers are presented to us as hundreds of complexities and simplicities and most are slightly different and many are very different. The majority of answers falling on the spiritual side of our consciousness where we live in submission to an uncontrollable and mysterious force or as submissive to a fictitious being. Our minds are comfortable in these seemingly encompassing answers, as concepts based in premises that are based on that force, that invisible being or the ethereal realm. Again we are mostly in denial that they can’t be accurate. Again the denial requires constant validation, as we continuously invent new ways of strengthening it. This happens to us because of that tail. Ignoring the tail is easy. As easy as going to that wise person, that monk, that ancient literature written in a time of great ignorance of the mechanisms of our lives that are interconnected to the mechanisms of our entire place in time and in space.

We call it having faith or "believing" in an actual thing that has the substance of mass and energy. Essentially we go about holding these things to be true for that which we have no environmental evidence. Nothing in nature seems to correlate to us when we hear answers to the great question because those answers still do not satisfy a biologically driven need. We cannot test with our instruments these seemingly tangible concepts. We need to see that tail, to finally see it. But we can see it.

Many answers fall conveniently, often psychologically comfortable onto selfish meanings. Because their short lives were running out, I think these many philosophers when attempting to answer the question fell off of the challenge too quickly as if taking the simple side of Hakim’s razor. The deliverers of the answer most often dive off into short statements by the tens of thousands and far too frequently they seem to have a recurring selfish theme:

• Enjoy yourselves.  
• Take what we can of life.  
• Be as happy as we can be.  
• Meaning is what you make it.  
• Be grateful and live so.  
• To find your dream and go for it.  
• To dance while the music still plays.  
• There is no purpose, but to be happy.  
• Life is an adventure, while death is a holiday!  
• There is no meaning just survive and be happy.  
• The meaning of life is to find meaning in life.  
• Don't ask what the meaning of life is. You Define it.  
• Live and let live.  
• To find your own truth and follow it.  
• To achieve your highest potential while satisfying your needs.
• The universe has no purpose. You just have to make the best of it.  
• Living it. Just living it.  
• Family first.  
• Treat others as you would like to be treated.  
• Life is a road that I wanna keep going - love is the river I wanna keep flowing.  
• To create more positive experiences than negative in the pursuit of happiness.  
• Have fun, be happy, and when you fall, pick yourself back up.  
• To cry, to laugh; to dream, to aspire; to live and let live.  
• Life is what you do while you're waiting to die. Life is how the time goes by.  
• Life has no meaning it just is, so we are free to live it as we please so long as we're kind to others.
• There's no such thing.  
• To find your own truth and follow it.  
• Living it. Just living it.  
• A jolly drive on the highway to death.  
• Life is an opportunity to be all that you can be starting where you are and with what you have.
• The meaning of life is to accept the challenge!
• To live not just exist!
• The greatest thing, you'll ever learn is just to love, and be loved in return.

Are you ready to vomit flowers yet? Is this enough selfishness for you? Does the power of the human ego not strike-out from these simplistic statements?

These are answers to the basically worded question: "What is the meaning of life?" All answered from individual perspectives in selfish meanings first, before thinking of the human community or our species and our collective role or the meaning of our actions in purpose of the existence of life.

I will give credit right here to three answerers to the question on the thread above for answering in the context of all of the species on Earth. I made sure I commented "bravo" and told them that they "Got it." But they were in the great minority on the greatest question's answer thread. But if you (reader) have read this far there is a good chance - you'll get it too.

Rarely a great answer appears on the thread. Like this one from Alice:

“Life is meant for community, connecting, sharing, discovering, exploring, building, expanding, mastering, improving, enhancing, beautifying, bearing the burdens of others to help those that cannot help themselves, loving, and giving. In other words the meaning of life is to be productive in everything you do. Expand and multiply and increase all of the good you generate. Share it with the world to make it better." Bravo Alice!

In several of the statements above the writer is indicating they would rather not think about it, and so you should not think about it either, to validate the non-thinking writer.

"There is no such thing! Now shut-up and go away you burden reminding questioners!"

Some of us are innocently ignorant of a purpose to have a purpose. As lives are often too complicated and challenging to take the time to begin to consider the great question. We have seen entire sections of our book stores crammed with these self help books that are each attempting to catch the tail.

Why are there thousands of them? The answer is that tail is a money maker. The meaning to our purposeful actions can be answered in millions of words and that is unfortunate.

All of you bright answerer's to the greatest question: please go look at yourselves in the mirror and slap yourselves as hard as you can. If you are physically incapable of doing that simple act of your will overpowering your body, you may want to just leave this page now. Dogmatic? No is advisable. It is a simple test you do at home. Try it please. If you can you are capable of facing the great question and getting it through to that muffled voice speaking to you from behind your mind. You can defeat your ego.

Many of us have convinced ourselves the answer must be some spiritualistic and difficult to describe higher purpose. And so we peer into the complexities of all our learned behaviors in our biological lives. Most of us leave this search for a grand answer to our published philosophers and poets, our religious authorities, our geniuses, to hypothesize for us, lending us their reasoning. Because it remains the greatest question that persistently follows our thoughts, it is delivered to us for thousands of years, from times in varying eras of massive widespread ignorance of our environment.

As can be seen in this typical human behavior above, many answers are very simple statements sprouting from that drive for simplicity. But when they are looked at from afar they seem as weak as a guess or an assumption and so are ultimately unacceptable. They are egoist viewpoints from standing in one place and looking in all directions and presuming the answer must be within our lives.

The cosmos have been too much of a mystery to us - until now. So in our minds we deduce that our intensely human-centric personal examination of ourselves is a course of exploration that is seemingly mathematically reasonable. So it seems to us the most self-absorbed and grandiosely self-described species on this one ball of rock.

But billions of us have found the time to hear their subconscious. Unfortunately, the documented pattern of behavior is to then chase without enough knowledge the answer to the great question. This leads humans toward an unlimited number of un-connectable hypotheses of the falsely philosophical tail that annoys us from behind our consciousness. Our behavior is then to chase this invisible tail in circles for centuries like bored dogs. But the tail was never visible and its mystery was enthralling and unexplainable, because it was a feeling.

I seek out the practical first in many observations of living and life’s unbreakable connection to nature. I feel confident I see it practically because I observe and because I accept science as the best method, at our best shot, at the most satisfying and useful facts we call “truths.” I am also confident because many other brilliant people have found ways of making those observations possible to be proven theory. That is; As testable and highly criticized accepted truths of nature.

When I see it as a spectator and an absorber of data from afar, I see only a blurry line to be further explored between what we know of, of the biologic and the entire cosmos. The line is porous and is but a method for the astronomical and the biological to give life and its energy to one, and return that energy from the other. And so, we are intrinsically bonded as cooperatively functioning living mass fueled and motivated by energy that reaches deep out into space and all the way into the atomic matter at the quantum level of study within our very biologic lives.

In the grandeur of our consciousness we measure these realms of science and too many of us are still holding them to be true as being separated, to gain a meaning by our actions in purpose that provides our consciousness a reason for living - we call it romantically a "purpose."

Separate we are not. We never were as any form of species.

We can place pretty good odds on how life forms and spreads through our galaxy and I would bet money that at least a billion galaxies, most colliding with others are all spreading the ingredients of life. Those galaxies and their star systems have numbers on their side in that advantage.

As the behavior in purpose of the birds and the bees down here near the ground, the galaxies and the solar systems pick up and carry the ingredients of life; Their purpose in action now measured in motion toward the death of a universe and the birth of a new.

The consistency in this reflection from the cosmos that so very well appears to match our very actions in life on Earth is not a coincidence. It is a clear pattern to be recognized by all thinking species.

It is yelling at us a message.

continued - The Psychology of the Confusing Search

The Pale Blue Dot.. From: Ann Druyan, science writer. Please return! "On Feb. 14th, 1990, the Voyager 1 probe snapped an image of Earth. The probe was more than 4 billion miles away at the time. Druyan, Carl Sagan's co-author and widow, talks about how impactful the image is on humanity." From: Space.com

Copyright Reserved, James G. Mason, 2014, October. JamesGMason.com