How can anyone even contemplate LIFE?…it’s too big a mystery. It's overwhelming.
I understand why people assign religious purpose and meaning to life. They feel compelled to do so. There is no obvious answer, which means there is a void, and I’ve heard that nature abhors voids and rushes to fill them. Apparently, especially human nature; thus we fill it with something, anything, fact or fiction.
I myself have aspired to the idea that life’s purpose is to grow spiritually, which is really stretching reason and logic, because spirit itself cannot be proven. I know, it cannot be disproven either. But it isn’t logical, to accept something just because it cannot be proven it does not exist. There is a lot we don’t believe without proof. Yet many, most in fact, seem easily inclined to the idea of spirit and a GREAT SPIRIT.
We have senses with which we experience the world. We acknowledge cause & effect in the physical. If our skin is burnt, we know it came in contact with something hot. If a bone is broken it came against something harder than itself. But when we cannot physically determine a cause, we make one up instead of saying, "gee, we just don't know?" We seem to long for something greater than ourselves. (Given the problems of human nature that's understandable.) That longing seems to reside in emotions that are also not physical, though emotions also cannot be denied because we experience them.
Still, feelings are not facts. They may engender physiological sensations thru which we know we are having emotions, but that doesn’t prove they are any more real than the gods of the many religions. The person who sees a rope in the grass and runs in fear because she has misperceived it to be a snake is laughed at when its all over with and the truth is seen, and she hopefully laughs at herself. Her reaction to her misperception may be real, but what generated that reaction is not. I think the practice of stepping back from our emotions and evaluating what caused them is important.
So many of our emotions are based on misperceptions and/or faulty conclusions of fact. Example: One may indeed have been denigrated by a colleague, say, but that doesn’t make the insult true. Or, even if it is true, it doesn’t mean we have to feel bad about ourselves for x number of hours or days. Nor does it mean we have to undermine or in some way get back at that colleague the next chance we get. If it occurs repeatedly of course some different reaction must take place to make the offender stop or to remove ourselves from abuse.
But I went off on a tangent, and now I have to apply that tangent to my initial thoughts. Life seems meaningless to me and without purpose. But I don’t have to fill that void with anything at all; not with religion or spirituality or any kind of fiction or fantasy. I can just let the void exist. I was resisting that acceptance because it was leading me to feeling depressed, but I stepped back from that emotional response. Not having purpose or meaning doesn’t have to depress me. I can enjoy my existence even though it may have no higher purpose beyond itself.
What else can accompany my awareness of the possibility that perhaps nothing I know has meaning beyond itself? Is it possible to just be with that without assigning emotion to it? Perhaps there are unknown reason for life, for my planet, my species, my solar system, my universe. Must I know it? Must I search for meaning just because I haven’t yet been convinced there is some?
No. I can just be. And I am finding that just being is freedom. But I have no need to assign freedom as a purpose for being or to proselytize this to others. I’m just sharing.
