You are for joy, because it both feels good, and is good.
That, really, is so eminently enough, that if you find it an inadequate explanation of your purpose or presence, you ought to check to see if you have been generous enough with the meanings you ascribe to something ‘feeling good’ and ‘being good’.
What more, on the positive side, would you ask than to be such, and to have been given such, that you may feel joy?
Granted, on the other side of things, you could sure use less hatred, suffering and infirmity. And you might oppose and avoid hatred as best as you are able. And you might, in numerous specific contexts, oppose and avoid suffering and infirmity. But finding and stating an overarching purpose, and seeking and even finding the fulfillment of that purpose, cannot ultimately be about eliminating hatred, suffering or infirmity.
Such things actually never go away, for one thing because your perception of them would always be relative to their prevalence in the life you had led up to the point at which you encountered a particular manifestation of them.
This is not to say that the torture of the longsuffering is meaningfully equivalent to the inconvenience of the otherwise pleasantly pleased. It is not. But that statement is made within the context of yours and my understandings of what it is to be tortured or inconvenienced. Other and better understandings of what unacceptable harm is are certainly possible.
Thursday, January 4, 2007
Joy (pt. 2)
Survival has something to recommend itself, since survival is a necessary precondition to anything else. But that’s really not that great a point, is it? You wouldn’t say the meaning of life is to have a skull, would you? But without your skull, where would you be? Also not alive.
Necessities are, apart from being necessary, not significant enough to serve when you ask yourself to state your business here.
Pursuit of necessity can certainly be descriptive of human behaviors, unlike, to stay with the example, the pursuit of having a skull. A person pretty much automatically has a skull, and few interesting skull-seeking behaviors exist in human history. There has not been a fascinating and diverse unfolding of ways to go about getting and keeping one’s skull. But there has, in the case of survival, been a lot of data that has piled up, an awful lot of data. But it is just data, and it does not describe your purpose.
If your question is historical, sociological, physiological, or etc. then survival and propagation may be something of a be all and end all: a root source to which diverse branches may be retraced. But, again, survival is not the purpose of living. Survival is the platform, the collapse of which you will go to tremendous lengths to avoid, yes, but when you stand on the platform of your own survival, you have not yet arrived at yourself, at what you are meant to be.
Necessities are, apart from being necessary, not significant enough to serve when you ask yourself to state your business here.
Pursuit of necessity can certainly be descriptive of human behaviors, unlike, to stay with the example, the pursuit of having a skull. A person pretty much automatically has a skull, and few interesting skull-seeking behaviors exist in human history. There has not been a fascinating and diverse unfolding of ways to go about getting and keeping one’s skull. But there has, in the case of survival, been a lot of data that has piled up, an awful lot of data. But it is just data, and it does not describe your purpose.
If your question is historical, sociological, physiological, or etc. then survival and propagation may be something of a be all and end all: a root source to which diverse branches may be retraced. But, again, survival is not the purpose of living. Survival is the platform, the collapse of which you will go to tremendous lengths to avoid, yes, but when you stand on the platform of your own survival, you have not yet arrived at yourself, at what you are meant to be.
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
Joy (pt. 1)
The meaning of your life is joy.
This is assuming that the question of the meaning of life is mostly concerned with what you should direct yourself towards. Joy is a whole answer.
If you do not know what happened before the universe, or what happens after you die, or etc, does this leave you in the dark? No. To know your life’s meaning does not require an explanation of the nature of the whole universe, or of any part of the universe fully explained. This is because the explanation, to be yours, must be of you; it must come in your language, and not in either a language of billions of years of time and of light or in a language of divine power or knowledge, unknowable to the mortal mind.
This is not closed mindedness. It is one’s own mindedness. And the larger scale, whether you see it in terms of physics or of faith, simply is not a person’s to encompass, at least not during their lifetime.
Your study or your search may lead as far as they may lead, and the point is not to limit yourself, but simply to be yourself: to admit that what your life means has everything to do with what you effect, what effects you, and with what you do know. To admit what joy is to you, and to seek to be a part of giving joy and receiving joy. That is what you are here for.
This is assuming that the question of the meaning of life is mostly concerned with what you should direct yourself towards. Joy is a whole answer.
If you do not know what happened before the universe, or what happens after you die, or etc, does this leave you in the dark? No. To know your life’s meaning does not require an explanation of the nature of the whole universe, or of any part of the universe fully explained. This is because the explanation, to be yours, must be of you; it must come in your language, and not in either a language of billions of years of time and of light or in a language of divine power or knowledge, unknowable to the mortal mind.
This is not closed mindedness. It is one’s own mindedness. And the larger scale, whether you see it in terms of physics or of faith, simply is not a person’s to encompass, at least not during their lifetime.
Your study or your search may lead as far as they may lead, and the point is not to limit yourself, but simply to be yourself: to admit that what your life means has everything to do with what you effect, what effects you, and with what you do know. To admit what joy is to you, and to seek to be a part of giving joy and receiving joy. That is what you are here for.
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