There once was a little boy whose mom told him the key to life was happiness. When he was in school one day the teacher asked the students to write down what they wanted to be when they grew up. Some kids wrote down Fireman or Policeman, some Actors, others Lawyers or Astronauts but he wrote, “When I grow up I want to be Happy”. The Teacher told him he didn’t understand the assignment. He told her she didn’t understand life.
Every now and again I find myself listening or reading people’s opinions and debates about the meaning of life, the purpose…it’s bound to happen, specially if you interact a lot with intellectuals, curious minds or enjoy reading about the history of philosophy.It must be one of the oldest questions in existence, in fact it quite possibly played a role in the creation of religions; “Why are we here?”, “What are we meant to do in this life? I feel lost”, “Where do we come from?”, “What makes me so deserving to have been born? is this life like a qualification test to be considered for a job after death? follow the 10 commanding sinless instructions and I’m accepted or punished?”.
I can’t help but laugh sometimes, asking “Why am I alive?” seems like a question coming from those who are bored with life, the miracle of life with all it’s beauty and interesting things isn’t enough and we want more?. Do you ever go to the doctor and say; “Doctor, why am I healthy?”, or do you only go you’re sick?. “Why am I alive?”.
The Never Ending Questions
“What is the meaning of life?” life is not man made so how can there be a man made answer to that man made question?, birds don’t ask themselves why they are here, plants don’t…no other living thing does it, only humans who have a brain chemical imbalance known as intelligence asked themselves that. Life has existed billions of years before us and will continue once we go extinct, we are just a blimp in history of existence. Science can tell you how things happen but not the complete why. “Why are almost all planets spinning in the same direction?” – “Well the solar system is supposed to have formed from a dust cloud that contracted due to gravity, the cloud rotated in a certain way so to conserve the spin the planets maintained that direction.” – “Where did the gas come from?” “ermm…well, from a primordial hot and dense initial condition at some finite time in the past.” – “Where did the hot and dense condition come from?” “ummmm….go away!”. “Why are trees green?” – “Because the chlorophyll in the plants color it green.” – “Why did the plants use chlorophyll and not some other color from the many in the rainbow?” – “Perhaps it was in the right place at the right time or that chemical was better absorbed to create matter.” “Why did it want to create living matter?” “Argh, just shut up Matty!”, it’s all a never ending chain of “Why’s” that even to it’s furthest depths will arise more questions because an answer can only create more questions (“Who created the creator of the creator?”), there will never be an absolute answer that completely answers every single aspect of the world. I mean how could it? The thought that the vastness of existence itself can be reduced to knowledge is absurd. What mind or even man made computer could contain the answer to every single detail and aspect in the worlds vastness…the reason behind every single rock, plant, animal, bug, person, chemical, how and why they are all there in that specific position and for what purpose.
The logic behind it is simple, how can we give an objective answer when we are in such a subjective position? To try and figure out life we would have to try and take a step backwards as if we weren’t part of life ourselves, detach yourself from life to find out the meaning of life…how is that possible?
Life is a mystery, it cannot be solved, there is however different ways to look and live through it. Asking for the “meaning” is to try and give it a purpose, there is no purpose in life because there is nothing to achive from it, the very act of life is the achievement itself, you can live and enjoy that achievement in many ways doing many things, the interpretation you give to it or what you find in it is all up to you to discover. Life is a purposeless cosmic play of energy, giving it a purpose or a mission is trying to convert it into something serious…something that will take the fun out of it because it becomes a task.
Logic’s Weakness
In my recent trip to Spain, being in the birth city of Picasso I couldn’t contain myself from visiting the fairly new Picasso Museum to see what beauty laid behind those ancient cathedral-like doors, I don’t understand anything about art but I delight myself with the colors and let my imagination flow with random ideas. I stood in front of the “Mujer en un sillón” looking thoughtful when these two Englishmen stood next to me. One was called Gareth and the other Charlie, Gareth said; “great isn’t it? I think the neo-plasticism of the abstract design proves the mystical, metaphysical and non-humanistic approach to the objective concept of abstraction”, Charlie added to that; “Yes, you have a point there! In fact, it’s obvious even from a casual glance that this painting was created by a paranoiac-critical activity, brought about by somnambulistically inclined dynamic sensations, companologists, who create a picture of transcendental non-curvilinear and curvilinear objects expressing subjective feelings in a cubistic manner”, they both turn to me expecting me to add something more… “Umm…I just see a lady with a bad hair day drawn by a 9 year old =S”.You can find patterns, coincidences and meanings in anything if you analyze it hard enough because opinions are biased to our past experiences, perspective and knowledge.
I tell you this anecdote because the “Why are we alive?” question reminds me of Italian Aesthetics Philosopher Benedetto Croce, he spent his entire life trying to figure out “What is beauty?”, how to define it, analyzing it, scrutinizing and dissecting all sorts of theories…at the end of his life if one of his books I read he came to the conclusion; “Beauty is indescribable”. Anyone could of told him that, what a wasted life with pointless research. Just imagine a person who is born blind, how would you explain to them through words the beauty of the stars? of a spring day? of a painting? How can they associate the word ‘light’, ‘beautiful’, ‘red’ to a visual memory they never had? how exactly does “beautiful” describe anything anyway? A shell can be beautiful…a person can be beautiful, is it the same type of beautiful? Yet Gareth & Chris so vigorously tried to describe beauty while falling in love with their own intellectual words.
Beauty has to be felt through art, music, attraction, sight, the face of people when they feel joyful and have sparkles in their eyes. Beauty cannot be thought about. In the same way life has to be lived, it cannot be thought about.
Plato in one of his works stated that in his ideal Utopian society known as a ‘Republic’ he would not allow poets. It startled me, why would such a great philosopher not want poets? I came to the conclusion that either the poems back then were very fantasy oriented (and Plato disliked irrational ignorant thinking) or because like all other philosophers, they value logic over all else. Philosophy is the eternal annoying little Matty asking “Why” about everything, poems would have no value to them as poets don’t ask why a rose is red…they just feel how red it is and write about it. To a curious philosopher always wanting answers to their “Why’s” that sounds unthinkable… “Isn’t he as afraid of the unknown and uncertain as me? Why is he so happy simply admiring his feelings?”.
We want to find out through knowledge what the meaning of life is, right? and what is knowledge? knowledge is passed along through words and words use logic. Logic works by separating things, dividing them into pieces in order to understand it. A rose isn’t a rose, it’s a compound of different chemicals and names for it’s parts, there’s petals, thorns, stem, roots, leaves, ect… But all those are words we have created to analyze them better through language/knowledge yet the the world/nature/life doesn’t work separately. A rose isn’t created by a bunch of thorns saying “Hey..see that group of stems, lets run over there and attach ourselves to them…and call the group of petals to come along for the top part”. It grows all together from the start, the whole world isn’t divided into parts like language/logic makes it seem, what we call a “rose” is connected directly to what we call “soil” and that connects to “trees”, “land” meets it’s path with the “ocean”. The “Planet Earth” isn’t some separate thing from the other planets or universe, they all work in a harmonious balance, a cosmic play of magnetic energy. Western medicine uses logic to separate our body into different organs (heart, liver, lungs…) and treat organs individually while ancient Chinese medicine was aware there were different “parts” inside our body but they didn’t treat them individually, they created a harmonious balance with all organs to work well together in sync.
William Shakespeare so eloquently wrote in his Romeo and Juliet play;
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.
Logic is great for our daily lives, for the advancements of science, medicine and technology, but it has that one big flaw in its system when it comes to using its power for profound questions like this one.
Even science itself can prove lifes meaning isn’t possible to find out through logic, the entire world, the very core of all universal matter is composed of Electrons, Protons, Neutrons, if you put any of them under a microscope you will see they all bounce around randomly…they follow no logical pattern.
Forget Plato, I say the best thing you can do is become a poet and feel the world, life has no absolute philosophical truths, philosophers are always having an endless debate of what they believe is an absolute statement but they can rarely agree upon anything, in fact I’ve noticed many intellectuals don’t ask questions to find out the answer but rather to appear knowledgeable by being inquisitive profound questioners. Remember logic and your mind separates and divides things apart, feeling brings things together…you can’t think the world, you can only feel it.
Fall In Love With The Mystery Of Life
When I was in Year 9 we went on a school excursion to the mountains, after hiking to the peak top they sat down for dinner when I wondered off to sit on a rock nearby admiring the magnificent array of colors that were visible in the horizon after the sun had set. After a few minutes my professor approached me; “Matty what are you doing here all alone? Ahhh, what a beautiful sight…Did you know the colors are due to light passing through a clear fluid with suspended particles being scattered. Wavelengths like blue are scattered more strongly, John Tyndall in 1859 was the first to notice this.Reddish sunset sky is light passing through a lot of air removing the other spectral colors as the angle of the sun changes”. In that precise moment, even though I found all that information interesting…the same thing happen as with Gareth and Charlie, the explanation didn’t fulfill me at all, only the sight of the actual red sky did, even more so the thought process of continuing the conversation with him spoiled the beauty of the scenery because my complete focus wasn’t a silent admiration of the horizon anymore…it was also aware of the arrangement of thoughts/language going on in my head to communicate with him which was why I wanted solitude in the first place.
If his explanation wasn’t fulfilling, can you imagine people who fall in love, if they knew exactly every single detail of the other person, what they were going to say and do in every moment, what they were thinking, yogurt making them fart, all the knowledge and memories they have stored in their heads…everything! How horrible would that be??? They’d be bored of them from the beginning cause there’s nothing left to find out and they’d know everything that is going to happen.
That’s when I learned one of my most valuable life lessons out of all the junk I carry in my head;
To find out the meaning of life would take away all it’s beauty, an explanation is dead because it’s always the same, it’s based on memory and all memories are static while the life/nature/universe is always dynamically changing, expanding, growing and dying, nothing is ever the same. You can fall in love with a mystery but you can’t fall in love with an explanation.
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