Direction, Meaning & Purpose
Life is relentless and unforgiving. Death brings a surcease of effort and forgives all. Life’s process is simple cause and effect, and consequences are inescapable. Accidents do not just happen. Accident is a misnomer. An accident is nothing more than an unforeseen, unintended consequence: a mistake. While a mistake can be forgiven, it’s consequence - effect- is unavoidable.
Life learns from its mistakes? Not unless the consequences are traumatic. There is little impetus for change if the natural consequence of an action is merely inconvenient. Overcoming the apparently insurmountable, reconciling the conflict between outcome and desire is dramatic.
The culprit in all of Life’s drama is the central nervous system: the originator of the pain/pleasure dichotomy. Where would be the conflict if Life could follow its blind obsessions unaccompanied by pain causing awareness? All its monstrosities could romp and reek havoc and spread mayhem without a felt effect. No pain or pleasure breeds indifference.
Instead, with the inclusion of painful awareness, Life carries out its vivesective experiments to the strains of global, if not cosmic, agony. The further irony is that Life agonizingly feeds upon itself: perpetually! The maddening question is: does it do so knowingly? Is Life a conscious Uroboros?
If Life is a cosmic mistake, who made it and why hasn’t it been corrected. The most hopeful answer is that Life is some sort of proving ground for developing the most durable model. The experiment is repeated over generations, testing the hypothesis, developing the theory until time introduces some random(?) variable which either brings the experiment to an end or takes it along another tangent. Leading to where? The best answer - back to the Source! Uroboros: the Dragon eating its tail.
Before the Beginning everything was in stasis; every thing balanced every other thing. Since the Beginning Life has been seesawing back and forth in the dialectic of leaving and returning, differentiating and assimilating, individuating or uniting. With each passing generation, the question of what Life would be returning to becomes less clear; what lies beyond existence? What is lifelessness? Can Life return at all; or does it just cease?
While the living may long for a return to simpler times, that desire runs contrary to Life’s direction. The law of inertia claims that matter goes from a more complex state to a simpler state: from a high rate of vibration to motionlessness. Life, operating within the material universe, does not follow the dictates of this universal law. Life moves from the simple to the complex and carries self awareness along with it on its diametrical journey.
It must be noted that the question of direction, meaning and purpose is the concern of the central nervous system’s self awareness and outside of that closed system may not carry any import at all. The only measurable impact self awareness can have upon the central nervous system is to purposely impair or end its functioning. Otherwise, the central nervous system operates with little regard for the comfort or concerns of its parasitic personality. In contradistinction, it often continues to function efficiently when its attached personality wishes otherwise.
The personality is the central nervous system’s crystallized self awareness. It’s as if self awareness is the string that the central nervous system suspends in the sugary solution of perceptual experience. The crystal of a personality forms and refracts experience according to how symmetrical or irregular its facets are. Continuing the metaphor, self awareness remains suspended in experience for the duration of the existence of the personality. After the crystal is formed, generally, without some traumatic intervention, it grows in size while retaining its basic structure.
Experience varies widely from personality to personality, yet there is a great deal held in common; same body structure, basic needs are common and culture also contributes. It’s been noted that while there are presently six billion people on the planet, there are only thousands of points of view. Experientially, perhaps collectively all personalities contribute to a global “crystal.” To speculate along these lines though is in the purview of the personality and is of no direct(?) concern to the central nervous system.
Life, whatever it is, appears to have an insatiable longing for itself; at least on earth. The only Life the personality is certain of is carbon based and may be restricted to this planet. Through a long process that can be reconstructed but not totally accounted for the inorganic became organic: Life sprang from the non-living! Single cells united forming organisms. As noted, Life moves from the simple to the complex, not necessarily in a linear manner. Until very recently it was thought that the earth was basically stable, cataclysms being local in extent. It’s been discovered to be otherwise and several times in it’s planetary history Life has been very nearly wiped off the face of the earth. If Life is not able to develop its capabilities sufficiently to leapfrog out of this solar system before the whole is subsumed by Sol’s supernova it will have reached a dead end. If the Universe is truly inhospitable then it will have all been for naught: from nothing to nothing.
Even if the Universe is not averse to Life, it may be scheduled to collapse in upon itself erasing all of time and space and their by products. If there is a reality to be discovered and not merely invented by the personality and if it possesses verities beyond perceptual speculation then Life’s direction remains in question. Everything in the Universe appears to be revolving around a center, so why shouldn’t Life just be spinning its wheels?
It’s fashionable to speak of epiphenomena: consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain. The implication being that consciousness is not substantial. That being so, how can anything be known? Further, the logical consequence of the epiphenomena hypothesis is that Life is merely an epiphenomenon of the physical universe and is equally insubstantial. Counterintuitive!
Life is, but what is it? Life is experienced, or is it experiencing: or . . . is it experience? Life appears to be tenuous, ephemeral. Something fleeting can’t have lasting meaning or purpose. Meaning or purpose, must be assigned. The assigner, personality interprets experience: the effect of Life manifesting in time and space. The meanings are indeterminable. Without an interlocutor to ask, there are no questions to answer. Apparently, within this illusory steady state system till the end of time, terrestrial, celestial or universal, Life will inexorably continue the paradigm of cause followed by effect.
Life moves from the nonliving into individual self aware experience and will cease when its operative conditions no longer function, holding all its minions in its iron grasp. Death will free each personality. From conception to death Life rules unchallenged. After Death; is the question even meaningful for the individual personality?
Perhaps Life is dreaming or is being dreamed blurring the distinction between perception, memory, and actuality. What is really happening?
