We already know that the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42. I have no reason to doubt that. Real nice number. Round and even. Unfortunately, that is just the numerical representation of the Answer. I need more. There must be more to it. The 42 is too Zen-like.
This is another personal thing. The Life could mean so many things to so many people. We should not confuse the meaning of it with just the thing we like or enjoy doing. That would be an answer to a different question of what do we like to do while living the Life.
But, what is the Meaning of it? What is the Meaning of it to ourselves as individuals and to all of us as a group? The Meaning? The Purpose? Why are we here? Why are we supposed to live?
To John Lennon, the Life was the thing that goes on, while we are busy doing other things. Nicely put. Nice fellow, John. Liked his music very much. He seemed to have been an honest man.
The Basic Assumptions
Before we can proceed, we need to agree that the Life has a Meaning or Purpose. There are many that believe the Life has no Meaning whatsoever. They think that the Life is completely random event and that during Life there is no specific purpose assigned to it and that you should just enjoy the ride while it lasts.
Good luck. I don't think so. Well, I agree that you should try to enjoy, but I think that there is a Purpose to Life and I'll try to dig further into it next.
The Individual Purpose
I was thinking hard about this so many times. Often I would fall into a trap of finding false answers that would really reflect things I personally enjoy doing. Eventually I came to realize that the purpose to an individual is in what I would call the continuous progression or in some instances the continuous improvement.
During our life as individuals we need to strive to make a continuous progression and improvement in certain things we do. The important aspects are:
- true understanding of yourself
- true understanding of the contributions you make to a group
- children (for those of us who were blessed to be able to have them)
- true understanding of the short-term and long-term goals we as Humans need to achieve (a separate post is touching on this issue)
- true understanding of the God and the Universe (these two cannot be separated since they are one)
Children
For long time and even today, people believed that the sole purpose of having children would be to extend the life of our species. Another Darwinian nonsense. They thought that we need to have kids so that the Human race would survive and would not seize to exist. That's it. No other purpose. Just the pure survival instinct. I disagree.
While the survival is certainly one of the reasons why we need to have children, that is not the only one and not the most important one. The children are supposed to help us better understand ourselves, the God, the Universe, and the Life itself. Actually, they play a central role in our quest to understand the Meaning of Life. We think that our role as parents is to teach our children various things. That is true. However, the role of the children is to teach us more about the Life and few other things along the way. It is easy to ignore and miss this simple fact. The children are our connection between the theory and reality.
We know so little about how exactly the Life is being created and how a life form like a human child becomes a conscious being. What is the true nature of consciousness? What is the true nature of Self?
Creation
We have to step back now and think about something even more fundamental. Those of us who are interested in the issues of Physical Reality would recall that the photon has a structure, although it is not considered a material particle. The energy and matter are closely related. The matter is nothing else but a stable form of energy. The photon appears to us as a wave of certain energy. The structure of a photon is such that it forms a wave packet that travels by modulating the "space". The space or vacuum that it travels through is not empty (as we will find in another post I'm working on). In essence, we have the information that is being transmitted through the space. That is the photon. The information. The substance which photon is made of does not travel along with the photon. The substance is being modulated like wave modulates the molecules of water and what travels is the wave or simply put the information about the structure of the wave.
This is very important and crucial to our understanding of the Physical Reality.
Similarly, all "material" particles, including the electron are dynamic structures and vortices in space. In that sense the space is made of the same substance that the material particles are made. The only difference is that what we call vacuum is without any organization and the particles and similar entities are just the manifestations of the substance the space and everything else is made of.
So, going back to the children and how and when would they become conscious beings we could come up with a large number of theories which most likely are all wrong. Nevertheless, based on experiences that some people had and from what was reported about it, one could at least guess that the individual consciousness is derived from a certain source of energy that at the present state of scientific knowledge we may not be able to explain. We cannot even "prove" the existence of the source, but there are indications that it exists. We cannot measure it since we do not know what to measure and how to measure.
That should not be surprising to us. Just "recently" we have found a way to measure photons and various types of waves that are bombarding us on a daily basis and that are passing through us at high speeds. The fact that we cannot measure certain things does not have any effect on the Physical Reality and the actual structure of the Universe. The only thing that changes over time in that respect is our knowledge and understanding. Sometimes, those changes are gigantic and create a paradigm shift. We just started poking into the secrets of the Universe. We have a long way to go.
If we can understand children we will be able to better understand ourselves since that is how we started some time ago. As children. A child creation is a process during which "certain material components" are combined. In addition to the material content, the binding with a source of consciousness is occurring as well. All of that is nothing more than a process during which various pieces of information are going to be combined. The final outcome would hopefully become a healthy living and breathing human being. Also known as the Baby. The essence of the material content and the consciousness is the same, i.e. both are made of the manifestations of the same substance that the whole Universe is made of.
It is important to note that as much as the electron and photon are both made of the same substance, the body and consciousness are composed of the very same substance. The body is made of the material particles while the consciousness is attached to it in a way that we do not understand at this point. The important assumption that we must make is that both originate from the same substance that the whole Universe is composed of.
The Wonder of Life
How does the source of consciousness function? What is it? How to explain cloning? We do not really know any of the details. We as humans are at this point of our history limited in our ability to comprehend these processes. It seems that we may be able to acquire the knowledge about it in the future, but not using currently developed methods of learning. Our methods of learning will need to substantially change before we can start gaining deeper understanding of these issues. One idea that comes to my mind is that the source of consciousness is present "everywhere". That should not be strange. For example, the force of gravity is present everywhere, even far, far away from the place where it was perhaps generated. Again, information about the object that created gravity is being passed far, far away and we are taking that for granted. Although this may not be the best analogy, the source of consciousness is possible to exist everywhere and by that token may already be present within the material components that we think today are the only ingredients and information carriers to the future life form. Of a future child.
Those of us who are the parents and who witnessed the birth of our children had an opportunity to be amazed by this pure Wonder of Life. We should not just take it for granted and we should not try to rationalize it. If we do that, it would be nothing more but another missed opportunity.
When it comes to the importance of understanding children this is just the beginning.The Wonder of Life
You formed my inward parts;You covered me in my mother’s womb.I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;Marvelous are Your works,And that my soul knows very well.
My frame was not hidden from You,When I was made in secret,And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed.And in Your book they all were written,The days fashioned for me,When as yet there were none of them.
Psalm 139:13-16
Early Development
During early development, especially during the first 3-4 years of life, a child is acquiring various skills and types of knowledge. It starts to form the sense of Self. The whole process could be looked upon as a kind of calibration. The child is getting calibrated to the immediate environment and existing social conditions. Unfortunately, during that process, it appears that some of the innate skills that humans may have are being neglected and are often being underdeveloped or completely suppressed. We do not know yet the complete story about what kind of skills and senses we may posses. We did not get the Hardware User's Manual in other words. Not to mention the Software or other, still unknown components that we have not observed yet.
All we know is what we have learned from our own experience and from what we were told by others.
This is very important statement to understand. Two things:
- Personal Experience
- Accumulated knowledge expressed through some kind of language.
Our personal experience is limited. We may have some embedded knowledge that we have been provided at the point of creation as previously discussed. The components that were bound together into what we became may have carried some additional information that may be known to us in a certain way. How much of that information we can reach and understand is not known. Again, we know so little. In addition to the embedded knowledge that may be carried through the genetic material, we were bound to the source of consciousness. That connection may also provide us with personal experiences that may give us insight into elements of knowledge that are beyond what current science can explain. An example, that may be easy to understand is the Art. Certain artists, like Mozart, in addition to their obvious talent for creating and performing Music were also capable of generating enormous volume of work of highest quality that appeared as if it was communicated through them. They had personal experience that people who did not have similar experience would never be able to understand. However, the experience was real. The fact that not everyone could have such experience does not mean that it would not exist.
It is important to understand that what I am talking about is not just a pure talent and ability to be good at Music or Sports or some other activity. I am talking about an added value that was created through a special experience that those individuals utilized without being able to fully explain it. There are many people who have talent for Music and Sports, but not too many who are capable of reaching the higher plane of creativity that I am referring to.
Language
The language is very limited. If you do not believe, please pick up any philosophical work of those who looked at the problems of logic and language. The spoken language, the mathematical language, and the language of science, are all very limited. They are also conditioned by the limitations of our own personal and social calibration. That is, two people of similar background and origin when told the same information in the same language may not understand the content in the same way and may not derive the same conclusions. Information may be lost in translation even when only one language is used. That is because we are trying to translate some experience or observed phenomena using language that may not be the best tool for such a purpose. As an exercise, try thinking about experiences that are not possible to express in language. I'll give you one. How about a joy of having a drink of water after being lost for 2 days in a Sahara desert without any food or drink.
The point is, that by using language to communicate knowledge we are limited in what we can express and how precise we can depict our experience or scientific findings. When it comes to pure logic, Godel has shown that the language of science may have certain limitations especially if it is not used carefully and within the constraints of possible Physical Reality. In essence, he has shown that the mathematical approaches based on Aristotelian logic may not be capable of properly modeling Physical Reality. When it comes to countable and uncountable infinities, what Godel did not think about perhaps was that they are easily reconciled in some models of physical reality since the uncountable infinities would stand for the continuum of the Void while the countable infinities would stand for the infinite number of identical Fundamental Particles that exist in the Void. In addition, the uncountable infinities may be used with success to model the motion of the Fundamental Particles.
It is very easy to diverge into Fantasy if we let ourselves to be driven purely by mathematical constructions. I have no problems admitting that some of the thoughts I expressed in this post by many would be considered pure Fantasy as well. All I can say is that we need to use our own judgement and our own personal experiences to validate any theories that are presented to us. My goals is to encourage people to think about these issues and to communicate my views about these topics based on my own personal experiences and the knowledge I have acquired over time.
The language of math has to be used within the constraints of strict experimental verification if we are to apply it to understanding of Physical Reality.
Summary
In summary, we should revive the child within. We should learn from our children. We should teach them to think and feel the world around. We should try to improve the calibration process. This is very important component of I what would call the Meaning of Life.
True Understanding of Yourself
As it was pointed out, an important step toward understanding yourself, is to understand the children or to understand your own creation and calibration process that you had to go through as a child. That would be a good starting point. The next step is to realize that during your life you will be continuously trying to better understand yourself. You would most likely never be able to complete this task. The reason is that to fully understand yourself you need to understand the God and the Universe since we are all an integral part of it.
To understand in this case would mean to experience, or to transcend.
Whenever you perform some activity you produce some result. Many parents tell their kids things like: "Make yourself useful!". People who go through life without producing any "useful" results are wasting their time. To know yourself, you need to look and find the activities that you are good at or you may have talent for. Hopefully, you would be able to find more than one. You may clasify those activities in several categories according to who may benefit from them:
- personal or immediate family benefit
- group or society
Ideally, we would like to do things that would have some personal benefit or satisfaction. This does not necessarily mean that we would never tend to do things that others could benefit from. On the contrary. Many people enjoy helping others. Teaching, healing, entertaining, protecting, etc. They find great joy and satisfaction in doing such things.
In general, people enjoy being creative.
The best situation is created when our personal benefit aligns with a group benefit. Those people are lucky since they do a job for a group or society that at the same time makes them happy and satisfied.
An important part of knowing yourself is to determine what are the activities that you personally enjoy doing and that create useful results. It is not just about what we like to do, but also what generates useful results. Those results could benefit you and your immediate family in a true way.
We have to be careful to avoid being caught in too many activities that are with short lived results and that are not really useful to anyone including us. It is easy to declare that we might be very happy watching TV and/or drinking beer whole day, whole week, whole month, whole year, and so on. We need a more balanced approach.
How do we find things that would be useful? We can start by thinking about those that are not. For example, things that can kill us, make us unhealthy, or would not improve anything in our lives are generally waste of time and should be avoided.
We need to live "healthy" life. In general, that would mean to watch what we eat, to be physically active, and to practice some form of meditation (mental hygiene). There are many books written on these topics so I would not go into it now.
Next, we need to organize and plan. We need to track our progress in whatever we are doing so we ensure we are moving in a right direction. We can choose whatever pace, but we should try to achieve gradual improvements.
Within the activites that would benefit us personally, we should also look for those that could benefit a group or a society. As we gain more knowledge and attain certain level of education we might be able to work on the problems that would be interesting for us to solve and that many other people could benefit from (e.g. science, medicine, engineering, law, arts, ...) Virtually all human activites have a value if they are improving our own lives and lives of others.
Ultimately, we would come close to the true understanding of ourselves through the creative actions that we will perform during our life. That combined with our personal understanding of God and Universe will enable us to move forward at high speed and to achieve incredible results.
Group Benefit
Every person is capable of creating a benefit for others. Every person can find an activity that is possible to enjoy doing and that has a benefit to others. If it comes from a personal satisfaction and it is positive, it will eventually benefit other people as well. In another post I talked about some common goals that we as Humans should try to achieve.
Obstacles
Interestingly, one of the major obstacles in getting to know yourself is you. That is because not many people believe that would be important or they think they have already acomplished the task.
Another major obstacle is often the Government or similar Organization with Authority (a corporation, a crime cartel, etc.) These organizations, the way they function today, are limiting your ability to have a meaningful life. They are out of control and they are enslaving billions of people on Earth. They use technology to limit our Freedoms. Only 100 or 200 years ago, that would be much harder and almost impossible. Today, it is very easy and it is instantaneous.
I am not proposing that a Government as a form of a large organization of humans should be removed. No. We need Government to provide certain necessary functions and to help us achieve certain goals. However, the problem is that we should not allow the Government to enslave us. We should try to get a Government that is helping us remove obstacles and limits, not the one that is creating obstacles and limits to what we may be trying to achieve. The Government should stay out of most things that Humans do. The only good Government is the one that is small and efficient and that is being refreshed/replaced very often.
Today, at this stage of human society, we need to have term limits at all levels of government. We do not live anymore in times where only few people could read or write or would have good education. There are many people today that could be very good at governing. So, there is no need to keep the same individuals to tell us what to do and how to do it. We need to make sure that no individual can be elected to serve in the public service for more than 8 years. This is the most important step we could take toward preventing modern Government from enslaving us and completely destroying us. This change should be gradual and should go in top-down direction.
In the USA, the president is already limited to 8 years maximum. Next step would be to limit Congress (both House and Senate) to 8 years maximum. This step is becoming urgent since the current approach is generating catastrophic results. Eventually, as we transform our Society to become more efficient we could propagate similar changes to the state and local levels.
The next step would be to completely restructure the Tax system. I do not want to go deep into this, but a good reference that I personally think would be the optimal solution is what is known as "The Fair Tax".
We have to understand that Humans like to be free. That is the only way for us to achieve progress. We cannot get to know ourselves and to understand the Meaning of Life if we have someone else constantly telling us what is important and where should be the limits of our activities. I have touched on that problem in a separate post.
We have to be careful and avoid being pushed toward society that Winston Churchill warned us about:
The Left prefers an "equal distribution of poverty" over an "unequal distribution of wealth."I hope we would not need to go that route... It is not just the matter of wealth and poverty. It is also the matter of free thinking and ability to create. We need to minimize our dependence on entities that are trying to make us into slaves. We need to take a full control of our own lives.
True Understanding of Your Contributions
What are your contributions to human society? Very simple. Two things:
- Your children (if you were lucky to have them)
- The results of your creative actions
There is only one exception to this and that would be people who unfortunately got sick or were born with health disorders that prevent them from functioning in a regular way. Those people need to be protected and provided appropriate help.
If you are productive and creative and you care about understanding the Life and the Universe, you will be very important for the future of Humanity. You will be able to bring a true change into the hearts and minds of people you interact with and you may be able to lead them in a right direction. You will be able to do it without much talking, but through your own example.
The most successful leaders are invisible to those who follow them.It is never too late to start doing the right things...
True Understanding of God and Universe
This topic is realy important. It has to do with Philosophy, Science, Religion, and Government.
The Philosophy and Science are trying to find the true answers that can help us achieve true understanding of God and Universe.
The Organized Religion is supposedly trying to bring us closer to understanding of God. However, it is failing. Is it by accident or by purpose, I would let you decide for yourself.
The Government is trying to erase the possibility of any authority that can be above it. It is using people in the worst possible ways to perpetuate its malign growth. The God is the enemy of every Government. If the true understanding of Universe would bring us closer to true understanding of God, then the understanding of Universe is the enemy as well.
Before we proceed, it is very important to realize the following fact.
The Philosophy, Science, Religion and Government are all run or created by people.That is the problem. People come in all kinds of shapes and with all kinds of ideas and motivations.
Philosophy
Considerable limitation is the language as we already discussed. Another one is that most philosophers would like us to understand and accept their personal views, findings, and experiences without providing us with the tools to explore and experience the reality ourselves. They are failing at their task since they do not realize that we need to do it ourselves and experience Physical Reality ourselves.
The failure is not complete since some, more successful philosophers, were able to express themselves very well and succeeded in getting us to think about the important issues. This in turn could lead some of us toward experiencing Life, God, and Universe on our own. It could serve as a good starting point and could inspire us to make progress in our own search for the Understanding.
So, the true goal of Philosophy should not be to try to dump on us the ultimate answers to Everything, but to inspire us and lead us in our own search for the answers.
Science
This would be the extension of philosophy. As Newton liked to call it Natural Philosophy. Problem with science is that for long time in the past it was controlled by the Church and most recently, it is predominantly controlled by the Government.
In the past, if science was proposing ideas that were against the teachings of the Church, the scientists would be burned on a stick.
Today, the problem is more complex. The scientific elite merged with the Government in many ways. It also behaves like the medieval Church. There is no free pursuit of ideas. The scientists are mostly getting paid to do things that those with the funds and money are interested in.
Moreover, the scientific elite is supressing ideas that are going against the current Scientific Dogmas or that are produced by the scientists who are departing too far from it. In short, if the likes of Newton or Maxwell would appear today with some new revolutionary ideas, they would likely be pronaunced as lunatics and crack-pots that should not be paid attention to.
The Science today is in favor of small, incremental results and it does not tollerate paradigm shifts. This is very limiting since the greatest advancements in Science were made often by a few individuals who dared to think out of the box and to jump few steps ahead of the rest of the pack.
Religion
Organized religions were formed in spite of the efforts of the individuals like Jesus or Budha to emphasize that their teachings and their actions were more important than themselves. Those of us who may be closer to true understanding of God would know that Jesus or Budha are no more nor less Divine than any one of us. The difference is only in how much we are aware of it and how much we are in touch with it and how do we live our lives and what we do along the way.
People like Jesus and Budha were primarily philosophers. They just had a different method of exploration and they tried to use different methods to teach others about their experiences and findings. They were more enlightened than the rest of us.
One of the problems of organized religions is that the teachings and methods were overly simplified. The religious texts that were full of symbolism and philosophical content were interpreted literally. The organized religions do not teach people how to use meditation in order to help them transcend the true understanding of God and the Universe. They use a "prayer" and hope that somehow their followers would stumble accross the way to make the prayer work. By pure chance or by some sort of miracle.
The problem is that only a small number of people were born with ability to meditate or to discover the path to proper meditation on their own. Most people need to learn a technique. There are many different ways to do it and anyone can do it if properly instructed. The organized religion, while preaching a need for "meditation" is not really helping people to learn how to do it.
Going to Church without ability to really experience the presence of God is unfortunate. Watching people do that, accepting their charitable contributions, and refusing to trully help them out in their honest attempts is irresponsible.
Government
I think I have said enough about this topic already. We need to get it under control and limit its power. We are failing big time all over the World at this point.
Solution
You may ask now, how are we going to get to true understanding of God and Universe when the Philosophy, Science, and Religion are mostly failing to help us out. Not to mention that the Government is trying to brainwash us into thinking that such a pursuit is not healthy for us and that it is backward and primitive (at least when it comes to God, for now).
The only advice I can provide you is to start thinking about the issues discussed in this post. Allocate time to learn how to meditate. If you can, discover your own way to meditation. Keep in touch with yourself and your thoughts and feelings. Try to explore and learn new things. Use your own judgement and do not let anyone manipulate you. Be good to your children and learn as much as you can from them and while you can. Be true to yourself and your family and
make yourself useful!
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