That title is clickbait, I admit. I’m sure just about everyone, including me, would love to know the meaning of life, and will likely not be able to resist even the faintest possibility that someone could tell them in a 600-word essay.
The following is from a thought I recorded in my journal last week, then reworked a bit for this post. Who knows, maybe three minute’s reading will leave you just a little bit closer to some sort of understanding of life. Or maybe you’ll vehemently disagree and resent the time wasted. Either way; food for thought.
There is a living being growing and spreading across the earth. This entity falls under the scientific class, Mammalia, and its species is Homo-sapiens. This species, often referred to as humanity, is a single entity that survives over the long term, like so many animals and plants, by propagation and renewal, essentially cloning itself into billions of seemingly separate animals, each a nearly identical replica, each coded to continue this self-seeding survival mechanism.
This race is very intelligent and has learned how to use its memory capabilities to manifest complex thought processes.
But there is a problem: humanity has turned these complex thoughts inward and thought itself into believing that each separate animal is a unique and special entity of its own. Each of these thinking entities now believes it’s an individual, a whole “self,” separate from every other. That self now has its own selfish desires: to enjoy enriching experiences on a daily basis, to live forever, and to avoid all pain and suffering. It wants other selves to treat it in a certain way—a way that helps it to believe in its separateness, its specialness, its heightened importance. Which is funny, because how can each and every individual clone be favorably compared to every other? A mathematical impossibility, obviously. And yet, each of the billions wants to feel special and wants the others to help it to feel special by treating it accordingly. Though some of the population may claim that it believes “all men are created equal,” in truth, each of these “individuals” wants to feel that it is somehow superior to at least a significant number of others.
This thought-up need to be seen as special only leads to pain and misery, anxiety and violence. Such violence that people—even couples who claim to love each other—bicker and fight, scream and cry, hurt each other in different ways, psychologically and physically. Such violence that the race invents weapons of war in order to kill each other in greater numbers. Such violence that individuals will stop at nothing to prove they are the “best,” competing ruthlessly and carelessly for higher positions, social status, fame, and wealth; a competition that can only have winners and losers, perpetrators and victims.
This thought-up need to be seen as special leads to depression and suicide, loneliness and misery, feelings of emptiness and fear. It leads to easily hurt feelings. It leads to a powerful need to “prove” oneself in a million different ways, from the need to be right in an argument, to the need to control as many other “individuals” as possible.
And strangely, nobody has seen the truth of what’s happening. This urge to be special, to stand above the crowd, is so powerful, and the fear of “non-self” so strong, that nobody wants to give up the illusion and fall back into the original truth—that each leaf on this tree called humanity is only a piece, a fragment, of a single whole. No single fragment can be better or more important than another. No single piece—each useless without the rest—can be “special.”
Until every human being gives up identifying as a unique self (again; the very delusion that leads to the fear that causes the need to stand out) and realizes its true identity as one single whole, there will be no peace.
Oh, so, what is the meaning of life? I promised an answer, didn’t I? Well, the question itself is formed out of the delusion of separateness, and is therefore an illegitimate question. Get with God, as they say (realize our wholeness) and the question will fall away. So, I guess I lied. I told you you’d be mad at me!
Sorry.
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As I sit here on my porch with the faintest of breezes moving the humid air through the trees and the puppy on my lap I feel great comfort in the pause that it took to read your piece and take a step back into nothingness, just space. Letting go of the striving, the me-ness, the task orientation is a relief in this moment. Just maybe, that’s what life is. You described what life isn’t with great clarity. Thanks Don.
the meaning of life I don't know, but gazing into your tender eyes in this picture, enjoying and appreciating your words and seeing your beautiful soul is already quite meaningful. Thanks for the meaning you bring to life 🙏