Lord777
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So, it's time to talk about the MEANING OF LIFE. ?
On the one hand, this is a rather "hackneyed" topic - who only and what only said about the meaning of life. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of those who spoke only declared their postulates, but did not substantiate them at all.
- What is the sense of life? one asks.
- The meaning of life is in children! - with pathos another answers him.
And why, on what basis did he come to this conclusion? As they say, HZ. That's how I decided and that's it! And why, why - it doesn't matter ...
Let's try to correct this omission. Arguing about the meaning of life, I am ready to give you the whole chain of my reasoning, the whole list of facts on which these reasoning are based and only then - I will give the final CONCLUSION ... ?
In general, a person begins to wonder about the meaning of his being, only having reached a certain spiritual level. It makes sense to look for an answer to this question only if WITHOUT an answer you literally cannot live on. Otherwise, all this will be nothing more than empty self-indulgence ... ?
I remember very well the first time it happened to me. I was fourteen, on my way home from school. It was a frosty winter evening. The snow crunched underfoot, and thousands of bright stars shone in the bottomless black sky. It was with the sight of this sky that everything began. I stopped, struck by the vastness of the abyss that had piled on me. For the first time, with my childish mind, I tried to comprehend the secret of infinity and ... I could not! A chilling horror crept into my soul. So insignificant I seemed to myself in comparison with this majestic blackness, we all seemed so insignificant, that a little more, and I probably would have screamed. Little by little the horror passed, but the feeling of the Mystery remained. “How can you live doing some petty business,” I wondered, “when there is such an incomprehensible, such a grandiose Mystery next to us ?!”
This incident left an indelible imprint on my entire future life. To this day, I am amazed by the fact that such experiences in one form or another are familiar to each of us. However, for someone they are an impetus, an incentive to realize themselves and their place in this world, and for someone (for the overwhelming majority), they pass without a trace, causing perhaps a slight bewilderment ...
At the time when I was in school, we had no alternatives to the atheistic and materialistic worldview. I plunged headlong into the natural sciences, but the further, the more obvious became a simple truth: “If I am just my body, that is, a certain combination of molecules and atoms, then sooner or later, when the atoms return to their original state, my I will come to the end. " I just won't be! ?
Do you know the feeling that engulfs a person who for the first time realizes the finiteness of his one and only "I"? This whole world will remain, but I will not be. There will be no thoughts and feelings, there will be nothing at all! But why then be born, why live, why suffer and suffer, if in the end you will turn into nothing ?! ?
This is how my acquaintance with philosophy began. All the great Russian literature with the utmost simplicity and clarity tried to show me that the main thing is to live for the sake of the people around me, for the sake of society, for the sake of future generations.
“It is necessary to go to the“ other life of people ”in order to accept this other life as a continuation of our own," Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy instructed. "This is the goal, meaning and happiness of every human person."
“But if, of course, my single“ I ”, - involuntary thoughts arose in my head, - it means, of course,“ I am universal ”! What's the point? " ?
“The meaning of life is to live,” the great teachers continued to instruct. - The highest and final meaning of life is in itself, in its full and all-round development.
- Excuse me, - immediately burst out from me, - but I have something to do with all this, if what awaits me (first for me personally, and in a somewhat more distant future - and all of humanity) is death, which means that still nothing. If I were an animal for whom such questions do not exist, perhaps "life for the sake of life" would suit me, but I am a human being. I have a mind, ? and to understand why I live is as necessary for me as it is for an animal to eat, sleep and copulate ... ?
It seemed that this torture would never end! ?
- Listen, why do you need all this? A friend of mine once asked me with sincere surprise. - After all, people live without stuffing their heads with such nonsense. Here and so the mouth is full of worries: wife, vegetable garden, children ... And you are drawn into some kind of metaphysics. The meaning of life ... What, you won't earn a piece of bread without this meaning? What kind of apartment do you have, two-room? Would you like three or four? So much for the point! Do you need to buy a car? Do you need to arrange a child in a kindergarten? Well, go ahead and do it! And you get bored, you will collect stamps or breed aquarium fish. What other meaning do you need ?!
I had nothing to argue with him. How can the principles of quantum mechanics be explained to an adult savage? Is it possible to explain to a dog or cat why we use a fork and a knife when we eat? Is it worth explaining to the frog you caught that the river in which it lives is already utterly polluted by the plant standing on the bank, that not today tomorrow all life in this river will end? .. ??
And the search for "the meaning of life" continued with renewed vigor. Books, books, books ... ??? An infinite number of the most conflicting opinions. If you somehow systematize everything that I was able to read, you get something like the following. People see the meaning of life: in wealth, fame, in striving for power, in pleasure, in labor, in love, in procreation (i.e. in children), in serving God, in serving other people, in creativity ...
- My dears, - I exclaimed, putting the book aside and starting to run excitedly around the room, - but all these are only parts! Wealth, fame and power in themselves do not mean anything, in and of themselves they are meaningless and absurd! Both that, and another, and the third can serve only as a means to achieve any goal. Having become an end in themselves, they lead a person to a dead end and direct him to the path of spiritual degradation. ?
Pleasure as “the meaning of life” is absurdity, because pleasure is a product (consequence) of this or that activity. It is the brighter and longer, the more perfect activity a person is engaged in. Labor, taken by itself, cannot become the “meaning of life,” for labor is all the same means for achieving certain goals, but not the goal itself. Working for something or for the sake of something.
Love ... ?
? Love cannot become meaning due to its specificity: it is always either a part or aimlessness. In its highest manifestation, love is an expression of the striving for unity with something or with someone, for finding harmony and balance, but what do I care about all this, if the result is death ?! In its lowest manifestation, love is nothing more than a biological impulse, an emotion that is useless from the point of view of the search for the meaning of life. Only a person in whom feelings have prevailed over reason can choose such love as a goal, and goal-setting is the prerogative of reason.
Seeking the meaning of life in children ? is similar to an animal in the sense that it is in animals that the highest manifestation of the “spiritual principle” is caring for offspring, the so-called “maternal instinct”. Procreation is not the meaning of life, but a means of maintaining it ...
And so on and so forth. All the "meanings" that were offered to me became completely meaningless as soon as I remembered that sooner or later I would die. That sooner or later we will all die.
And suddenly ... ?
Suddenly I asked myself such a seemingly obvious question: "And why, in fact, did we decide that 'I' is only a body and that when this body dies, 'I' as a spiritual entity ceases all existence?" The times of militant materialists have sunk into oblivion, a new era stood in the courtyard. The era of pluralism and transparency. ???
Reflections flowed along a new channel. It turned out that in order to answer the question: "Why do I live?", It is initially necessary to give an answer to another, no less fundamental question: "What am I?"
I am human. Everything that I come across, I consider from a human point of view. Everything that surrounds me has only that value for me, because and how it relates to me.
I am Homo sapiens. ? One of the main properties of the mind is purposefulness. I am aware of myself, I am aware of what is outside of me. In order to act, I must understand what I am doing and why I am doing it. I must know what I am. What is what surrounds me, what place do I occupy in this environment and how do I compare with it.
Going beyond the boundaries of my own "Ego", I discover many others like me "I" and learn that they are tormented by the same questions. Some have definite answers. The answers are different and rather contradictory, but they all fall into two conditional groups:
- some say that I have an immortal Soul, that is, infinite in time, others - that there is no Soul, and therefore, once emerging from nothing, after a certain time period I will return to this nothingness again.
The most striking thing is that neither one nor the other of these conclusions can be neither proven nor disproved in practice! At least until the event that is called Death occurs. We have before us two opposite theories, equivalent from the point of view of their truth! This is a classic antinomy, the resolution of which is possible only with the arrival of death.
I still cannot understand how one can be a materialist and see some meaning in life. It is even more difficult to understand what makes people from two equal (I emphasize this word, equivalent!) Assumptions to choose the one that declares all of us and everything that we do, a senseless movement from nowhere to nowhere ... ?
Let's think a little ... ?
So, we have before us two equivalent
️ from the point of view of the truth of the hypothesis. Both at this stage of human development are unprovable, but in order to live and act in accordance with their nature (that is, the nature of an intelligent being), it is necessary to accept as "truth" any of these assumptions.
What we get:
- if we accept as "truth" the assumption that the human "I" is mortal, and this assumption really turns out to be true, our life will have no meaning, because what is the point in the fact that the results of all your activities will have zero for you result?
- if we accept as “truth” the assumption that the human “I” is an immortal Soul, and this assumption really turns out to be true, our life and our activities will have a certain value, that is, a certain meaning, depending on what and how we intend to do. ?
‼ ️ Paradoxically, regardless of whether I am mortal or immortal from the point of view of objective reality, from a subjective point of view, my life and all my actions make sense only if I have an immortal soul, and therefore, live and act according to my nature (to the nature of an intelligent being) I can only in this last case! ‼ ️
The final withdrawal was now only one step away. ? And here, oddly enough, my youthful addiction to natural science came to my aid. Turning to the world around me, I quite naturally discovered that everything in this world is constantly changing. Movement is the main property of the world. But not movement from nowhere to nowhere, but purposeful movement. In its movement, the world strives for ... perfection! ?
Life is constant development and improvement. And if in “inanimate” nature, due to the incommensurability of the scale of life of the Universe and Man, this tendency remained unnoticed for a very long time, then in nature, which we call living, the striving for perfection is obvious. Everywhere and in everything there is a continuous process of increasing the complexity of the organization. Any material system develops from simple to complex.
In its biological development, life on Earth has gone through a number of stages, and Man is its most perfect creation at this stage of evolution. But does this mean that she has nowhere to move further? Such a statement would sound ridiculous! Life is development, and therefore, something more perfect and powerful than the person himself must come to replace man!
Reason is what first of all distinguishes a person from all other, less perfect forms of life. And it is from the mind that something more perfect must develop than itself.
The development of the mind, the development of higher feelings - the development of the Soul! - this is the direction in which a person has to move. This means that in addition to biological progress, which is the primary "meaning" of plant and animal forms, man has spiritual progress. It is he who dominates in the program of our development, and it is he who is the meaning and goal for a person!
Thus, a direct answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" sounds like this: "The meaning of life is in development and self-improvement!"
Awareness of the practical importance of the question of the "meaning of life" and the search for a more or less positive answer to it is the foundation on which all our activities are based. Without this, it is impossible to become the master of your destiny or change anything in your life for the better. It all starts with an idea. Further actions and achievements are only consequences. Ancient wisdom says: "What is above, so is below." Therefore, the first thing that needs to be done by a person who has embarked on the path of self-improvement is to ask himself with all seriousness and understanding the importance of the matter: "Why do I live?" Ask and try to answer. Without this, all subsequent work will be a waste of time ...‼ ️
On the one hand, this is a rather "hackneyed" topic - who only and what only said about the meaning of life. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of those who spoke only declared their postulates, but did not substantiate them at all.
- What is the sense of life? one asks.
- The meaning of life is in children! - with pathos another answers him.
And why, on what basis did he come to this conclusion? As they say, HZ. That's how I decided and that's it! And why, why - it doesn't matter ...
Let's try to correct this omission. Arguing about the meaning of life, I am ready to give you the whole chain of my reasoning, the whole list of facts on which these reasoning are based and only then - I will give the final CONCLUSION ... ?
In general, a person begins to wonder about the meaning of his being, only having reached a certain spiritual level. It makes sense to look for an answer to this question only if WITHOUT an answer you literally cannot live on. Otherwise, all this will be nothing more than empty self-indulgence ... ?I remember very well the first time it happened to me. I was fourteen, on my way home from school. It was a frosty winter evening. The snow crunched underfoot, and thousands of bright stars shone in the bottomless black sky. It was with the sight of this sky that everything began. I stopped, struck by the vastness of the abyss that had piled on me. For the first time, with my childish mind, I tried to comprehend the secret of infinity and ... I could not! A chilling horror crept into my soul. So insignificant I seemed to myself in comparison with this majestic blackness, we all seemed so insignificant, that a little more, and I probably would have screamed. Little by little the horror passed, but the feeling of the Mystery remained. “How can you live doing some petty business,” I wondered, “when there is such an incomprehensible, such a grandiose Mystery next to us ?!”
This incident left an indelible imprint on my entire future life. To this day, I am amazed by the fact that such experiences in one form or another are familiar to each of us. However, for someone they are an impetus, an incentive to realize themselves and their place in this world, and for someone (for the overwhelming majority), they pass without a trace, causing perhaps a slight bewilderment ...
At the time when I was in school, we had no alternatives to the atheistic and materialistic worldview. I plunged headlong into the natural sciences, but the further, the more obvious became a simple truth: “If I am just my body, that is, a certain combination of molecules and atoms, then sooner or later, when the atoms return to their original state, my I will come to the end. " I just won't be! ?Do you know the feeling that engulfs a person who for the first time realizes the finiteness of his one and only "I"? This whole world will remain, but I will not be. There will be no thoughts and feelings, there will be nothing at all! But why then be born, why live, why suffer and suffer, if in the end you will turn into nothing ?! ?
This is how my acquaintance with philosophy began. All the great Russian literature with the utmost simplicity and clarity tried to show me that the main thing is to live for the sake of the people around me, for the sake of society, for the sake of future generations.
“It is necessary to go to the“ other life of people ”in order to accept this other life as a continuation of our own," Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy instructed. "This is the goal, meaning and happiness of every human person."
“But if, of course, my single“ I ”, - involuntary thoughts arose in my head, - it means, of course,“ I am universal ”! What's the point? " ?
“The meaning of life is to live,” the great teachers continued to instruct. - The highest and final meaning of life is in itself, in its full and all-round development.
- Excuse me, - immediately burst out from me, - but I have something to do with all this, if what awaits me (first for me personally, and in a somewhat more distant future - and all of humanity) is death, which means that still nothing. If I were an animal for whom such questions do not exist, perhaps "life for the sake of life" would suit me, but I am a human being. I have a mind, ? and to understand why I live is as necessary for me as it is for an animal to eat, sleep and copulate ... ?
It seemed that this torture would never end! ?- Listen, why do you need all this? A friend of mine once asked me with sincere surprise. - After all, people live without stuffing their heads with such nonsense. Here and so the mouth is full of worries: wife, vegetable garden, children ... And you are drawn into some kind of metaphysics. The meaning of life ... What, you won't earn a piece of bread without this meaning? What kind of apartment do you have, two-room? Would you like three or four? So much for the point! Do you need to buy a car? Do you need to arrange a child in a kindergarten? Well, go ahead and do it! And you get bored, you will collect stamps or breed aquarium fish. What other meaning do you need ?!
I had nothing to argue with him. How can the principles of quantum mechanics be explained to an adult savage? Is it possible to explain to a dog or cat why we use a fork and a knife when we eat? Is it worth explaining to the frog you caught that the river in which it lives is already utterly polluted by the plant standing on the bank, that not today tomorrow all life in this river will end? .. ??
And the search for "the meaning of life" continued with renewed vigor. Books, books, books ... ??? An infinite number of the most conflicting opinions. If you somehow systematize everything that I was able to read, you get something like the following. People see the meaning of life: in wealth, fame, in striving for power, in pleasure, in labor, in love, in procreation (i.e. in children), in serving God, in serving other people, in creativity ...
- My dears, - I exclaimed, putting the book aside and starting to run excitedly around the room, - but all these are only parts! Wealth, fame and power in themselves do not mean anything, in and of themselves they are meaningless and absurd! Both that, and another, and the third can serve only as a means to achieve any goal. Having become an end in themselves, they lead a person to a dead end and direct him to the path of spiritual degradation. ?
Pleasure as “the meaning of life” is absurdity, because pleasure is a product (consequence) of this or that activity. It is the brighter and longer, the more perfect activity a person is engaged in. Labor, taken by itself, cannot become the “meaning of life,” for labor is all the same means for achieving certain goals, but not the goal itself. Working for something or for the sake of something.
Love ... ?
? Love cannot become meaning due to its specificity: it is always either a part or aimlessness. In its highest manifestation, love is an expression of the striving for unity with something or with someone, for finding harmony and balance, but what do I care about all this, if the result is death ?! In its lowest manifestation, love is nothing more than a biological impulse, an emotion that is useless from the point of view of the search for the meaning of life. Only a person in whom feelings have prevailed over reason can choose such love as a goal, and goal-setting is the prerogative of reason.Seeking the meaning of life in children ? is similar to an animal in the sense that it is in animals that the highest manifestation of the “spiritual principle” is caring for offspring, the so-called “maternal instinct”. Procreation is not the meaning of life, but a means of maintaining it ...
And so on and so forth. All the "meanings" that were offered to me became completely meaningless as soon as I remembered that sooner or later I would die. That sooner or later we will all die.
And suddenly ... ?
Suddenly I asked myself such a seemingly obvious question: "And why, in fact, did we decide that 'I' is only a body and that when this body dies, 'I' as a spiritual entity ceases all existence?" The times of militant materialists have sunk into oblivion, a new era stood in the courtyard. The era of pluralism and transparency. ???Reflections flowed along a new channel. It turned out that in order to answer the question: "Why do I live?", It is initially necessary to give an answer to another, no less fundamental question: "What am I?"
I am human. Everything that I come across, I consider from a human point of view. Everything that surrounds me has only that value for me, because and how it relates to me.
I am Homo sapiens. ? One of the main properties of the mind is purposefulness. I am aware of myself, I am aware of what is outside of me. In order to act, I must understand what I am doing and why I am doing it. I must know what I am. What is what surrounds me, what place do I occupy in this environment and how do I compare with it.
Going beyond the boundaries of my own "Ego", I discover many others like me "I" and learn that they are tormented by the same questions. Some have definite answers. The answers are different and rather contradictory, but they all fall into two conditional groups:
- some say that I have an immortal Soul, that is, infinite in time, others - that there is no Soul, and therefore, once emerging from nothing, after a certain time period I will return to this nothingness again.
The most striking thing is that neither one nor the other of these conclusions can be neither proven nor disproved in practice! At least until the event that is called Death occurs. We have before us two opposite theories, equivalent from the point of view of their truth! This is a classic antinomy, the resolution of which is possible only with the arrival of death.
I still cannot understand how one can be a materialist and see some meaning in life. It is even more difficult to understand what makes people from two equal (I emphasize this word, equivalent!) Assumptions to choose the one that declares all of us and everything that we do, a senseless movement from nowhere to nowhere ... ?
Let's think a little ... ?So, we have before us two equivalent
️ from the point of view of the truth of the hypothesis. Both at this stage of human development are unprovable, but in order to live and act in accordance with their nature (that is, the nature of an intelligent being), it is necessary to accept as "truth" any of these assumptions.What we get:
- if we accept as "truth" the assumption that the human "I" is mortal, and this assumption really turns out to be true, our life will have no meaning, because what is the point in the fact that the results of all your activities will have zero for you result?
- if we accept as “truth” the assumption that the human “I” is an immortal Soul, and this assumption really turns out to be true, our life and our activities will have a certain value, that is, a certain meaning, depending on what and how we intend to do. ?
‼ ️ Paradoxically, regardless of whether I am mortal or immortal from the point of view of objective reality, from a subjective point of view, my life and all my actions make sense only if I have an immortal soul, and therefore, live and act according to my nature (to the nature of an intelligent being) I can only in this last case! ‼ ️
The final withdrawal was now only one step away. ? And here, oddly enough, my youthful addiction to natural science came to my aid. Turning to the world around me, I quite naturally discovered that everything in this world is constantly changing. Movement is the main property of the world. But not movement from nowhere to nowhere, but purposeful movement. In its movement, the world strives for ... perfection! ?Life is constant development and improvement. And if in “inanimate” nature, due to the incommensurability of the scale of life of the Universe and Man, this tendency remained unnoticed for a very long time, then in nature, which we call living, the striving for perfection is obvious. Everywhere and in everything there is a continuous process of increasing the complexity of the organization. Any material system develops from simple to complex.
In its biological development, life on Earth has gone through a number of stages, and Man is its most perfect creation at this stage of evolution. But does this mean that she has nowhere to move further? Such a statement would sound ridiculous! Life is development, and therefore, something more perfect and powerful than the person himself must come to replace man!
Reason is what first of all distinguishes a person from all other, less perfect forms of life. And it is from the mind that something more perfect must develop than itself.
The development of the mind, the development of higher feelings - the development of the Soul! - this is the direction in which a person has to move. This means that in addition to biological progress, which is the primary "meaning" of plant and animal forms, man has spiritual progress. It is he who dominates in the program of our development, and it is he who is the meaning and goal for a person!
Thus, a direct answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" sounds like this: "The meaning of life is in development and self-improvement!"Awareness of the practical importance of the question of the "meaning of life" and the search for a more or less positive answer to it is the foundation on which all our activities are based. Without this, it is impossible to become the master of your destiny or change anything in your life for the better. It all starts with an idea. Further actions and achievements are only consequences. Ancient wisdom says: "What is above, so is below." Therefore, the first thing that needs to be done by a person who has embarked on the path of self-improvement is to ask himself with all seriousness and understanding the importance of the matter: "Why do I live?" Ask and try to answer. Without this, all subsequent work will be a waste of time ...‼ ️
Waiting for life