On Life

What can a human ever say about the meaning of life? Life, which is so complex and subjective—why don’t people realize that thinking of this is, ironically, a waste of their lives?

Oh, how beautiful would things be like if instead we decided to live, rather than to think about living. Not bother one’s mind with reality or possibilities, but focusing on what can be done, on what we want to realize. Why should we spend an entire life pretending to know where we are going, when in reality we live for tomorrow, hoping for a new turn, an unexpected twist, that, if our calculations don’t fail us, will launch us into a reality where our dreams are a possibility rather than actual dreams.
But after all, we are only human. And as such, we are subject to the darkness of our soul and being. We are subject to the fact that the happiness of one person is the grief of another—a perfect, vicious circle that prevents anything from ever being perfect; it stops anything from ever being fully black or fully white. I do not intend to show humans as a hopeless being that can do nothing but obey the darkness or the light that lies inside. Obviously, it is much more complex than this. We have decisions, the real thrill of life, the events we all meet; we all avoid them as well. Our minds evolve through these choices, of which we can only imagine the consequences—we never know if a seemly nice action will instead turn us into our own monsters. The future is, after all, unpredictable.

So, speaking objectively (as much as one possibly can), what then is the reason for existence? Why not just please ourselves and hope for the best, wish to the stars that that myth we have termed luck will always come to our aid? The answer to this question is not as complicated as we wish for it to be. Simply, because we are human. Unlike other beings on this planet, we are cursed and blessed with a mind that can handle self-consciousness, with a mind that can create abstract realities such as morality and then place them on a pedestal that allows us to coexist. We cannot simply live to please ourselves because we can’t handle it—we like change, growth, improvement, and even other phenomena such as pride, acknowledgement, and what we call love. Once again this existence can tie in with the abstract concepts of light and dark, a.k.a. good and evil. The power of our minds, the unique powers of our minds, must be bound to protect us from ourselves. For a being that is capable of killing without a secondary, unpleasant effect, will obviously do it again. A balance is then created: our minds, our spirit, our geist, unconsciously forms the concepts of the good and the evil, we could say that out of the principle of natural selection. There must be limits, for humans are in always, in essence, egoistic.

Everything that follows is a result of our mind. The human morality allows us to coexist; it forms a necessity not only to please and survive oneself, but to ensure the success of fellow beings. Our mind’s evolution creates in our hearts a feeling of good and evil. And in all of nature’s greatness, evil predominates: feelings such as anger or depression, feelings such as those we refer to as deadly sins, remain beneath our being. The fear that the heart develops over these concepts is so great that it limits the mind from being too powerful; it limits one from being devilish. And since there must be a balance, we also come to desire the opposite of these: happiness, love, and other feelings which remain as a mystery of evolution. And with the predominance of evil, these desirable feelings become a greater goal, something we require to live fully and successfully.

Humans as we are, we try to overcome these limits, and at the same time strive to keep them in place. We develop politics and religion to limit our progress for being too great to tolerate each other. And yet we remain ambitious: with each passing generation we wonder more, we question more, and we begin to see the realities of our existence, some of us labeling them miracles, the others labeling them as nature’s doing. Regardless of this, the balance of light and darkness remains a rule. Our decisions become tests of one’s being, tests which through the ploys of our mind become also tests of one’s true desires and origins. Subjectivity of our minds shows us how our minds are really working for themselves, keeping us as an individual, but remaining wise enough to follow the established order.

The place of religion is an interesting aspect of this evolution of the mind. As of today, one can dare to say that religion, man’s greatest invention, is dead. The concept of religion can be separated into individual concepts such as faith, hope, love, necessity, gratefulness, or even heirloom, to name a few. The concept that (among the really religious at least) remains a rule is morality; that morality which allows our minds to work together and survive. People don’t realize that to some religion has become a business or a routine. To the rest, it is a real feeling of faith. It is human need to believe in a greater reason for existence, an eternal motivator and incentive that will forever live to keep us from destroying each other. What really is God? God is, in a way or another, within us and all around us. God is our name to the perfect balance that exists in the world and universe. He is the light that allows plants to grow and allow all of us to live, just as he is the darkness of a black hole that consumes matter. Most of us choose instead to think of him as a giant man with a white beard and a toga. In this context, we see that religion is nothing but an invention which resulted from someone combining morality with faith. The Pope, the Dalai Lama, the many rabbis in the world, they’re all humans, like the rest of us, and they also have within their minds that presence of balance, that presence of God, however you want to call it. They may have a stronger control over their minds as a result of knowledge and wisdom, but they are still human. So is it truly necessary to use religion as a guise to kill millions of people, when what really lies behind chaos is the natural egoism and desire of power of all humans, our dark side?

To return to the true purpose of this text, we see that the purpose of life is not of religious essence, as religion, like most things around us, is man-made. Do not expect, however, to find a solution to all questions in the reason of life, for I have already stated it briefly a while ago. The purpose of life is life itself—as redundant as it might sound to some, it makes the most sense. We live. We grow up, we experience thing, we learn, we fall in love, we see our future generations following our steps, and then we die. Isn’t that fulfilling enough? Why don’t we stop and think for a while on the beauty of this concept? Our minds allow us to experience things that few other living beings known to date can experience. We can feel beauty, in a landscape, in our creations, just like we can feel pain and repulsion. We can be sad, and happy, and experience a range of emotions that allow us to appreciate our existence and each other. And we can die—we can take a rest when we have gone through all that we needed to go through. I am aware that accidents occur, and people die who don’t deserve to die, but life and death are simply beyond us. After all the perfect work of nature, can’t we say that every event has a reason behind it? Can we, as the subjective humans we are, challenged the perfect work of nature? Would it really be beneficial for us to become great, to overcome death, at the cost of this beautiful reality?