What is the Point of Life?
It was 20 minutes to one. I got up and walked down to meet my wife. As I walked I felt all that energy flowing out of me as the experience of being clear from the things that recently had prevented me from writing or getting on with life. I felt myself to be a predator, but a good feeling, and I didn’t have to kill. As I reached the bottom of the hill the old hassle about the final destination of mankind arose again. Every so often I stood still and explored this. It was like looking right along each corridor of life and seeing there was no final destination. Each one only pointed to exactly where we are – a happening that includes being an animal, a struggling human, an expression of cosmic events. If we did evolve consciousness or body, there is no set good place to end up. There is only existence just as it is now – a life poised between the opposites. There is more to this that I find difficult to explain in words.
But perhaps that is we are constantly not seeing what we are, a very strange mixture. So strange people go to extremes viewpoints in their fruitless attempt to deal with what life is. One such viewpoint is that life and living it are a heap of shit, massively painful, that life’s a bitch and then we die, so why not kill ourselves now? We see this lived out day by day by many young people and also those who achieved fame who have taken in the view that their life is painful and meaningless, and an accident in a world that doesn’t give a f**k about them; so they end it.
Another view is that some strange masculine creature called God is in charge of everything so we can continue living with hope. But even some of these people ask the stupid question, “Why does God allow such terrible things?” That is like standing before an erupting volcano as massive amount of lava is approaching their house and they are crying, “Why are you doing this to me?”
It is strange that God is quoted as saying, “God created man in his image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Stranger still that the image of god was male and female – so why was the female side of God edited?
As for, “Why are you doing this to me?” Perhaps it is because they have missed the point that there is only existence just as it is now – a life fixed between the opposites. Yes we are all the time living and facing Chaos and Order – Because the two face and meet each other we have the action of Creation. With just Order one’s life would be stuck in the sort of life like robots who only can do just what their programming allows. That is the sort of life people want who ask, “Why does God allow such terrible things?”
Unfortunately for them, human life is stuck between Chaos and Order . But there is more. Recently a man sent me the image of a pile of shit in response to the things I write about, I suppose thinking it would upset me. How could it upset me when I see that we are also living a life poised between the opposites of Creation and Decay – so I told him he and I are a heap of shit, for we have a good load of it in our lower intestine, because without it we would not be able to carry on living. we have to include the power of decay to continue to live – but we also have the power of creation. It is missing this wonder of our existence between huge opposite’s that causes us to constantly miss this amazing life truth that defeats many people. For people believe that only one is right, so the opposite must be wrong.
Take darkness and light – the media is full of this huge mistake, seeing darkness is evil and light as the sign of goodness. It is when the two meet that the wonder of colour and form appear. If you were just light you would be lost in the light without any shadow, colour and form, so you wouldn’t know you exist for you only are aware of being because you are a compound of darkness and light.
The same applies to goodness and evil. The great women and men of our times have all gone beyond the limits of the good to create the new. As individuals we are interfaced between the huge forces of biological drives and social expectations, but we can seldom satisfy both. What we inwardly desire may be socially frowned upon, what is socially expected of us may spark no real interest internally. Of course one need to keep the balance between the opposites we face.
So the way of resolution for many people is through creativity, the unity of the opposites or through innovative actions such as seen in the lives of people like The Rolling Stones. The Rolling Stones were at the forefront of the British Invasion of bands that became popular in the United States in 1964 and were identified with the youthful and rebellious counterculture of the 1960s. Rooted in blues and early rock and roll the band started out playing covers but found more success with their own material songs such as I Can t Get No Satisfaction and Paint It Black.
To find that creative balance we need to remember that we are the latest expressions of the HUGE creative process – The Big Bang. We tend to think of ourselves as local creatures and think that our mothers and fathers were our local beginning. But our planet and bodies are made of star material. Our mother did not create us in her womb for no human person could work and create from a cell the amazing changes and intricate processes that are necessary to form a human baby. It is LIFE – whatever that mystery is – that formed you.
A single cell, which is a seed from which all life forms evolved from, doesn’t become old or die because it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it does so it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organism. We all started from the original one cell, and we, your and my body, are the result of gathered experience.
No plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories, education and programming you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient self.
Finding this very ancient self, hidden as it is by all your personal thinking and opinions, you find you are free from all the painful emotions, suicidal urges and personal hurts. To explore it see Opening to Life – https://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/
So my summary is that we are part of an amazing cosmic process. When we take an overall look, a simple view is that it is all about procreation – to form or create seeds that are sowed on our earth, but it is often not producing human babies, but the creative products that are the fruit of human lives. Humans are like any plant life, as such it has challenges for we are constantly at he centre of so many opposites – negative and positive energy, matter and anti matter, sleep and waking, male and female, pain and pleasure, light and darkness, life and death, and death and resurrection, war and peace, matter and anti-matter, negative and positive, the void and bodily existence.
To be whole we need to accept and meet these opposites. As human seeds we continue despite failures if we dare to face challenges. What can we become? Well it seems we have freedom of choice, for we have not been made as robots and there is no fixed direction – so it seems obvious to me that we can become murders, saints, perverts and real lovers, parents of children and our own creativity, we can become suicides or pathfinders, space people and explorers of other worlds – including the depths of space and the immensity of ourselves, for we can become the wonderful creators like That which formed us.