Recently I posted a series of questions that I suggested it would be fascinating to ask every person we met for the rest of our life. I promised that I would answer those questions myself — even though most of the visitors to this site already know how I would answer them — just for the record.
Here are more of my answers to those questions.
What is the point of human life? Does it have a point? Is it simply, and nothing more than, an expression of a biological entity that begins in utero and ends at death? Is there life (that is, individual existence, consciousness and awareness of self) after death — and, for that matter, before birth? Is there such a thing as the “soul,” defined as a metaphysical individuality? If so, what is its function or purpose?
I think these questions drive to the heart of the human condition. That is, I believe we experience our condition as humans differently — perhaps radically differently — depending upon our answers to these questions.
In my own mind, I want to go further. I find myself wanting to say that I believe humanity’s complete and total dysfunction…its appalling self-destructive behaviors…are all the product of what I perceive to be nonbeneficial or incomplete answers to these questions.
There is no question as to our dysfunction. There are those who like to point to the “progress” we have made as a species through the centuries and the millennia, but I’m sorry…I’m unimpressed.
As we read this today, one-quarter of the human species lives without toilets. Some 1.6 billion do not have electricity. Just under 1.7 billion have no access to clean water. And these are not simply inconveniences. Thousands die each day from preventable health issues, such as malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia.
Wait. It’s worse. Over 650 children will die on this planet in the next hour because of starvation. Not because of some exotic or unfamiliar disease for which we have not yet found a cure. Because of not getting enough food to eat. This, on a planet where we throw away more unfinished dinners in the restaurants of Paris, Los Angeles, and Madrid than it would take to feed all of those 650 children for a week.
All of this raises some interesting questions: How is it possible for 7 billion members of a single species to all want the same thing—survival, safety, security, peace, prosperity, opportunity, happiness, and love—and be unable to produce it, even after thousands of years of trying? Is it possible — just possible — that there is something we don’t fully understand about God and about Life, the understanding of which could change everything? Is it possible that there is something we don’t fully understand about ourselves and about who we are, the understanding of which would alter our lives forever for the better?
Now I know there are those who answer “no” to those last two questions. And I think this is part of our dysfunction. We refuse to believe that there might be some data “still out there” that could alter our entire perception of reality.
I am not among them. I am not willing to look at the world the way it is and “tsk-tsk”, or downplay, those statistics, pointing instead to whatever “progress” we have made, such as it is, in improving the human condition. We are still threatening each other with total obliteration. The only difference has been the lethality of our weapons. Whereas before it was sticks and stones, then rocks and arrows, then knives and bullets, now it is bombs that annihilate millions in ten seconds. Such has been humanity’s “progress” from its caveman days.
Well, I am not willing to look at that and call it “progress.” And I’m certainly not going to stare into the face of those stark global statistics and point instead to all the good that we have achieved. I am, instead, going to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw here: “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That’s the essence of inhumanity.”
So out of my refusal to be indifferent to the progress we haven’t made, let me offer my answer to the questions above. First, my reply to those last two inquries…
Is it possible — just possible — that there is something we don’t fully understand about God and about Life, the understanding of which could change everything? Yes.
Is it possible that there is something we don’t fully understand about ourselves and about who we are, the understanding of which would alter our lives forever for the better?
Yes.
Now, my answer to the questions with which I began this writing.
“What is the point of human life? Does it have a point?”
Yes. The point of human life is to recreate ourselves anew in each golden moment of Now in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are.
Put another way, the purpose of life is evolution. That is both its Purpose and its Process.
“Is it simply, and nothing more than, an expression of a biological entity that begins in utero and ends at death?”
No. Life is much more than that. It is an eternal expression of a singular spiritual entity that has no beginning and no end.
“Is there life (that is, individual existence, consciousness and awareness of self) after death — and, for that matter, before birth?
Yes. There is no such thing as death. What we call death is merely a process of re-identification.
“Is there such a thing as the ‘soul,’ defined as a metaphysical individuality?”
Yes. The Soul is the individuation of the pure energy, or the Essential Essence of the Universe, that some of us call God.
“If so, what is its function or purpose?”
The function of the Soul is to provide a vehicle through which this Essential Essence expresses and experiences Itself in discrete and individual form.
I believe we are all on a journey here. I call it The Journey of the Soul. I believe that (to speak metaphorically) we come through the Door of Birth and leave through the Door of Death. I liken this to white light beamed through a prism. Beamed one way, we divide into three parts — Body, Mind, and Soul. Beamed the other way, we reintegrate into the Single Essence of the Soul, which is the pure energy of the Essential Essence, singularized.
It is my understanding that our journey is cyclical, or circular, with no beginning and no end, but with a purpose that is served by the very fact that it is circular. It is my awareness that the cyclical nature of life’s endless expression is what creates the possibility of its expansion through evolution.
When I look at the world as it is today I again think of wonderful Mr. George Bernard Shaw, who offered us this: “I hear you say ‘Why?’ Always ‘Why?’ You see things, and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream of things that never were, and say ‘Why Not’?”
And I think of William Shakespeare, who wrote: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Now I know…I know….what the rationalists and those who are deeply into Scienceism (the theology that Science has the only, and all, the answers) will say. “More ‘woo’,” they will say. While the religionists join them in declaring: “Blasphemy.”
But let’s get back to Mr. Shaw. It was he who observed: “All great truths begin as blasphemies.” He also said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Finally, Mr. Shaw asked a question that actually brings pain to the heart: “Must, then, a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?”
Do you want to see something that describes Who We Really Are with imagination? Watch this. Look what the geniuses at MindValley did with the messages of Conversations with God. I dare you to watch this and say, “Ho-hum…”
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