Sunday, January 16, 2005

The purpose of life

It seems to me that the meaning of life can best be described as our attempt to see reality. I would claim that this attempt contains all the truly meaningful aspects of life. This might seem strange to you as I am claiming the purpose of life is not in any way defined by action, but rather the attaining of a vision. I claim this because I think that upon seeing reality, we will no longer have the desire to do any action that does not result in good. All our actions will conscious actions designed to improve the situations we face.

To begin this process however, the first conscious action we need to take is something I know that we all have done at some point, because I know that children have the desire to learn. This is why they will believe what adults tell them; they want to understand things for what they truly are. However, as we begin to develop ideas of how life works, it is easy to forget the questions we were trying to answer in the first place. I know it happened to me in high school with all the external pressures from school and family. Of course, it is good to be involved and active with these things, but they can lose their goodness if we stop trying to distinguish between the truth or falsehood of our ideas about our life. I think we must all try to remember the curiosity we had as children. The most basic and therefore most important action we can consciously choose in life, is to make the attempt to see our life for what it really is; to try to see reality.