Meaning of Life May Not Be Basket of Roses Shocker

After my last (and admittedly rather excited) post about the meaning of life being that of constant change and death and rebirth, I have had feedback from quite a few people which seems to suggest that people may have found this a bit dry and bleak.  After all, if all we are here to do is exist then be blown away to become something else, then our Nectar points and our children and our insurance premiums and, y'know, the whole of our lives, may well look a bit pointless and shit. 

But I think this chronically misses the point.  I think human beings have, on the whole, missed the point on this for the entirety of their existence. 

Why should your life be special and different and imbued with the traces of Gods?  Who ever promised that it would be?  Your parents? Your teachers? Ah, wait, no, the Bible did.  The Qur'an did.  The Talmud and, in fact, almost every religious text reassures, soothes and cajoles us that we are here for a reason.  The coincidence of consciousness is too great, too important, to have spontaneously occured as a quirk of evolution (best tell everyone that's not real either).  All the other frissons of fate that reality gave birth to are less important than the fact that we are aware that we are thinking. 

My point was that there is something special about this - we are starstuff contemplating starstuff - as Carl Sagan used to say.  But I don't see how that is incompatible with what I have been saying.  If anything, our awareness of our own mortality gives the exquisite shudder of tragedy to our lives.  Religion (particularly but not exclusively Western religion) caters to a deep-seated, primal fear of death.  They proffer a bunch of plastic flowers - beautiful, yes, but not alive.

The religions that promise everlasting life are essentially death cults, shushing our anxieties with pictures of clouds and virgins.  Why would anyone want that?  At some point would it not be a much bigger adventure to be something else?  Are we so vainly wedded to our personalities that to imagine not being us for a second is enough to propel us churchwards?  I don't see that this is a necessarily nihilistic, heavily-kohled, purple velvet, angsty statement.  I see it as part of a Cosmic Bargain, really.  Even if the codified forms of reincarnation don't exist (which I don't think they do, I don't believe that if I steal someone's chips that will contribute to an Eternal Karmic Scorecard where my points will be totted up at the end of class and I will be assigned a body based on my behaviour - a bit like Boots Advantage points, or the perennial "No Pudding If You Don't Eat All Your Greens" maxim) then we will become the air, the trees, the bits of pavement and the cup you drink from...eventually.

We have to die in order for other things to live, that's all there is to it:

If we have welled up from the morass of non-sentient beings to be able to experience this most noble of realities, even for this blinkiest of seconds, then I am happy to have been part of that, before dribbling back down from whence I came.  In that time we can conceive of an entire Universe in our minds, we can meet people, create people, learn and wonder and jizz and fight and live all the life that's coming to us.  Is that really so horrible an idea?  Does our common heritage with everything single object around us not create a feeling of peace and oneness (and more than anything else, a bit of perspective on all the mundane shite that we wear about our necks as emblems of having lived, mediocre medals to a life we think we cherish) rather than a pompous sense of disgust that we might have more in common with the world around us than we like to think about?

It baffles me that specialness has been equated with difference for so long.  Has that ever really been a policy that has worked for humanity?

Death is an inevitability, but it is up to each and every one of us to decide how to deal with that fact.  There are many cultures who deal very well with death - just look at the Mexicans - because they realise that to confront death is to make it less scary:

To accept the incontrovertible scientific truths that are out there, that we as a species have worked out, that we are elemental beings, just as subject to the Laws of Nature as everything else, from the amoeba to the supernova, lessens the clamour of the bullshit, lessens the import to be given to meaningless things (bearing in mind at all times that, so mired in debt am I that my corpse will belong to Bob Diamond and the loan companies. I'll never buy a house, learn to drive or do any of the things which I fully acknowledge are nice and convenient to do as an apparently fully-fledged grown-up and taxable citizen) but instead allows freedom where it really counts, in the fucking mind.  That is why it is our duty to learn as much as possible about everything in the world, more, to live as much of everything in the world as possible.

I'd rather be a bunch of real flowers that blossom and twist to get at the sun, rather than cling to the dusty permanence of plastic ones.