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.

A Level RE, Television and Thermodynamics Combine Forces to Reveal Meaning of Life

I'm really sorry to do this, but you best stop what you are doing.  Please, just put that down, put it...there you go...listen to this.  Don't pick it up again when you think I'm not looking, just cross your arms and concentrate.

It appears, without too much of a fanfare, that the meaning of life has been revealed.

I'm going to walk you through it, but take your shoes off.

I'm sure you've all seen the work of Professor Brian Cox, his enigmatic billion year stare and his uncanny knack of making extraordinarily diffuse astrophysical topics seem as easy as pie (I myself got caught up in the Stargazing Live zeitgeist at New Year and went to a lecture by the Manchester Astronomical Society about the birth, life and death of stars.  There was a distinct cooling in the room when everyone realised that these topics are much more difficult to understand than watching three TV shows would have us believe, and that it isn't in fact possible to somehow absorb a PHd thesis while eating pickled onions on the sofa.  They do sterling work, though: http://www.manastro.co.uk/).  His new series, Wonders of the Universe, commenced apocalyptically with the nature of time itself.  (And you should watch it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/zf9dh/)

In this dimension at least, it seems the entirety of creation is bound in a Sisyphean work - to move forward, to change, to live and then to die.  From the tiniest bubble of the quantum foam to the vastest nebulous juggernaut of deep space, on every level, there is only change.  Time is a real thing, it exists (although no-one really knows in what form, see Cox's documentary "What Time Is It?" for a clearer introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VgzCMmaVLM&NR=1), and it compels us more than any other force of nature.

entropy at the core of a galaxy

But, inasmuch as we can understand it, this Universe is flinging itself headfirst into the future, and only that.  We are moving from a state of low entropy (complex, structured objects like galaxies, planets and skyscrapers) or order to states of high entropy or disorder, where line and form and shape and definition is sacrificed to the uniformity of chaos (no outlines, just an amorphous ooze of sameness).  This logic, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (that the Universe aches for balance everything out, so eventually all concentrations or lumps of stuff - matter, heat, etc. - will be dissembled and spread out, ashes to ashes) is applied by Cox to explain that this will also happen to everything within the Universe.  Its death is when all is balanced out, all is obliterated, all is smoothed out.

What strikes me as most glorious about this idea is that it is very similar to what many human civilisations have concluded about the meaning of life throughout history.  It seems that our constant exposure to death has led to an innate understanding of this "permanent change" of existence, from the Great Nothing at the beginning, leading us inexorably to the Great Nothing at the end.  The earliest gods were the sun and the moon, and these are extinguished every day, to be reborn.  I mentioned a while ago that it is as if we carry the most ancient memory of our existence before, and very occasionally we manage to communicate it.

The Maori explain it thus:

Tane raising the sky with his feet in the Maori creation myth

From the conception the increase,
From the increase the thought,
From the thought the remembrance,
From the remembrance the consciousness, 
From the consciousness the desire. 


The word became fruitful,
It dwelt with the feeble glimmering;
It brought forth night:
The great night, the long night, 
The lowest night, the loftiest night, 
The thick night, to be felt, 
The night to be touched, 
The night not to be seen, 
The night ending in death. 


From the nothing the begetting, 
From the nothing the increase, 
From the nothing the abundance, 
The power of increasing, 
The living breath.  

The Three Marks of Existence at
everydayink.blogspot.com

The most profoundly succinct of all these understandings of this now scientifically proven reality, was that of the Buddha.  His Three Marks of Existence are as follows, and they managed, 2000 years before, to express the same beautifully bleak reality:

1. All things are impermanent, always changing (anicca)
2. All existence is suffering, caused by attachment to impermanent things (dukkha)
3. There is nothing everlasting, no essence, no soul, no self (anatma)


So there, the meaning of life seems to be nothing more than an acceptance of this impermanence, a realisation that all will change and die, and the realisation that life is infused with the special, most tragic beauty of a rainbow, most elegant because it is fleeting, but we are part of it.