Why are we alive?

In this podcast, I contemplate the question 'Why are we alive?' Moreover, is there a purpose in life? It's one of those questions most of us don't attempt to consider, although thinking about it can lead to some sense of resolution. Music by Michael Vignola - 'Purpose'.

Transcript

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Speaker 1 0:00

Hi, Don Thompson here with another podcast for you today, and today's topic will be perhaps a little philosophical and esoteric, but, I believe, an interesting and important topic to explore. And I'll title it why Are we Alive? And I'd like to ask this question and ponder it a little bit, and hopefully it'll help us to consider a couple of topics related to mindfulness, looking at mindfulness from that perspective, in other words, why are we alive? And if we ponder this question mindfully, what kind of answers do we come up with? The first thing I would say about why are we alive is that there are different schools of thought related to why we are alive.

Speaker 1 1:30

I would say that, in general, you could say that there is no purpose behind life, aside from the fact that nature has created it from its own primordial machinations. So you have a process of evolution, you have a process of life unfolding on the planet. Scientists don't have a question why do we have this life? What is the purpose of it? What is the purpose of animal and insect life, which is often so short-lived so short-lived it's barely even noticeable, really. Maybe an insect will last a week or two and then you get into the higher animals, like the mammals, and they have a perception and a perspective, you might say, and the fact that they can taste and see and hear and feel, but they have no mental activity in the way that human beings do. They have no sense of an eye In the way that human beings have a sense of an eye. I'm not saying that animals are not valuable or conscious or anything like that. I have to watch what I say there because people are very touchy about that. People love animals and I love animals too, so I'm not trying to tout human beings as being so superior to animals, but we have to say that human beings have this ability to think and to actually have this sense of mindfulness, in other words, to take a step back and see life as if you're observing it, to look at it, to analyze it, to look at it.

Speaker 2 3:17 Speaker 2 3:19

And I would say that a lot of people on the planet today live in a sense, sort of an animal-like existence, in that they're really concerned about surviving, they're concerned about putting food on the table. They've had children and they're concerned about their children. They want their children to get an education, they want their children to get fed and all that good stuff, and so, in many ways by just living out the life of their parents. They grow up, they go to school, they get some kind of career, they get married, they have kids and their kids have kids, and the cycle continues.

Speaker 2 4:05

And there isn't a lot of reflection on why are we doing this, what purpose does it serve? And people have a sort of a desire to have children. You know, there's sort of like an organic, almost visceral desire among people to have children and they don't really think about it too much. Their parents had children and they think, well, I'll just do the same thing that my parents did. There's not really a lot of thinking about it, so I'm not saying that that's a bad thing. I mean, life needs to continue. If nobody had children, there would be no new life.

Speaker 2 4:43

Of course, with artificial intelligence, one could say that we're going to be a robot. We could say that we're going to have robotic life or AI life or whatever, but that's a whole other topic. But in terms of human beings, you need to have people that are willing to have children in order to continue the species. Is that really the paramount of human activity? I think if we look back historically, we think about the people that we admire, historically, people that the academics and others are telling us that we should admire has to do with people that have had some kind of an impact on society, whether that be political impact, whether that be economic impact or whether that might be philosophical impact. In terms of philosophy, well, why are we here? Why do we live? We might live really, in essence, just to have this awareness of the world, and by having this awareness of the world, we become, in a sense, the eyes of the world, of the earth, the earth being our mother or father, mother, father, whatever you want to call the earth. The earth is really the progenitor of human existence, and you'd have to look at the earth as almost a sentient being or a conscious being that wants to have life.

Speaker 2 6:13

Scientists will disagree with this, of course. They'll just say it's a random thing, but it does seem to me, on reflection, that there is some kind of intelligence behind this whole exercise, that it's just not happening in a random fashion. The scientists can argue with you until they're blue in the face about well, it's just random, it just happens to be the role of the dice and it's just the way things came together molecularly or biologically or whatever, and you just happen to have this process that Darwin talked about in terms of selection, the selection process that has to do with survival, that survival instinct becomes paramount. It's the need to survive. But why have life? Why do that so? In other words, why would life be created, be existed just to survive, just to eat and to have more children? I mean, it seems sort of pointless, to me at least.

Speaker 2 7:25

So people like myself will ponder these questions and think well, what is there? Is there another purpose? Is there another idea behind this thing called life? Well, what is it that we're trying to accomplish in our lives and what is it that we're reflecting in terms of a broader sense of what is the dynamic of life on this planet and what is life trying to do? One thing that does occur to me is that life is trying to be aware, aware. By being aware, we become the eyes and the ears and the taste and the touch and the smell of the world, of the earth, and we are, in a sense, an extension of the earth in that way, and in the East and in the spiritual countries where they emphasize spirituality, it's not so much done in the West today. There's a lot of it, but not as much as in the East.

Speaker 2 8:26

In the East there's a whole tradition of the Yogis and they have a particular perspective on what the goal of life is. And the goal of life is really evolution, awareness into cosmic awareness, into a greater awareness, into my you might say God awareness. The Buddhists will look at this and say, well, these are just words and labels and all that stuff. But I don't think that the Buddhist will argue necessarily that the intention of the yogi to explore awareness is it all wrong or bad at all? I mean, there's many aspects of Buddhism that deal with the exact same topics and the exact same Kinds of endeavors that the yogis deal with. So I don't think that there's really a conflict.

Speaker 2 9:16

You might say that Buddhism and in the yoga philosophy, buddhism coming from Shakyamuni Buddha and Hinduism Giving rise to the yogis, a much older Vedic Hindu philosophy giving rise to the yogis and you might say to the Buddha as well, that the Hinduism gave rise to the Buddha. So these philosophies of spirituality the date back, you know, many, many thousands of years. Just out of the gate. They had a completely different opinion about the purpose of life than scientists. They were scientists in a way, but they weren't scientists in the same way that our modern scientists or scientists. They weren't reductionists from the standpoint of they weren't trying to find the irreducible elements and then to be able to look at them, to analyze them and then to manipulate them, which is usually the goal of modern science is to understand something, but then the understanding of it is, in essence, to be able to manipulate it, oftentimes towards Good ends, like medicine or whatever you know. So there's manipulation of, you know, the elements of nature in order to create medicines that are then used to cure people or help people, which is all great stuff. On the other hand, you do have a manipulation of the environment that might ultimately lead to some kinds of issues related to the environment itself, if you're not thinking about the environment holistically.

Speaker 2 10:53

So again, to circle back around to the talk in terms of its topic, what is the you know, purpose of life? Why are we living? Why is there life? And if life has to do with the fact that there is an awareness coming out of life, higher life forms like the human being, and that awareness is the goal of life. But yet this awareness exists within the context and framework of a physical thing, a body, and this physical body needs to survive, then you have an inherent sort of tension between the physical needs of the body and the spiritual needs, you might say, of the mind or of awareness that seeks something else, and this seems to be the, the, the interplay, the dynamic of human civilization or human beings that has existed for quite a long time and the.

Speaker 2 11:58

The more recent view is that we should not look to the awareness aspect of Life so much. We should look more towards the practical exercise of science in order to, to you know again, mitigate physical suffering, generally speaking, physical suffering, but also mental suffering, of course, and that can arise out of physical suffering or Mental suffering, as it is a standalone thing. I mean, you have psychiatry and psychology that Look at these types of suffering. So the sciences are looking from a practical perspective at life. So it really gets down to, or comes back to, well, what is the, the purpose of life?

Speaker 2 12:48

Because if the purpose of life is to Live and to be aware and to perhaps enjoy yourself, perhaps to fulfill your desires, perhaps to have dreams and ambitions and to fulfill them, if the purpose of life is to do that, that's interesting. But we're all going to die, we're all going to reach a point where we don't exist anymore. We don't exist in the same way. So, as I've said on another podcast, I do believe that pondering these questions is good because, ultimately speaking, the one thing that we really are certain of is that we will die, and, as far as I know, there has been no way to get around that. At least physical death Now you can contemplate. Is there some kind of an existence after physical death? And certainly religion and spirituality have to deal with this issue, of course, and so it's really trying to create a salve to these issues of questions regarding life after death.

Speaker 2 14:07

And if the purpose of life is to live and then to die, it doesn't make a lot of sense. In a way. It doesn't make a lot of sense if you look at it from a purpose, a goal, in terms of looking at it from a mindful perspective of just understanding or feeling or being in the present moment and being aware of the beauty of the present moment. And again it goes back to well, we become the eyes and the ears and the sound and the touch of the earth itself, and by doing this we become an extension of the earth and even in the yogic tradition of moving beyond and to higher levels of consciousness. We could be the vehicle for the earth itself to reach these higher levels of consciousness.

Speaker 2 14:55

This is sort of how I've come to look at it is, I believe, that human beings are really an extension of the earth and they have a consciousness, and that they have an obligation, you might say, or certainly a potential to evolve that consciousness to a level that is unique, unique in the sense that it isn't like the animals or it isn't like other types of life on the planet. It has a unique consciousness and unique expression of consciousness, and that we should consider this, I think, and that the purpose of life, you might say, or why we are alive, is to be the eyes and ears and sound and touch of the Earth, the consciousness of the Earth, and to extend that consciousness to wherever it may go into the universe. Perhaps I think the desire of humanity to reach out to the stars through technology is the same impulse of the yogis wanting to reach the stars through meditation. I mean, the yogis would use meditation to transcend into, you might say, cosmic consciousness. That's the idea, and space travel is the same kind of impulse, but through a technological vehicle as opposed to a spiritual or mental vehicle, and the interplay between the East and the West. And these different approaches show oftentimes the same kind of motivations underneath, you know that buttress them the desire to evolve and expand and to move out from the Earth into the cosmos, whether that's a yogi in meditation or whether that's a scientist getting themselves and their colleagues on a spacecraft and blasting off to other stars.

Speaker 2 16:59

So I'll leave the podcast at that. I really enjoyed this one. It was a little bit of an interesting diversion and we'll see where it goes. I might pick it up again and talk about this a little bit more later. Until then, I appreciate it and talk to you soon. Bye-bye. You.