02/28/2025
What Is Your Purpose?
I don't know about you, but being asked that always kind of annoyed me a little.
As if I need to prove I have a right to exist!
As if some deity laid out an exact path for me to follow, but forgot to include the map... (or left some cryptic instructions that can only be interpreted by more holy followers than me)
As if being alive wasn't enough, in its own right.
And don't get me wrong, I have goals. I just assign them that much importance - as goals - rather than the entire point of my life.
Goals are flexible. They can be changed as we learn and grow. My goals have certainly changed throughout my life as I absorbed more and more information.
Sometimes goals increase.
Sometimes goals become obsolete.
But it's no big deal, because they're just goals. Goals are expected to change based on data.
Purpose is inflexible, it's generally only good for one or maybe a few limited things.
Take a spatula, for instance. Great for scraping semi-solids off surfaces. Has limited appeal for other tasks.
Many people think that life itself must serve a purpose.
"We're here to learn lessons," some proclaim.
"This world is a prison or hell we must escape!" others insist.
"Our purpose is to love and serve God," the religious fervently swear.
"We are here to evolve through reincarnation based on our karma," many believe.
What drives all these different belief systems?
What makes them so appealing that vast numbers of people are willing to kill, and die, over their differences of opinion?
I think it's because of this attachment to the idea of purpose.
If you believe that your only purpose is X, and someone else comes along and basically says that you have no purpose, that's essentially equivalent to them saying that you are disposable, unnecessary, or obsolete.
Yet, deep inside, you reject this idea. So you fight for your inherent right to exist.
Wars have been fought throughout millennia because one group of people believe that they have a superior purpose to the other group.
It's ironic, because, just like in a kitchen, there is room (and need) for more than one utensil. Should the spatula deem itself more worthy to exist, we would quickly defend the salad fork, and the spoon, and the knife, etc.
And the kitchen is not going to war with the living room, even though food is arguably more essential than a comfortable place to sit.
That said, I believe that we don't require any purpose beyond just living and experiencing life.
The philosophy that makes the most sense to me is the idea that we are all parts of one consciousness, experiencing itself subjectively.
In this worldview, there is no right or wrong way to live. There is only that which we choose or do not choose to experience.
And this one consciousness doesn't impose itself on its parts with any set of requirements. Each part can choose and choose again, over and over, without limits or restrictions.
Do we pay attention to and direct our atoms about how they should move and function? Does one atom say to another, "you're going the wrong way"?
At an even more abstract level, quantum foam appears and disappears. Certainty without certainty.
Yet observation locks in the path of the particle.
So it is with life, and beliefs.
Whenever we observe something, we make up a belief about it, and that "locks in" a set of experiences, but only for ourselves.
Others, who have observed different things, have created different beliefs and locked in those reality experiences, for themselves.
Transcendence is all about shifting the viewpoint to instead observe the beliefs - and the results of such beliefs - and purposefully changing these beliefs, in order to change the experience of reality.
Try it, it's fun!
