The Biggest Questions...

“What’s the significance of life? Who are we? Is human life just a dream, from which we never really awake, as some great thinkers claim? Are we submerged by our feelings, by our loves and hates, by our ideas of good, bad, beautiful, awful? Are we incapable of knowing beyond those ideas and feelings? Listen to Shakespeare and Joseph Conrad:

Is the reality we know a reality imposed to us by nature? Is the reality and the meaning of life a creation of men, such as music, or love or colors (science tells us that there isn’t such things as music, harmony or colors in the physic world. Just traveling molecules: “There is not, external to us, hot or cold, but only different velocities of molecules; there aren’t sounds, callings, harmonies, but just variations in the pressure of the air; there aren’t colors, or light, just electro-magnetic waves,” said H. Von Foerster.

Are we – and all living beings – just “survival machines, blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes,” as Richard Dawkins states? Are we incapable of knowing beyond the frames imposed to us by nature? Is there any significance for life in a Universe of billions of stars that ignore us? Is there any significance for life in an Universe whose dimensions and nature overcome our understanding?

Love gives meaning to our lives – as do friendship, or art, or faith in God. These are factors of true happiness, of inner peace, of feelings of harmony, allowing meaning to our existence. But there is the other side. There is the cruelty of life, the pain, the evil, not to talk of death. They are the hidden tigers, ambushed and ready to attack the imprudent, to use an image present in the Buddhist Scriptures.

It is between these pendulums- the positive, the one that gives happiness and meaning, and the negative- that our lives are lived. And when we meditate about all that, we arrive at a diverse and disagreeing set of thoughts about the meaning and purpose of life.”