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The meaning of lifeSince the dawn of time, the ultimate question has been asked in a number of ways. Why do we exist? What is the meaning of life? Does God exist? What is the origin of the universe? How does the world exist, and what is its origin or source of creation? Why is there something rather than nothing?This site offers you the possibility to discuss this fundamental metaphysical question with others. It also allows you to share your opinion and react to other people's points of view. What do you believe in? What do you think is the meaning of life?
Whether you are a believer, an atheist, an agnostic, or a clever mix of all three, you are welcome! Your point of view can be serious, absurd, even bordering on completely nuts. However, the following two things are essential to this dialogue: respect and an open mind.
Respect: you may defend your opinion and try to prove the falsity of another, but it is forbidden to attack its author directly. Fascism and generalisations are strictly verboten! An open mind: if you can't handle having your convictions being put into question, this might not be the place for you. For this same reason, a sense of humour is highly recommended! If your beliefs forbid their being made fun of, you might not want to participate in this dialogue. You don't have to register in order to be able to comment or to start a new thread. We do, however, highly recommend that you register. By doing this, you can easily look up everything you've posted and, if you like, modify it. You'll also be able to track new threads and new comments. Please note that this site is neutral and does not promote any one religion or belief in particular. The opinions and texts that appear on the site are the sole responsibility of their authors. The site reserves the right to refuse and delete any submitted content without notice. You can contact us here. |
The amount and quality of information bound to energy regulates the "purpose" of energy. It is always on a chaos-order scale, and it has a certain degree of coherency. The largest coherency is the optimum between the two extremities: the chaos and the order. This coherency is material existence (but possibly not only that). There is a certain degree of coherency in all your life - including your environment, your events, your body, your organs, cells, etc. All of them function with a certain degree of coherency, and the best way of life is when you maintain the largest possible coherency.
When coherency decreases then illness appears, health degenerates, and when coherency reaches a certain minimum then the things, events, organs, etc. cease to exist.
However, this doesn't tell anything about the ultimate meaning of life, or a...
The value of an answer depends on the practical use of it. The ultimate questions of life, the universe, and everything play a fundamental role in our beliefs, thinking habits, and in our whole life. So answering such questions does matter. It is more likely that the answers give something to our lives than that they take something away from it.
In case of understanding, it's better to be curious of the truth than to be satisfied with lies.
However, in case of personal satisfaction and good feelings, it's better to be satisfied with lies that are believed to be true.
It's a matter of individual choice whether one pursues the truth or accepts something that may be lie - whether one wants to be right or happy.
As far as free will goes, there are more experiments on consciousness showing that our decision is not merely the product of consciousness, but rather something within us, something beyond our awareness. The decisions are simply reconsidered and expressed via our conscious self, but they raise much sooner in our brain than the actual thought o...
The answer to an objective question must not, and cannot, rely upon individual beliefs. Saying that 2*2 equals 5 because I believe it does, is mere nonsense, and it's not different with anything else to which we try to apply an ultimate answer.
This is nothing more than your mere belief, in lack of objectivity. You pretend to know where to find the highest limit of human knowledge and capability - but most likely you don't know it, you just believe that you know...
Why would it be lost? You can still find wisdom and knowledge originated from thousands of years ago, like religions, or things we use like paper, candle, gunpowder, just to name a few.
Did we lose knowledge? Most certainly yes. Is that knowledge really so valuable that we should have to pass it on to the next generations? Most certainly no. All the valuable knowledge is still available. This is like evolution itself. Strong species don't die out - weak ones do. So useless knowledge dies out, while important knowledge lives on.
Of course human judgment sometimes classifies useless and unhealthy things valuable and vice versa. To admit such judgments and discriminate right from wrong, we need wisdom. But wisdom is not something what you can teach to others. You can share wisdom, but it doesn't mean that people will become wiser - everyone has to understand it hims...
You confuse some things here.
Imagine you have a pot with 10 liters capacity. Even if there is only 1 liter water in the pot, you still have enough water to cook one portion of rice, and you don't need another 9 liters of water before you could cook one portion of rice.
The same is with our brain and understanding. Just because we don't use all our brain's potential capacity, we don't necessarily lack the ability to understand and answer these questions. You can't say that 10% usage is not enough for the answers, you can't say that 20% should be enough, you just can guess, but that's not certainty, that's not a fact, that is just your own belief.
Human brain didn't evolve dramatically for the last 2000 years, yet, we live way more advanced life than those 2000 years a...
One who knows not the limits of human understanding should not claim what is beyond it.
And who would know its limits?!
I think there is none... They're the same, they consist of the same, and they have the same processes. Then what makes up something while it does not makes some other things?
I think the universe is constant, and consciousness is the only variable. In other words, everything stands still, except our consciousness is moving, thus we experience the world as a moving "thing".
Yogis of the early centuries came up with solutions we call pretty much bizarre, while deeply spiritual ways like Zen Buddhism conclude solutions which are simply not understandable for a western mind.
It is therefore of most necessity first to prepare yourself to deny all what you believed to be real, good, right, or true. Only with such attitude will you become able to understand the path, even if you can't comprehend the end of it.
Buddhist monks use a famous illustration for this. Imagine that you have a cup of tea. The cup is full of tea, as normally, when you just prepare to drink it. Someone comes along and wants to fill your cup wi...
It is an unfortunate humor of life that you have to decide whether you want to live a meaningful or a happy life. Because if you want a meaningful life then you have to care about the future, while if you want to live happily then you have to care for nothing but the present.
It's like Zen, or the Tao. Do whatever you do and be aware of whatever you do, don't let your thoughts flow around in the past and future actions and events. Life is now, and if you think about your past, well, you can learn lots of things by repeatedly thinking of your past mistakes, but you miss your present while you think of the past. And when you plan your future, well, it might work out and you might have the possibility to live your life nearly as you've planned, but you can never know when will come something new what you didn't count with. So either you analyze and plan your life, or you live it.
Of course we all have to work for living. And i...
Am I not right? What else would the church do if they would have to face a real god who is not like they told us?
You're wrong. I want to learn and understand. And I want to know the truth. But the truth begins with accepting that the Bible contradicts with reality. Of course we can say that God is testing us and this is the reason why the Bible is not cut and dried, but the fact is that this is only the defensive reaction of religious people on the questions of nonreligious people.
Religion is secured with the concept of punishment on not believing, i.e. if you question God's truth then you go to hell, if you question that the religion mediates God's words then you go to hell, etc. But this is not the truth, this is the lack of truth. Religion does not offer any possibility to overview and change its own dogmas. Even if God would come here and say that this and that is not as it was written in the Bible, the church would probably declare Go...
Well, it turned out that either way you'll arrive at the eightfold path, since happiness can be ultimately defined as the riddance of suffering. However, this path may seem to be more joyful if you look at it as it begins from happiness, yet, this thought is just an illusion which creates a Karmic bondage, thus it has to be demolished eventually.
Buddha also taught, anyway, that the true nature of all the living beings is the buddha-nature, meaning that in essence everything what lives is buddha. The teaching that our true nature is enlightened leads to the conclusion that there is something in our mind what veils this truth from us. This something is the ego, which doesn't really exist, because there is no part whatsoever that can be called our true self....
However, I would also gladly discuss these with other people around here, but it looks like everyone knows everything and no one has questions :)
I kind of feel uncomfortable knowing that I don't know very much :)
In other words, realizing that in reality he is just an imagination in a dream. Realizing how incredible potential in his "life" actually is because of the fact that his life is only a dream.
Finding the ultimate answer means finding the ultimate truth. The truth in a dream is that it's just a dream. Awakening to the truth opens the door to the real potential of that kind of existence.
The reason why the world is as it is, is that we create it this way. It is not God who made the world like this, it was us. The difference between animals and human brain is that the human brain's frontal cortex - which is responsible for matching patterns, creating connections, responds, and to make decisions - is much larger according to the other parts of the brain than in animals.
Why do we need a leader? Because we are addicted. It's not just the drug user or the alcoholic who is addicted, basically it's all humanity who is addicted. The difference is just the object of the addiction. Most people are addicted to stress, or different kinds of emotions, which are basically caused by hormones or peptides, which are simply mol...
Just stop and think about what is necessary to experience this feeling, and then you'll find what the statement "happiness is the meaning of life" actually means.
The question beyond this is: what is the purpose of this? Where do we get while we fulfill the meaning of our lives? Does it make sense to live our life in a meaningful manner? It will all vanish eventually...
Does it even make sense to ask why we are here?
It is really good, however, to know that people exist with a secure feeling about their meaning of life, and how they want to achieve it. Even though my happiness depends on different things, the concept of this whole thing appears to be the same for me too.
It simply makes me feel good to know that some people really think about their lives and really find meaningful answers.
I don't really get this, why do many people think that if God wouldn't exist then life would have no meaning?
Read it - read "Mysteries of the Ages".
As much as I've looked inside that book, I wouldn't say that it gives an answer to anything. It simply states such things as "God is Creator of ALL". It seems to be nonsense to me to write a book about proving the biblical theories and philosophies, and then putting the whole explanation to such assumptions...
On the other hand, there can be just as much (if not more) books written about the opposite issue, starting with the assumption that "God is not real".
So this is not really an answer.
Well, I'd prefer to say that if there is a God who is guiding the universe then he is rather truthful than good. I can imagine that there are parameters which we don't know about and these parameters change someone's life in the way it is, meaning that there are children suffering of illness and such things, which we don't understand but still there may be a logical reason for them.
Let's say the purgatory is actually Earth. This means that we've already lived a life before we were born here, we just don't remember it, and now we have to suffer according to our sins in our past life. This would explain all the sad and bad things a man has to face in his life on Earth.
Then we can say that God is truthful because all the people receive pain and sorrow according t...
If you'd really think so, you still could dedicate your life to open other people's eyes to see this. However, to achieve that, you'd need to have proof for your thoughts.
I don't think I'm better than anyone, I just probably use my brain more :)
I see the futility of theories based on beliefs, thus I try to find scientific explanations which are unreachable without keeping up the possibility that everything might be wrong, or that there is no sense to ask anything.
The only way we can figure out any kind of truth is logical, based on deterministic laws of nature, and it has to start with the assumption that everything we've ever learned is false.
However, sooner or later we may find, as Heisenberg did, that there are levels of reality where uncertainty cannot be avoided. Thus we find that the fundamental laws of the universe cannot be described by states of the world, only by processes which connect emerging new states with previous ones. Then again, it is still not quite sure for me whether this uncertainty occurs in the measuring ...
Complex things are based on randomness with a much greater possibility than simple things. Randomness occurs according to the law of great numbers.
Randomness doesn't mean no control. There can be control even if it's random. The particles can behave according to laws even if their movement is basically random.
Now this is a good question for religion. I often think about this in relation with God. If God knows everything then he knows that a defective person cannot be as good as a healthy person. So if the achievements expected for the reach of heaven are objective and general, then weak, defective or "less lucky" people have a smaller chance to get into heaven. However, God had to know this before, and if this is so, then he simply doomed th...
Think of yourself :)