What is the purpose of life?

[Talking Ass]

Not meant to be funny. We are molding language as we work with it. Scientism is (well, at least I think so) a worthy new entry. I neologize quite often. You?

[Dan Rowden]

Er, guys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

[Tomhargen]

I thought it was funny because it was clever.

And I do my best to use the words my forebears invented, because I have a nagging suspicion that they were smarter than me. I leave the neologizing to other cleverer souls. I wonder if I could get a job as a neologist? Who would pay for people to study new things?

[Tomhargen]

I slapped myself, Dan.

[jufa]

No one can tell anyone what the purpose of life is for no one can define life, not even the purpose for their own life. Why? because no one has found or discovered logic for existence. And because no one know the purpose for life, then there cannot be a purpose of life which can be defined in words.

Never give power to anything a person believes is their source of strength - jufa

[Talking Ass]

It would have had more meaning, Tom, if you would have spanked yourself. Or, if Dan would have spanked you. More fitting to the sycophancy one often witnesses here.

Also, thugs and dope-fiends invent words. Computer geeks. Scateboarders.

"But if you think about it I didn't ask what my purpose is."

I guess that is true. What threw me off was 'because at this juncture in my life I don't see one'. I heard a violin...Also, dawning (or diminishing) awareness is implied.

Still, if one can discern no 'purpose' to the existence of things, to existence, one will forever be hard-pressed to locate any possible purpose in 'consciousness', and of course in ourselves.

Scientism as a sort of fetish for mediocre minds, I like that! The subject of group masturbation. Oooooh. How kinky! (It would, you'll admit, be much more interesting to get the girls involved too).

Wikipedia entry, Scientism: "It is used to criticize a totalizing view of science as if it were capable of describing all reality and knowledge, or as if it were the only true way to acquire knowledge about reality and the nature of things".

Oh God, oh God---why is this ringing a bell. Stop, stop it's hurting my ears! Minds that 'totalize'. Endless conversations between totalizing egg-heads. Again, it is pretty clear, isn't it, that such 'totalizing' is a tactic for mediocre intelligences. Now, a 'totalizing rationalism', that shit sounds deadly! I'd take Byron dressed up as Tinkerbell sprinkling angeldust as an antidote, I'd be sure to invite some hot chicks to the masturbation sessions, and I'd sit back on my haunches and watch the whole thing play out.

So:

---Life may indeed have 'purpose'.
---To negate teleology might be just a facile tactic to avoid larger considerations.
---It could very well be that subconscious and unconscious 'purpose' also exists. So, the analogy of comparing our own selves to an iceberg is not unconsiderable. (Except in a limited, closed-loop 'conversation' where, anyway, you know the answer beforehand).
---To imply that one knows, through and through, things one in fact CAN'T know is, well, too QRStian for my taste. Besides, I suspect buggery.
---Spanking is far more interesting than slapping.
---Once again, a Talking Ass wins the day on GF.

[Talking Ass]

Er, thanks. (*slightly worried expression*)

One problem I see, and one can toss in as an example the Enlightened Sage (like these Zen dudes people refer to around here) is that those sages themselves seem to sense and imply that their realization of The Nature of Things is the natural development of those things, or out of those things. I think this is true of all religious processes. Buddhist, Hindu, Christian. One 'discovers' a path to a whole group of realizations, and one 'understands'. Is this an arbitrary choice one makes? It could be this or it could be something else altogether?

"I possess the true Dharma eye, the marvelous mind of Nirvana, the true form of the formless, the subtle dharma gate that does not rest on words or letters but is a special transmission outside of the scriptures."

I suggest to you, ladies and gentlemen, freemen and wankers, that in a very real sense, with the above, we are selected by a purpose. We discover a 'purpose', we enter into a purpose.

One day, like dejavu, I will turn my head a little and let y'all see into my Dharma Eye, the Dharma Eye of an Ass who Talks. You will see, through the spider webs of your 'consciousnesses', littered with gum and condom wrappers, bits of soggy leaf, a cigarrette butt with a lipstick smudge, a mind so marvellous and pouring forth light and brightness so radiant you turn away and cover your faces. And you will repeat amongst yourselves, in hushed, reverant tones:

"The Talking Ass's wisdom does not rest on words or letters but is a special transmission outside of scriptures!"

Ouside or 'scientism', outside of totalism, outside of rationalism, outside of wankerism.

Deja-vu writes: "Teleology smells like fear when the genuine enquiry wears off. People love to make out life has a purpose beyond their knowledge when they're afraid to actually give it one. If the universe itself were conscious, we'd already have the future the theists maintain exists."

You are quite right about that, I think. Fear and also laziness. But I am a little concerned about the verb give. That is why I would refer to an understructure in us, and a process of discovering what is there in it. Just like the Buddha (*bows, genuflections*) talking about 'the true form of the formless' and a 'dharma gate'.

Who invented this Dharma Gate may I ask? Dan?

Can you really say there is an individual who decides to 'give' a purpose to things? That we sit around in council and come up with an edict? I don't think decisions are ever really made like this. It is a fallacy that we think they are. Lack of self-knowledge.

According to the Sages, the purpose is already there, realized. It exists, eternally. This Golden Mind, etc.

[Tomhargen]

You speak of entering into a purpose. Like the purpose is already there. Purpose is just a human concept as far as we know. Do you separate humans from any other beings out there in the universe? Does God have a purpose? Could something eternal have a purpose? I think a purpose is created. It is a construct of man because to simply be is to difficult. We are driven by our genetic need to procreate, like all other forms of life. But procreation is simply an extension of survival. It is as close as one can get to living beyond the point of death. The genetic need is simply a method of protection that dates back to the earliest man who was but an animal. The man who found self consciousness was just to damn scared to recognize his own triviality and to damn scared to face the winter so he decided to give himself purpose. He built a hut. He made clothes and a fire and blah-dy blah. But in the end purpose is just a shield from fear. The human mind is so vast and so powerful that it would destroy itself if it truly took the time to think. About anything. Purpose was spawned because we are afraid of our own insignificance. Religion came from the disease that is purpose. People needed to believe that someone out there had a purpose for them. That their lives meant something beyond the glaringly obvious shit speck that it must logically be. Saying that we will some day see your magnificent mind and that you will one day step in to your purpose is the exact same thing as saying that you will step into the kingdom of Christ and be known as a man of the kingdom. I for one will shoulder the burden of knowing that I am alone. That my purpose is mine to choose. That I am a dirty beast who will walk on a dirty planet for a couple seconds. We will never grasp the infinite and we will never perceive The Totality and God is a construct to help us live. I will be strong. I will not be led by the weak to satisfy their needs in this life.

Religion is a crock of shit and changing the terms around doesn't mean a damn thing (you know who you are out there). Purpose and religion are all part of the massive weakness of man.

[Tomhargen]

Because believing that you will "enter into a purpose" is religious in itself.

[Dan Rowden]

We have no choice in "creating" a purpose for ourselves if we are conscious. Purpose is a necessary manifestation of consciousness, as are valuing, judgements and discrimination.

These things are consciousness.

[Dan Rowden]

Consciousness necessarily engages and is engaged in the temporal - the causal flow of one state of affairs to another; this is where purpose arises. However, one may of necessity have purpose without being egotistically attached to it in a deluded fashion.

[Dan Rowden]

Those terms are symbiotic. [meaning/purpose]

[Dan Rowden]

God that was stupid. Was that deliberate?

[Talking Ass]

It sounds, Tom Hargen, like you are of the 'ascending animal' and not the 'fallen angel' school of thought? And it is true that that view---essentially the scientist's view n'est-ce pas?---is quite powerful and absorbing. So, interesting how the Units of Information that we have at our disposal come to form, and contain, and also to restrict, our conception of the possible.

Alright, could you please ring the bell, Tom, and tell the others that class has begun?

Very good! Today's lessons will touch on introspection, a backward step, turning-about, and turning the eye inward.

The quotes about 'Dharma eye' and all that came from quotes of the Buddha, and the Buddha, around here, is the wisest among all wise. The Buddha and a group of other very-wise-ones are the Ultimate Reference. They exist on a pinnacle. They have gone to the farthest point in comprehending Life and the choices they have made are the most sober and the most intelligent. Ultimately, I assume, their understanding and realization-level trumps even the other minor divinities: Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard, however, could easily have kicked away his pulpit, donned robes, and ascended to the wind blown heights.

"I possess the true Dharma eye, the marvelous mind of Nirvana, the true form of the formless, the subtle dharma gate that does not rest on words or letters but is a special transmission outside of the scriptures."

The Buddha-teachings came out of the Indian school which could really only be descrived as a mega-religious school of thought, ethics, social organization, jurisprudence, science, medicine, etc. It is a good idea to keep this in mind. You can't really just shave off a portion, tweak it, and fit it into one's modern life (as I see it). But, mostly, my point is to stress that whatever one does with it, what one is doing is strictly and nearly absolutely religious. It's just that one hopes that one has purified one's religious inclinations and burned away the dross so that only the most relevant essence comes to dominate and direct consciousness.

Class! Attention please! (*raps burly club with rusting nails on the Mediaval teacher's desk stained with dried blood and generations of coffee-cup rings*) Today we shall examine Tom's delightful essay, for which he gets a B+ (the highest grade being, yes you guessed it! A=A)

Tom wrote: "But in the end purpose is just a shield from fear. The human mind is so vast and so powerful that it would destroy itself if it truly took the time to think. About anything. Purpose was spawned because we are afraid of our own insignificance. Religion came from the disease that is purpose. People needed to believe that someone out there had a purpose for them."

Despite what anyone says (about having no purpose, becoming empty, etc.) it would be quite absurd to say that practicing Buddhists (the buddhist religious) have no 'purpose'. You simply cannot modify and rededicate your entire focus and existence to a 'non-purpose'. With an almost cruel focus, therefor, the Zen practitioner reassesses his basic and most essential relationship with life, matter, being, existence. There would be no reason to do any of this if there were not an objective. So, on some level, one could indeed say that the religious tendency (in this strict, utterly focused sense) is indeed a fear-reaction. One fear, I suppose, falling ever-more-deeply into assinine stupidity, into ridiculous and misguided life-choices, to the squandering of a certain moment in timeless-time. The fact that there is 'something there' (although Zennies love to play with semantics) to be 'attained' (as distinct from plodding along like a mule, not even aware what one is grinding and THAT one is grinding) is in a very real sense an 'attainment'. Even to get that far, as our own Sensais say, is a vast attainment: one has ascended quite a ways above 'the herd'. So, not to be a herd-animal is, in a definite sense, a purpose too.

To say that purpose is spawned by awareness of our own insignificance, from the essential Buddhist perspective, could only be seen as a somewhat insignificant (heh heh) part of the story. Buddhists speak of the attainment of a 'precious pearl'...'riches beyond imagining'...in quite the same way (but with very different understanding) as Christians speaking of 'Heaven'. If only we could realize our position. If only we could succeed in seeing through the traps that have been cponstructed for our awareness and which we also construct:

"I built my prison stone by stone
how many useless knots I tied

"I dug the pitfalls in my path
how many useless tears I cried."

If someone fears such outcomes, I don't think I would hold that against them. If one establsihed as his purpose the avoiding of such suffering and error, I don't think I would condemn him as either stupid or misguided.

Now, as it pertains to 'someone having a purpose for them', this certainly opens into an interesting conversation. I would again bring up the subject of today's class: introspection, a backward step, turning-about, and turning the eye inward.

The way I look at things (I am not a Buddhist) is that religion, in the essence, is about cultivating awareness. I mean, in the best of circumstances. True, every religion that we can name, because it possessed an inferior scientific platform which rendered a significant portion of its world-view as outmoded and irrelevant, is tied to idea structures that, in essence, function as obscurantism. But still, in a 'liiving kernel' that is there inside, it seems to me that 'religion' speaks to the same existential problem, a sense of something magnificent lying 'beyond' or 'beside' or 'within'. Different prepositions but quite a similar order of realization.

I hope that class today has been relevant to you. I will be thoughtfully noshing oats in my barn if you need me.

[Robert]

Is this you, Alex?

[Talking Ass]

I cannot be limited to just one body, in time, separate. I would say 'yes that is me' and 'no that is not me' in the same breath. (Interestingly, you have come across some members of the very small community of Indian Jews.)

[Tomas]

Because, at this juncture in my life, I fail to see one.

To get it right.

[Kunga]

To evolve...because that's what's happening....

[Tomhargen]

Is there a word for it? For a purpose that has been chosen from the soul instead of fear?

I admit my speech was slightly...depressing. I think I just got caught up in the moment. I do, however, believe that purpose almost always a fear reaction. But I guess I would say that it is simply...necessary. It is written in to us to always do something, and i guess it only makes sense to do something that seems beneficial.

[Talking Ass]

I think we need a reference point: Religion, Wikipedia.

Religion, looked at in the way that we are now able to look at it, is just about as strange in negative and positive senses as man himself. (As the above survey shows).

As you are aware, a religion can function as a series of neurotic movements, ritualized unconsciousness, a means to remain unaware. Because religious viewpoints generate narratives (meta-narratives) and operate within the structure of consciousness itself, it is not hard to see how ideas (in the sense of pre-structures) dominate people. And it could be true that 'what people need' is an antidote to all that captures them, binds them, etc. It is not hard to see the logic of an anti-religious posture.

What I am interested in, on this forum, is the way that the 'revolutionary' ideas of Q-R-S (a form of radicalism, a throwing off the blinders of a thoroughly mediocre mass-consumer vacuum-reality) seek to reject the present as gross ignorance and seek to return to or rediscover the roots of awareness in a whole new way. But I suggest that it is not really a 'whole new way' because 'there is nothing new under the sun'. Or, all that 'we' can really ever do is return to ta perceptual core and a perceptual path within us (it is all about 'experience'), and reorganize our lives in fundamental ways. As I said, I am not a Buddhist and was never very attracted to it. I see it as a radical rejection of the Hindu school, which had gone over the top in its exoticism and led into a vast 'trap for awareness', and it seems to express a desire and a need to strip the table bare, to clear it of absurdity. But the essence of it is to understand the fundamental nature of this 'reality'.

You might say, 'Well, that's not a religion, that's a desire to understand the fundamental nature of reality and adjust oneself to that reality!' But that is exactly what 'religion' is: it is a revelation of 'the nature of this reality', the modification of behavior in accord with that revelation, the construction or modification of ethics to support that revelation, it is mindful practices, etc.

Deja-vu wrote: "Having experienced this magnificence of awareness, does anything really speak to it afterwards but the awareness itself?"

This is a pretty problematic statement, really. One of the problems is that experience is modified by 'fore-structures' within the mind or consciousness. So, one man's experience (awareness) is going to be different from anothers. If you change the 'fore-structures' you change what is perceived. Second of all is that (I think this is true) only a few people out of thousands or millions ever seem to want to risk the discomfort of really entering into a time of seeking and discovery, which invariably is a pretty demanding and often upsetting process. Then, one man's experience does not accord with another man's---one's experience is subjective.

You might call out: 'Look, everyone, let's stop what we are doing and reexperience reality at the most fundamental level, come hell of high water!' And what do you think people would come up with? It is an interesting question. But if, say, a group of people in a community were to do this, using whatever means at their disposal, what they would inevitably come up with would be a new-and-improved vision of 'this reality', with or without a redressing of a Diety (it could be absolutely atheistic and process-ive, or an utter personalism, a new way to see a Creator all over again). Who is going to judge the experience and hand down a decision?

If the subject is Modernity, the modern democratic, pleasure-oriented, divorced-from-a-core-religious-ethic present where people just sort of exist, like in a cloud, without ever really having to think about anything and where their 'experience' is all reflected (by media, teevee, etc.)---well, at that point we are in a really strange reality! Has anything like that ever occured before? But I would call that a dislocation (dis-location), like losing any sense of where one is located. It seems to me (as I have said in other places and times) we NEED to and we MUST redefine our relationship to the entire structure of reality. We MUST not separate 'religion and state' in the sense that our most essential view and grasp of 'this reality' (revelation) MUST inform our politics, our ethics, our relationships, and all our doings down to the last detail. (I only use the 'church and state' thing to make a point: what we experience and what we are aware of must inform all that we do).

Religion, therefor, is everything that comes after 'revelation'. It's inevitable.

Soon, its gonna be: Q-R-S and A.

[Ryan Rudolph]

The purpose(s) of life:

1. Become as sane and logical as possible personally through wisdom.

2. Use ones unique talents to spread wisdom, science, and attempt to increase the species chances of surviving and evolving to higher planes of consciousness.

[Kunga]

Life isn't designated to only human life.

[Talking Ass]

Okay, Ryan: How can I help? Where do I fit in?

[Ryan Rudolph]

TA,

Okay, Ryan: How can I help? Where do I fit in?

you must define that for yourself based on your unique environment, your unique talents, and your particular interests and passion. You can choose to do nothing, or take small steps towards some higher goal or goals, but there is no wrong answer. We are only able to act out of the best knowledge and awareness we have at the time.

For instance: I have dedicated the first part of my life towards philosophy/psychology, and sorting out some of my own delusions, but these days, I'm more interested with understanding science/economics as a means to do something useful and pragmatic. Perhaps it will never happen, but I enjoy the knowledge regardless.

[longsincedead]

Because, at this juncture in my life, I fail to see one.

Going back to the original post (and scanning through the responses, of which I saw only one in the right direction):

Life is the state of an existent existing. Your question is invalid, therefore there is no answer.

If you want a purpose - you must find one.
It can be as simple as: I am hungry - therefore my purpose is to find food.