bahman wrote: ↑Thu Apr 28, 2022 4:40 pm
popeye1945 wrote: ↑Thu Apr 28, 2022 2:59 pm
The meaning of life is when one realizes that the physical world is utterly meaningless in the absence of a conscious subject, life, biology is then creator of all meaning, which it bestows upon the world at its discretion. Biological reaction to the physical world is your everyday reality/experience you are free to bestow what values you will.
How the consciousness can grant meaning to the life. The problem start with consciousness when you realize that something is missing.
You have hit the nail in the head there.
When you feel meaninglessness, you feel like something is missing, from YOU.
So, it stands to reason, that when you feel complete, that you have found the meaning you felt had been lost.
So, one should look for the one thing which gives a feeling of completion, which cannot be lost.
The problem is impermanence. Everything which depends on conditions and causes can cease to be. Chocolate cake can give a sense of completion, for maybe a second. Sex for maybe a few minutes.
Beyond that, what is there?
Some choose to live in constant striving, and call that meaning, yet, like the donkey with the carrot always just out of reach, they only fool themselves by kicking the can further and further down the road, not wanting to face the inevitable crash of motivation and everything which had previously kept them going.
One must find stability in instability. The only thing which can be relied on to provide any kind of inherent meaning, is awareness of awareness. Not as one’s identity, because, even that can go. But simply being aware of awareness.
Awareness can be nothing, and also everything. It can be the small self, and the large self. It can be emptiness. It can be god, Brahman, etc.
One does not need to acquire it. So one need not chase it.
It is complete self reliance, and therefore not dependent upon anything in the world of experience.
When one comes to rest, it is right here.
When one attempts to chase some goal, it remains always out of reach.
Meaninglessness is paradoxical in that, the thing one is searching for, one has never lost. Yet one is estranged from it, seemingly. So a search or question begins in the material world.
Once that search has been exhausted externally, the search naturally turns inwards. This natural turning is the very key to ending the struggle, yet, it can’t be done intentionally.
It is always the last place we look where we find what we were looking for. The only way out, is in.