What is the Purpose of My Life? (Part 2)

Story 1:

Death is certain, life is meaningless. We are running on borrowed time and might die at any moment. We don’t take anything with us. Soon, we won’t even exist.

Well that’s one story. We can choose to tell a different one. Maybe a more apt description is- we can tell the same story from a different angle.

Story 2:

Somehow big bang happened. Laws of physics started to reign supreme. Time began. Things condensed and stars, planets etc appeared. One planet got some acid and stuff that can pass its data to the next generation. Natural selection took in charge. Soon there were life everywhere. Humans appeared. They have feelings and everything else, things that the other animals have. But they also think. Which is simply learning from the past and planning for the future.

But, some of them started suffering from their haunted past or glorious past they no longer have (or stand to lose) and worrying about the future.

This defeats the purpose of learning and planning. We learn and plan to make our experience of the world better. Latching on to the past just produces unnecessary suffering. Worrying about the future is wrong as death is our future. Entropy is real. Everything, even life will be taken away from us. All we truly have is the present moment. And the lessons from our past and our ability to plan for the future.

This makes us human.

If the purpose of a shoe is to shield it’s owner’s feet from the ground and the purpose of a  dog is to be a dog, our purpose is to learn from the past and plan for the future. While we live in the moment.

They aren’t at odds with each others. The lessons aren’t in the past, they are with us now. They plans aren’t in the future- they are here with us right now. Now is when we apply the lessons and take action for the future. Life is now.

Then I conclude, the purpose of my life is to live in the moment while I apply lessons from the past and take proper action for the future. Because we can. Because this is our feature. The purpose of a pen is to write because- it can write. That’s its best feature.

Do I like this purpose? Well mostly no. I’d rather contribute to something that would last forever. But sadly, we haven’t come across any such thing that needs my help. Like, laws of physics may last forever, but how to I contribute towards it? It doesn’t need my help!

Who am I?

I was watching Shelly Kagan’s lectures on Death. It raised questions in my mind about who I really am.

Am I a soul? my brain? My personality?

I can feel 3 kinds of things existing inside me. First, I see my current thoughts and feelings.Then I see my memories. beliefs, attitude etc which are the building blocks of my personality.

There’s something else of course. The witness/ watcher.

Without this entity in me, I wouldn’t even be aware of my current thoughts and feelings.

I guess this is what Eckhart Tolle calls presence and other teachers call consciousness.

My first inclination is to regard this ‘watcher’ in me as the real me.

This part after all, has been the single most consistent thing that exists withing me.

My thoughts are random and often contradict each other. Same characteristics apply to my feelings. My personality on the other hand has changed at least 3 times since I have been alive. Only the watcher is untouched.

But, what differentiates my awareness with your one? We all have this awareness but isn’t it the same for all of us?

If I have a head trauma and lose the continuity of my experience, the watcher is still there.

But, my thoughts, feelings and personality will be drastically different. In that case, is it still me?

I am unable to answer that yet. I seem to feel like my awareness is me as long as there is continuity of experience. If my brain loses all of its memories then that will be the death of me. The watcher that used to identify with me will now serve someone else’s experiences.

But even that explanation sounds wrong. How can my awareness ever be someone else? If all about me is my personality then I could be extracted as data and uploaded to the cloud. But, is all that data (memories, beliefs etc) me? That doesn’t sound right!

Buddhism as described in ‘Sapiens’ by ‘Yuval Noah Harari’

The central figure of Buddhism is not a god but a human being, Siddhartha Gautama. According to Buddhist tradition, Gautama was heir to a small Himalayan Kingdom, sometime around 500 BC. The young prince was deeply affected by the suffering evident all around him. He saw that men and women, children and old people, all suffer not just from occasional calamities such as war and plague, but also from anxiety, frustration and discontent, all of which seem to be an inseparable part of the human condition. People, pursue wealth and power, acquire knowledge and possessions, beget sons and daughters, and build houses and palaces. Yet no matter what they achieve, they are never content. Those who live in poverty dream of riches. Those who have a million want wo million. Those who have two million want 10 million. Even the rich and famous are rarely satisfied. They too are haunted by ceaseless cares and worries until sickness, old age and death put a bitter end to them. Everything that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But how to escape it?

… In the end he came to the realization that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behavior patterns of one’s own mind. Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experience, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction. When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant. it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless. This is very clear when we experience unpleasant things, such as pain. As long as the pain continues, we are dissatisfied and do all we can to avoid it. Yet, even when we experience pleasant things, we are never content. We either fear he pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify. People dream for years about finding love are rarely satisfied when they find it. Some become anxious that their partner will leave, others feel that they have settled cheaply, and could have found someone better…

… Gautama found that there was a way to wait this vicious circle. If, when the mind experiences something pleasant or unpleasant, it simply understands things just as they are, then there is no suffering. If you experience sadness without the craving hat it goes away, you continue to feel sadness but you do not suffer from it. There can actually be richness in the sadness. If you experience joy without craving that the joy lingers and intensifies, you continue to feel joy without losing your peace of mind.

…Buddhism shares he basic insight of the biological approach to happiness, namely that happiness results from processes occurring within one’s body, and not from events in the outside world. However, starting from the same insight, Buddhism reaches very different conclusions.

According to Buddhism, most people identify happiness with pleasant feelings. People consequently ascribe immense importance to what they feel, craving to experience more and more pleasures, while avoiding pain. Whatever we do throughout our lives, whether scratching our leg, fidgeting slightly in the chair, or fighting world wars, we are just trying to get pleasant feelings.

The problem, according to Buddhism is that our feelings are no more than fleeting vibrations, changing every moment, like the ocean waves. If five minutes age I felt joyful and purposeful, now these feelings are gone, and I might well feel sad and dejected. So, if I want to experience pleasant feelings, I have to constantly chase them, while driving away the unpleasant feelings. Even if I succeed, I immediately have to start all over again, without ever getting any lasting rewards for my troubles.

…Buddha agreed with modern biology and new age movements that happiness is independent of eternal condition. Yet his more important and for more profound insight was that their happiness is also independent of or inner feelings. Indeed, the more significance we give our feelings, the more we crave them and the more we suffer. Buddha’s recommendation was to stop not only the pursuit of external achievement s, but also the pursuit of inner feelings.