The Purpose in Existence

            When we look at the world around us, seeing creatures driven by the desire to continue to exist and to perpetuate themselves, it is easy to sense the seeming purposelessness of it all.  Like all other animals, we human beings are born, we struggle to exist—to find food and shelter, to survive—and we seek out mates, and we die.  But it need not be only this.  There is more than this.

            There are several desires that manifest themselves in us as they do in the world around us.  We desire to exist.  Once anything exists, it is driven by the desire to continue to exist.  We desire to group together, to find commonalities between us and others and to cling and clump together.  Even on the most basic level, the raw material of physical existence does this, driven by the force of gravity.  We desire to connect with other beings in this world.  Sexual reproduction is a form of this, but it is a very basic form of this.

            All of these desires manifest themselves in us, but we are capable of experiencing them in forms that ever-more-closely approximate their truest forms.  For all things in this world are ever evolving.  The same pattern manifests itself on every level and scale of existence, but it manifests more fully every time it repeats itself.  Like replicating DNA, it mutates with its replications, and those mutations, in their favorability, are preserved and passed on.  The world favors an ever-more-accurate representation of the truest form of the most basic paradigm—the paradigm by which the whole world is created.

            And so we come to learn, through our experience, what brought, and brings, the world into being.  The greatest experiences give rise to the thought, “Others should be able to experience this.”  And this thought manifests itself in the inclination to connect with another, to share this experience with another.  And this inclination to connect gives rise to the inclination to belong, to work with the other parts of the world as a group toward the greater goal of sharing this experience.  And this inclination to belong gives rise to the inclination to preserve the existence of the rest of the world, so that it might become capable of experiencing this experience.

            The whole world exists to experience the Source’s experience.  In fact, it is this experience that gives rise to the world.  As we grow and make ourselves ever more capable of receiving this experience in its truest form, we learn experientially how much purpose there is in the world’s existence, and in our existence.  And we learn—we come to know—why we are here. 

We are here not merely to perpetuate our existence.  We are here to become aware of our existence.  We are here to give rise to more existence through the sharing of the experience that we are here to experience.  At the peaks of experience, we can know why we are here.  We are here to experience the experience that gives rise to the world, and that gave, and gives, rise to our own existence.

Space and Time and Separateness, and the Underlying Unity

            Our reality as we know it rests upon the foundation of the ability of things to be separate.  Reality as we know it rests upon the foundation of the existence of space and time.

If there were no separateness—if everything existed at the same point in space and time—then you could not be there, and I could not be here, and you and I could not be you and I.

Yet because of the separateness of multidimensional existence, I can never completely know what it is to be you, and you can never completely know what it is to be me.  For we can never truly experience what it is to be something other than who we are, where we are—with different past experiences, and with different present experiences from some other vantage point in space and time and through some other lens of thought and feeling.  Thus, due to the existence of space and time, we require communication—we require some form of language—in order to bridge the gap of separateness.

Every part of the world is interacting with every other part of it.  Even though things are separate, they are interdependent upon one another to exist.  The fulfillment of physical, emotional, and intellectual sustenance comes via the other things—the other beings—in this world.  We would cease to exist in this physical world if we could not continue to gain existence through other existing things.  And so we require other existing things.

            It is through our ability to interact with, to communicate with, other existing beings that we can come to attain ever greater awareness of ourselves and of our place in relation to all of the rest of existence.  It is through our ability to experience an other separate from ourselves that we can come to discern purposeful coincidence in the world as events in the external physical world come to reflect our internal thoughts and feelings, and as physical events come to reflect other physical events, and as thoughts and feelings come to reflect other thoughts and feelings.

            Through all of this interaction, we can come to realize that even thoughts and feelings are separate from us.  Even though they are not separated from us by physical space, they are separate from us nonetheless, even at a single moment in time.  And so there must be other spatial dimensions beyond the physical ones—space to separate thoughts and feelings from us.

            But then who are we?  If we are not our thoughts or feelings—if these things are things with which we interact and through which we might gain fulfillment but they are not us—then what are we? 

It is space and time that allow us to ask these questions, and it is the other things that are separate from us in space and time that allow us to come upon the answers.  The process of discovery and learning and ever increasing awareness is allowed by time—within which this process can occur—and the contents of that process are allowed by space—within which these contents can exist.

            As we come to discern the separateness of ourselves from our world—beginning with only the recognition of I, but without real awareness of the “I”, and progressing to the recognition of others, but without any awareness of those others as other “I”’s, and progressing to the recognition of other “I”’s, where we can begin to become aware of ourselves as true “I”’s—we begin to discern the distinctness of ourselves from our world.  And it is actually through this awareness of distinctness that we begin to become aware of the unity that underlies all things. 

For all that we discern is separate from everything else.  But that which is doing the discerning—the true underlying essence that is us, that is “I”—is single and unitary.  In essence, there is only one “I”, for this “I” is not bound by space or by time.  This “I” is not divided or differentiated by these things.

Beneath all the layers of physical reality and instinct and feeling and thought, there is “I”.  And this “I” is that which chooses all of these things, beginning at thought, progressing to feeling, progressing to instinct and speech and action, and manifesting in the world of physicality.  The “I” is that which gives shape and form to the world as it divides and differentiates on its path toward existence in the world of physicality.

And all of this differentiation occurs through the use of language.  The “I” is ever shaping the world, separating it, dividing it, through its use of language.  And we are all projections of that “I”—that single, unitary “I” that is at the heart and root of all that is.

What Makes Human Beings Different from All Other Beings in this World?

There are a number of ways in which we differ from other apes and all other living and nonliving things. Ultimately, though, we can boil it all down to the term “self-awareness”. Human beings have the greatest capacity for self-awareness of any creatures in this world.

What do we mean by “self-awareness” here? We mean that human beings have the greatest capacity for choice and complex thought and feeling, as well as the greatest capacity for the recognition of the existence of other “I”’s, of any beings in this world.

Let’s break this down. First of all, (adult) human beings have the capacity for a kind of empathy that doesn’t merely involve putting ourselves in someone else’s external shoes—in someone else’s external physical situation—and seeing how we would feel if we were in that situation. It is a more developed kind of empathy wherein we are able to recognize how others are similar to us, and how they are different from us, in their thoughts and feelings and motivations, so that we can come to understand their true experience in some situation…and not merely what our internal experience would be in that situation.

This more developed kind of empathy is accomplished through abstract thought—through abstracting from our own experiences to piece together what someone else’s experience might be like. And so we realize here that humans have the greatest capacity for abstract and complex thought—and ultimately for imagining what isn’t—of all beings.

This leads us to choice. Through the ability to imagine what isn’t actually so, we are able not only to understand someone else’s experience even though it may be different from our own, but also to shape the world around us in new and different ways from the form in which it currently exists. We can choose the world that we shape for ourselves because we are able to imagine and anticipate the consequences of each possible action that we might take and then choose amongst these outcomes which we would like to create—which we would like to experience as our reality.

Notice here that the recognition of others besides the self—and other experiences besides that of the self—goes hand-in-hand with the recognition of the possibility for things to be different from the way they are. And only with such recognition are we able to create and shape our world more fully than any other creatures in this world. The capacity to use tools is greatest in human beings, for we use not only natural physical defense and offense mechanisms, but rather we use primarily our capacity for complex and abstract thought—to approach and solve problems in new ways, addressing our situation in life by making use of everything available to us in our internal and external worlds.

Further, because we are capable of recognizing that other “I”’s exist—other beings who are each looking out at the world through their own eyes and ears and nose and mouth, from their own situation in space and time, and through their own lens of thought and feeling and motivation—we are capable of connecting with those other “I”’s more intensely than any other beings in this world. Through the connection—through relating—with another being, we are capable of recognizing ourselves. As we come to understand and relate to others on an intimate level—and, by this, I mean far more than physical intimacy, including emotional and intellectual intimacy—we can come to understand our relation to our own thoughts and feelings and motivations.

We can come to understand what has led us to be the way we are, and we can come to understand who we truly are at our core—a core in which we and all other “I”’s are connected indivisibly. We are all united in our capacity for choice. And this capacity for choice is, as we have seen, wrapped up inextricably with our capacity for self-awareness. For it is the ability to imagine what isn’t—what isn’t within our internal and external experience of the world—that ties together the capacity for choice and the capacity for the recognition of the true experiences of other “I”’s—a recognition that allows us to recognize and become aware of ourselves and our relation to everything around us.

But all of this—all of what makes us uniquely us, different from all other beings in this world—is only a matter of degree of capacity. This does not mean that we all actualize this capacity, and this certainly does not mean that we all actualize this capacity to as great a degree as we can.

The development of all things is toward ever-greater self-awareness, toward the ever-greater exercise of self-aware choice in determining the shaping of experience. Humans are further along than other beings in this process of development. But even we are developing—from birth through childhood to adulthood, from infancy to maturity in the development of not only our physical bodies and brains but also our souls beyond this. In this progression toward ever greater self-awareness, we continue to march, as all things in this world do, toward this, our goal—our purpose in existence.