We live on this infinitesimally tiny, small speck which seems ideally suited to life, but which is bizarrely suspended in the midst of a vast humongous chasm of virtual nothingness, utterly inhospitable to any life. If something created this, then why on earth did they make it like this?
There again, the idea the Universe just came into being by happenstance is even more bizarre. The fine-tuning of the constants of nature so that any life at all can exist, even if only on earth, cannot be explained by blind chance.Moreover, the bizarre nature of the Universe extends way beyond fine-tuning. The fact that reality exhibits patterns that can be elegantly described by mathematics — by equations we can scribble down! — is also utterly bizarre and not something that one ought to expect in a randomly existing Universe. And what of Quantum Mechanics where reality appears to mould and shape itself depending on how we choose to observe it? Is this not also bizarre?
And then there's the fact that life allegedly arose on Earth due to a long series of extremely improbable events. All of which had to take place before the Earth had any chance of developing complex life, least of all that human beings would eventually evolve. Yet here we are...
Our lives and the Universe are ultimately mysterious, not only stranger than we imagine but perhaps stranger than we can imagine. Certainly, I don't think this reality is what people naively suppose it to be. Indeed, it appears to be a put-up job.
I do think, and indeed feel, that there is some ultimate reason for our existence and that we both existed before conception and will exist after death. But I do not pretend to know what such a reason might be. Possibly ... nay … even likely the reason for our existence, the existence of everything, is beyond our ken. We live in the midst of profound mystery.
I sometimes wonder if we're all being observed by intelligences outside of our reality. Maybe something akin to the Truman show. Perhaps to see how we react to this bizarre situation we find ourselves in. Who knows...
I sometimes wonder if we're all being observed by intelligences outside of our reality. Maybe something akin to the Truman show. Perhaps to see how we react to this bizarre situation we find ourselves in. Who knows...
Conceding that it's nigh impossible (at least in this life) to know the answer for absolute certain, I tend to think it's not nearly as complicated as we trick ourselves into indulging sometimes.
ReplyDeleteHumans aren't very complicated. Honestly we're pretty simple creatures. Behind all the nonsense and abstraction we put up, what we have is an infinite and boundless desire for those values that we label as Truth, Happiness, Beauty and ultimately Love itself.
No matter how much we might think we have of them in a given moment, I submit that no one would seriously think to themselves that they've ever had enough Beauty in their lives or that they've reached the pinnacle of Truth. Never. Our craving for them is endless, our every action in life ultimately in service of getting even just a little bit closer to them.
And this, I would submit, is what we call Heaven - the infinite mind of God in which those values that we endlessly crave for exist in their truest state; known to a thousand different faces and all of them equally true.
And it is also where we come from, which is why so many near-death experiencers describe it in a myriad of ways, but there is one that shines through above all others.
Home.
And there's no better feeling in the world than to have left for a long journey, enduring many difficulties and pains along the way, only to find your way back home in the end with your family and friends waiting for you with a smile.
"Our craving for them is endless, our every action in life ultimately in service of getting even just a little bit closer to them.
DeleteAnd this, I would submit, is what we call Heaven - the infinite mind of God in which those values that we endlessly crave for exist in their truest state; known to a thousand different faces and all of them equally true."
I hope you don't mind me saying this, but your comment seems to me to be deeply influenced by a Judeo-Christian viewpoint. 'Craving', for instance is treated very differently in Hundu or Buddhist philosophy. It's a bit rash to come up with an answer to such a question without making yourself aware of the existence of many other possibilities, and comparing them.