Life

[Muratus del Mur]

There is a very simple thing called life. Life its not complicated, its very simple.
The things that cause it, are too complex to fully understand. It might be the counter balance of an infinite, and dead, universe. It might be a coincidence, or whatever..
Its results are also complex...but can be described by one word .."consciousness".
Of course life means much more, but "consciousness" is "everything" ..and i am to tired to detail what i mean.


I was contemplating something recently, and i realized that a very simple and obvious thing came as a conclusion to a series of unsolvable issues and troubles. I want to share with you this simple finding. All of you probably realize it, but maybe if I am the one to say it allover again, you will put more value on it.


How do you define a good life? Is it by its length? By its intensity? By how happy you are? by what you accomplish during it?
hmm..

the natural answer is that the value of life is a sum of all that.

Its pointless to live a long and "stable" life where nothing happens. It is like "surviving" life, preserving yourself for when death comes. Its also pointless to live a dangerous life and die young, you will miss a lot of thing you could have experienced otherwise. There are some cue points in life, like "love" and "achievements". I will skip the details because you all know what i mean.


I truly believe that the value of life is defined by how you find that balance of how to live "fully" and at the same time not to shorten your life too much while doing so. I also believe that "life" is a shared thing. my life is your life and your life is my life sort of thing. We are all "one". In this sense, the value of life is shared with those we get in contact with. We are defiend also by how the others see us, not only by how we actually are. Thats why "achievements" are important, they are landmarks for others to remember.

We all die. Even the universe dies. It matters how powerful, in feelings, we lived our life.

[b]The 'moment' beats eternity.[/b]

[ignnus]

[quote]We all die. Even the universe dies. It matters how powerful, in feelings, we lived our life.[/quote]

yes,sadly we all die at the end,IMHO that's the only thing matters,this bodies of ours won't be truly happy and fully functional unless it knows it achieved immortality.

[ChildOfTheSoul]

From a universal standpoint, life has no inherent meaning or value. Living is not the intrinsic "positive" over death, because the universe assigns no intrinsic value to anything at all.

Unless we bring religious opinions into the conversation, human beings have no real way of knowing what happens after death, only what they experience in life. Personally, I believe that we as individuals must struggle to assign purpose and fulfillment to our own lives. It is only us that determine whether our life was lived fully and complete or not.

We only achieve what we believe we achieve. We only have lived a full life of purpose and happiness if we believe we have. I like to think of life as a book, and we fill it with our experiences and feelings. It is our choice how our book is written, and how it ends. We determine whether we write a good book, or a bad book.

Just a couple of thoughts on the subject.

Edited March 9, 2012 by ChildOfTheSoul

[Soothing Sands]

Achievements.. I'm sure there are some people who would assign that a higher value than others

I would also like to say that most of the things you said are relative to one other, as CotS pointed out. There is no "normal" assigned by the universe, only ourselves. Advancing will always be possible, and never-ending. The idea of no movement, total acceptance of your present state, is quite powerful on the other hand. Number 1? Not sure.

[dragonrider7]

Life IMO is not simple.......may be if you have an "I dont care" attitude, then it probably can become less complex......and I feel life's success lies in happiness of mind and soul....which can be obtained many ways.....achievements, curing diseases etc........and for me life is now a software script...every Monday it starts and ends on Friday (IT life he he)...Ahh!! am I talking out of the box??...may be....but its my opinion.


-rider

[phantasm]

To me the value of life is WAY simpler. As some of my closer friends know, I only wish one thing in life. That wish is that when I move onto another plane of existence, those who I have had interaction with can say "Knowing him was a positive experience". Then death has no sting, as you live on in the works and memories of others. I think universally most people feel that way. Live life to make a positive difference in the lives around you.

Religion, politics, science, arts, music, etc all put base faith in the fact that leaving behind something that people learn and grow from is the ultimate reward for ones work. Minus a few inherently bad people, or those with no 'souls', I have found very few exceptions to that rule. Even bad people often 'teach' or impact other bad people in a 'positive' way by teaching them to do evil things well. A little hard to understand at times, but even the devil himself seeks out to improve upon his minions.

[Dragual]

Ask a soldier what the value of life is.

[Jubaris]

Before trying to figure out everything, let's try to figure out us.

To me, life of a human has one clear purpose - cognition.

What is the difference between human life form and life forms of others? Self conscious? I do not know how animals 'think', so I won't be that ambitious to assume their total inferiority (especially not in potential) to think, but it seems clear that at the moment there is no 'exploration' thinking of abstract subjects in their world, no philosophy...

So that ability to question on a higher level and doubt, is at the moment very specific to us humans.
To avoid pointlessness of our existence (individual speaking) as whole-life-workers, 'slaves' sort to speak, of leaving a life full of pleasures, of leaving a life full of pain (each pointless from the standpoint of our current knowledge on 'what happens after our bodies die') humans should strive to understand "god", to answer the question what is god, to understand existence.

To understand everything! Otherwise, we would just be like animals, working on the survival of our group, reproducing and finally embracing death. And with that it seems the term 'human' is reserved only for some of our fellow biological-wise humans.

If there's really nothing after death, if our 'souls' do not tread on somewhere, then everything is pointless, from the perception of an individual, but with cognition at least we would be aware of that, and avoid "blind sheep being led slaughter" syndrome.

So let us be humans, let us aim for the heights of knowledge, and the rest will unravel on our journey.

[Rumi]

How many times in a day do you set out to do something and then you do it, sometimes well, sometimes poorly. Making a meal, performing the tasks of a profession, engaging with friends and loved ones, growing a garden, or cleaning a house. With all the power to create, we endlessly set goals and challenges before ourselves; some large, some small, some to be done once in a lifetime, others done many times each day. We are a receiver and a source of energy, and each little thing we do is a pulse of that energy in some direction.

Is a life defined by how well a person performs these activities? How completely? Or how gracefully? Or with how much joy? Or with the most desirable outcomes?

Or perhaps our defining moments are those in between the pulsing activities, where we are truly content?

[ZenTao]

I had a Astronomy Professor tell me that we are " The big eye looking through the little eye", That we come from the same source and we are all connected. It's because we look through these physical eyes that we see ourselves as a person rather then one universe. What is life all about? I wonder this all too often and come to see at least for me, it is about those we love and those we are connected with. About how we help one another out and how much compassion we carry and respect for all life and even non alive things. All this drive to be rich and successful those things can only corrupt I think. Here we live in a world with 2% holding the most money and people are starving and have no healthcare or even water and are dying preventable deaths by the seconds.

If all you got is you when you die, I suppose you'd better be content with yourself in how you have cared and treated for others and even yourself. I doubt a person is thinking about all the work they should have done more of while on the death bed. I think it would be wonderful to be able to pass away seeing most of the faces that mean so much to you surrounding you, love friendships and family these are to me the most priceless things in life.