An outsider, looking for answers.
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what sort of answers? About the riddle of life?
pretty much I do accept that life is meaningless, what I’m looking for is how best to live this life?
interesting, lets keep in touch. Tell me how you arrived at the conclusion about the meaninglessness of life. I have a post named ” The meaning of life” in my blog. Post your views in it. And let us converse further too. It is a subject I have done some thinking
It is very difficult to say how I arrived there, it’s like a personal journey that no one should take you through. What might have triggered it, I suspect, is an amalgamation of events in the last few years that supervened the course of my life. I read somewhere that what makes us human is the question “why”, and that is exactly what I constantly do.
Here are my views on it in a gist.
Our conscious life ends at death and the short span that we exist on this globe as conscious entities do not matter to us or to the universe. So there can’t be any meaning to our lives other than that we give them personally.
Tell me if you agree
I do agree with you, i.e. the valueless and futility of our existence, but how do we deal with that fact? how best to go through it? is it worth going through? sometimes I feel it was a mistake getting there in the first place, and there’s no way back to how things were before this realization. Maybe Sophocles was right, “Not to be born is best, but having seen the light, the next best is to go whence one came as soon as may be”. Another troubling aspect is that this world, this “reality” just seem so unreal to me, but that’s an altogether different matter.
Camus walked in front of a vehicle thinking such thoughts. Yes its true, whether to go forth with it is an intriguing question. Thats why some took recourse behind existentialism. “All we have this life, and we can chose any life positions within it. There is no question of right or wrong, its our statement on life.”
How to deal with it? My stand is that we can make an effort to exhaust all forms of inquiry( even the most absurd ones) while we are around and so amuse ourselves with them. After all we are conscious. Whether the life has any meaning or not need not concern us once we have it well thought out and put aside. To end it seems as meaningless too, we would be depriving ourselves of the only consolation we have, of contemplating.
As to the question on reality, we of course are limited by the range of our sensory organs to a certain kind of reality and can not reach over it. Our mechanical instruments are also effective only upto a point. So the reality as is perceived by us is only a myth created by our senses. Also there are different forms of reality within this sphere too. You may not be seeing the same red or blue as I am. Thus reality is subjective too. It has no objective existence and is subject to the perception of the observer.
Tell me your views
Samronsilva says: “So the reality as is perceived by us is only a myth created by our senses…”
A case in point: “The human eye responds to a very small segment of the electromagnetic spectrum, which we call “light;” i.e., roughly from 4000 (blue) to 7000 (red) angstroms.* In other words, the concept of “light” is defined by that small portion of the spectrum we can see. If that visible segment were to be extended a few angstroms in either direction, you would immediately see how absurd it is to define our physical world from such a narrow perspective. In fact, by expanding your vision just a tiny amount, the world would instantly appear so bizarre that you would find it nearly impossible to hypothesize (much less interpolate) what you see now from what you would see then. And yet, that extended view is always there–whether believed or not–and available to the first eye that dares to see it.” [From: The Riddle. Taking the question of “what we see” a step further is another piece you might find interesting: The Smell Of Light.
That is very interesting. Diving into different forms of inquiry was precisely my intuitive reaction, although sometimes I feel it’s an optimist proposition. I’m also inclined to agree that ending it is as meaningless.
http://multivalence.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/meaning-of-life/