The Meaning of Life

Today, I was doing a little bit of light thinking. I was pondering the meaning of life.

Since I wasn't sure what the answer was, I looked it up on dictionary.com. This is the answer I got:

Life: the condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally.

That was actually one of several definitions but somehow none quite fit the answer I was looking for. Then I realized that the question I was posing to myself wasn't really, what is the meaning of life? It was more like 'how do I make my life meaningful?' This question struck me as a bit less abstract and infinitely more personal than the former one. Acually, this is not really a question I'm struggling with at all. I know the answer. The answer is that I need to do the things that make me whole. I need to work out, read things that are interesting to me, write regularly, do my best at work, and maintain good relationships with the people who are important to me. The philosopher Joseph Campbell is famous for saying follow your bliss and that is what I need to do to make my life meaningful.

The challenge of this question is not figuring out the answer, but in staying focused on it. It takes a lot of self-discipline, self-awareness, and a selfless spirit to remain true to what's important. There are many opportunites to derail one's self and many are not easily noticed at first glance. But one has to keep in mind, that the battle is not lost if one fails to attain all of his goals because what ulitmately matters is the honest and passionate effort rather than the final result itself.

In writing this, I'm feeling a bit Yoda-ish which was not my original intention. But in thinking about the meaning of life there is another aspect of this question I wished to discuss as well.

That is: 'What purpose, if any, does life serve in the cosmic, universal scheme of things?' In other words, why does life exist at all? For that matter, why does the Universe exist? It seems like the most obvious answer to these questions is: it just does. But let's say for argument's sake that somehow someone made the ultimate discovery and discovered that the Universe and/or life did exist for some external purpose. If this happened, the first question everyone would be asking would be: okay, so we now know the purpose and the meaning of life and the Universe, but what is the purpose of the existence of whatever it was whose purpose it served. It becomes a sort of Russian doll affect. Every time you open one doll, another is inside of it no matter how deeply you go.

It is analagous to our perceived place in the hierarchy of things. As far as we know, we are the most intelligent, self aware creatures in the Universe. But do we really know that? Suppose there is something else whose intelligence and awarness is so superior to our own, we are not even capable of comprehending it. For that matter, doesn't every life form on our planet lack the knowledge that another being is superior to it? Do the deer really know their world is dominated by humans? Do the plankton in the ocean really realize how far down the food chain they actually are? So why do we feel so confident that there's nothing out there just as superior to us as we are to the smallest bacteria? Can we really have so much faith in our own perceptions to be sure that there's not?

So if we had the ability to ask this superior entity the question: What is the meaning of life? Would it know? Somehow I doubt that it would know the ultimate answer. It would just be like peeling another layer of an onion.