I often wonder for how long have humans been trying to figure out the meaning and purpose of life and at times when I think more / deeper, have humans actually been able to make any progress in our thinking and ability to philosophize.
The reason I feel this is. Almost universally people regard the Bhagvad Gita, and other ancient Vedic texts as supreme….in philosophy. We have not been able to carve out anything more substantial or significantly better over the last 4000 – 8000 years. This is mind boggling considering the scientific advancements which we as race consider ourselves to make.
People feel in today’s materialistic age that these text make a lot more sense and people revert to them for peace and solace. What were the circumstances 4k-8k years ago which allowed people to think the way they did. In an age which could not have been materialistic or atleast we would find it hard to believe it was, the Bhagvad Gita talks about detachment.
Anyway some of us continue to struggle with the basic questions of what is the purpose of our life, and figure out why things happen the way they do. I personally have now come to the conclusion that this is a self posed question. My life has a purpose if I want it to have one. The purpose is on going, and not pre-defined. We figure the purpose out retrospectively or at the best as we go along. The circumstances around one do help in forming one’s opinion and reasonining, however if determined one can break out of those constraints.
The question then for me morphs to: why do we look for a reason in the first place. Would our life be any different if we knew.
I think as a specifies this is critical for our survival. We now have evolved into a stage / state where our consciousness wants to understand the experiences (this now is a weird way , connecting back to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle effects what we do on a day to day level : since there is now an observer, which is our consciousness). Life or let me use the universe has evolved into a stage where it is trying to understand what it needs to change to evolve into another state.
This could be because of two reasons. The universe wants to speed up things now. There could be a case made that whatever we did we would evolve into a final state. The means or the path could be different but the end or the destination would still be the same.
So the universe is using us: live beings as a way to evolve further. So in a way all life forms are part of an attempt of the universe to keep evolving itself.
