The training and the meaning

The problem with the question of the meaning of life is nothing but the kind of answer we expect. We are creatures of stories. We want a tale to fit ourselves to. A role in the cosmic drama is what we need.

But the question does not arise in the moments of joy, in those devoid of suffering. If you look back at your life, you count such happenstances to have given meaning or made your life worthy of living. So the meaning of life can be simply to avoid suffering. Yuval Harari goes further. He says that the moments of the experience of being conscious and being able to have a subjective experience itself can be incredible enough to give meaning.

He says "The most ordinary moment in your life, you are stuck in the traffic in your car. The traffic is not moving. You are annoyed. This is the most amazing thing in the universe. It is in many ways more amazing than solar systems and black holes. We don’t understand, how can anything in the universe ‘be annoyed’. How can anything be conscious? How does some electricity and hormones and whatever, how does it produce a subjective experience of being annoyed?

Thinking about it in a different perspective; may be there is a planet where the atmosphere is just LSD. And the beings there, they constantly live in a psychedelic world. And they take some magic mushroom to experience ‘being annoyed’ in a traffic jam. And it just blows their mind. Ooo! Because for them this is unfamiliar."

The point is that our ordinary experience can be extraordinary, provided we perceive it rightly. Is it possible? Yuval says yes. A sufficiently (!?) long training in meditation can make you able to be amazed by the most familiar thing.

On Alan watts' ‘sense of nonsense’

 

Words underlie everything that we think. Perhaps it makes us ask for meaning of life. How? Words are here to help us? Yup perhaps in the sense of survival. The same words distort our understanding of the reality of ourselves. For example, when someone says “see carefully”, we strain our muscles near eyes and see. This straining is a bodily response associated with our language/words. Seeing carefully has nothing to do with straining the muscles around the eye (search for proof). Generalizing, we have come far away from reality because of words. Asking for meaning is the game of our language. That’s all.When you experience an immersive piece of music or dance you don’t ask the meaning of life. That piece is enough. Living in that moment in this world is enough. Why ask the meaning?- (Paraphrased) Alan Watts.

Yes, we understand what watts is conveying. Language is extremely powerful and shapes our  deep subconscious level reality. 

But the problem is this. By this knowledge, can we really escape the trap of our reality built by words? or are we condemned to succumb to it, constantly provoked by the question, what's the meaning of it all?

What happened before the beginning?

 Written in 2016

About a century ago, Astronomer Edwin Hubble turned his telescope towards the deep space only to end up in breaking one more conviction of human race. This time it was a conviction even Einstein had, that is the universe was thought to be stationary. What Hubble saw was that the universe was expanding. All the celestial objects were moving away from each other.

Then a curious idea came. If the expansion speed is reversed in opposite direction in to compression, then things would come closer and closer together, eventually to a point. This compression calculation told that it was some 14 billion years ago, things meet at a point. Then the expansion started with the big bang. Georges Lemaitre says, "the universe must have had a day without an yesterday".

But is that all? Everything started from big bang, but what caused the bang?

This quest was not on for quite a few decades after accepting the big bang. In fact surprisingly, even many scientists were happy with a beginning with an unknown cause.

Astronomer Carl Sagan says "In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed? Cosmology brings us face to face with the deepest mysteries with the questions that were once treated only in religion and myth". These words, though profound, were told in a time when science was not active in finding the reason for big bang.

Now science has started to face the question. A whole research facility works on only to find out what happened before the big bang, in Perimeter Institute, Canada. Many interesting approaches are rigorously pursued. One researcher's idea is that matter and anti matter can come spontaneously from vacuum and recombine. This quantum fluctuation could have triggered big bang. Another one proposes that the universe came through big bang which started from a black hole in another universe which in turn came from another black hole. Another one thinks that this universe got naturally selected from a bunch of universes like the Darwinian evolution of life. More and more fascinating approaches pop up but nothing is proven yet.

Whatever may be the truth, are we going to stop? Any cause of big bang must be an effect of another cause and so on. Doesn't it? Our humble curiosity is going to float in this infinite regression!