The Meaning of Life and Other Vegetables

Hello.

Today I intended to start commenting about topics from Hoffman’s interview. But then a piece of text from Dr. Hollis’s Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life triggered some thoughts. I started taking notes, and before I knew it I’ve written a post. So here it is.

[You may call me a procrastinator. That’s fine. I Never said I wasn’t.]

Hollis wrote:

The ongoing curriculum of life does not demand that we avoid suffering; it asks instead that we live more meaningfully in the face of it.

Despite the blandishments of popular culture, the goal of life is not happiness but meaning. Those who seek happiness by trying to avoid or finesse suffering will find life more and more superficial. As we have seen, in every swampland there is a task, the addressing of which will enlarge one’s life not diminish it. Life is not a problem to be solved, finally, but a series of engagements with the cosmos in which we are asked to live as fully as we can manage. In so doing we serve the transcendent meaning that is meant to be brought into being through us. In fleeing this fullness of life, we violate our very purpose.

First, I must comment that although I subscribe to it, this stance seems to be in some contradiction with the teachings of the Buddha. The Buddha taught that suffering can be ended, and that this is desirable because it can promote enlightenment. The Noble Eightfold Path (or The Middle Way) – a set of Buddhist guidelines that is meant to lead to the end of suffering – doesn’t seem to endorse the occasional Swamplands* visitations and engagements Hollis is describing as enlarging; rather, as much as that Path seems “right”, desirable, and indeed noble, it seems to be focused on avoiding “negativity” and anything to do with suffering, certainly a deep engagement with it in search of meaning.

*) These might include Guilt; Grief and Loss; Betrayal; Doubt and Loneliness; Depression; Addictions; and Anxieties.

Note: The idea of suffering giving meaning to life was also beautifully presented by another psychologist – Viktor Frankl, in his timeless book Man’s Search for Meaning (highly recommended if you haven’t read it yet).

But sitting with this a bit longer, maybe it’s a little more subtle than that. Hollis is not preaching indulging in suffering. In a way, he is also pointing at ending suffering. The difference is that rather than “removing” or avoiding suffering altogether, he recommends “going through” the suffering, listening to it, sitting with it for a while, to understand what it’s there to teach us or impart on us. Finally, when the lesson had been taken in, that particular bout of suffering might be over, or at least relieved to an extent. In a way, the goal is to “mine” meaning from the suffering vein.

Either way… the phrase that triggered me to muse was actually not directly related to the suffering conundrum… It was “engagement with the cosmos in which we are asked to live as fully as we can manage.” I was wondering, what does that mean in RSU? In RSU, “the cosmos in which we live” is the One. What does it mean to engage with it? What does it mean to live in it “as fully as possible”? These are difficult questions at this stage, because my model is not yet fully clear about free will. Hoffman touched on free will very briefly in his recent interview, and I intend to engage with that topic in that context, in a future post.

In the meantime, I’ll just say that right now I feel that my model is a bit too mechanistic in that sense. The CA, as described, don’t seem to be choosing whether (or to what degree) to “engage” with other CA, or with the One in general. The values they generate for their outputs (which make up the “messages” they broadcast) are immediately available at the inputs of their counterparts, with no seeming discretion about it. As a result, it seems that other than their internal workings – which apparently have the potential for near-infinite complexity, and therefor maybe the emergence of free will – they have no choice around “how fully they live” in the One. If their internal workings are “their subconscious” (as I crudely speculated in another post), and their consciousness is merely in their outer envelope – which currently involves no discretion – it would imply no conscious, free will about engagement. Food for thought.

Peace to all.