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and now flourish and grow warm with life,
and feed on what the ground gives,
but then again fade away and are dead.
Homer, Century IX b.C.
What's the significance of life? Who are we?
Is human life just a dream, from which we never really awake, as some great thinkers claim? Are we submerged by our feelings, by our loves and hates, by our ideas of good, bad, beautiful, awful? Are we incapable of knowing beyond those ideas and feelings?
Listen to Shakespeare and Joseph Conrad
As dreams are made on, and our little life is sounded with a sleep…
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Folger Shakespeare Library)
A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Penguin Classics)
Is the reality we know a reality imposed to us by nature? Is the reality and the meaning of life a creation of men, such as music, or love or colors (science tells us that there isn't such things as music, harmony or colors in the physic world. Just traveling molecules: «There is not, external to us, hot or cold, but only different velocities of molecules; there aren’t sounds, callings, harmonies, but just variations in the pressure of the air; there aren’t colours, or light, just electro-magnetic waves», said H. Von Foerster.).
Are we - and all living beings - just «survival machines, blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes», as Richard Dawkins states? Are we incapable of knowing beyond the frames imposed to us by nature?
Is there any significance for life in a Universe of billions of stars that ignore us? Is there any significance for life in an Universe whose dimensions and nature overcome our understanding?
Love and cruelty on our lives
Love gives meaning to our lives – as do friendship, or art or faith in God. These are factors of true happiness, of inner peace, of feelings of harmony, allowing meaning to our existence.
But there is the other side. There is the cruelty of life, the pain, the evil, not to talk of death. They are the hidden tigers, ambushed and ready to attack the imprudent, to use an image present in the Buddhist Scriptures.
Is between these pendulums - the positive, the one that gives happiness and meaning, and the negative - that our lives are lived. And when we meditate about all that, we arrive at a diverse and disagreeing set of thoughts about the meaning and purpose of life.
Poetic reflexions about the brevity of our lives
Insignificant mortals, who are as leaves are, and now flourish and grow warm with life, and feed on what the ground gives, but then again fade away and are dead.
Homer, Century IX b.C., Greek poet, The Iliad (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been alloted to me?
B. Pascal, 1623-1662, French philosopher, physic and mathematician, Pensees (Penguin Classics)
Why is there something rather than nothing? We do not know. We will never know. Why? To what purpose? We do not know whether there is a purpose. But if it is true that nothing is born of nothing, the very existence of something – the world, the universe – would seem to imply that there has always been something: that being is eternal, uncreated, perhaps creator, and this is what some people call God.
André Comte-Sponville, French philosopher, The Little Book of Philosophy
What is the purpose of life? I believe that the purpose of life is to be happy.
Dalai Lama, Tibetan political and spiritual leader, Voices from the Heart; The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living
At our mother breast, we tasted not only milk but also love – just enough love to know that it was the only thing that could ever satisfy us and that we will miss it forever.
Compte-Sponville, French philosopher, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues: The Uses of Philosophy in Everyday Life
Taken from The Meaning of Life
I too have often wondered if the only goal of a living being is multiply. What's the sense of it?
By the way, I agree with the Dalai Lama.