Thursday, May 21, 2015

The Purpose of Reality


Why are we here?  Why do you perform magic?  Why do you meditate?  What are you trying to achieve in the end?  Perfect the soul?  Why?

When looking around the world and thinking about the people I know in our mystery community I often ask myself what really motivates those people in their spiritual pursuits.  The knowledge of why we are here and what exactly is going on is clearly part of the mystery but I often wonder what people theorize, or whether they even theorize at all - perhaps they just ''do the work'' without ever questioning why they are doing the work...

As far as I can tell the main theories are as follows:

Meaningless - A tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

The universe has no overarching meaning you are free to invent your own pseudo meaning but in the final analysis - it was matter but it really didn't.

Theatre/Game - All the World's a Stage and all the Men and Women Merely Players... 

This opinion would hold that we are here enacting various stories for some kind of aesthetic experience - that we are playing at people.  Most people struggle here with the ''Ebola baby'' type reasoning - why would anyone want to experience the short and pain filled life of a young child dying of a terrible disease?  There seem to be a few options there a) we cannot fully understand the mind of a 5th dimensional being experiencing 4th dimensional reality and it is possible that there is some kind of aesthetic experience going on even in these extreme conditions or b) death/dying is a pleasurable aesthetic experience*.

School - Ignorance is the curse of God, knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven

We are here to learn, dammit!  All the pain and suffering of life, its victories, its defeats and its occasional soul-crushing tedium is to educate us.  This theory is extremely popular in the New Age and I assume when we ''graduate'' from planet Earth we are reborn into a ''higher'' dimension as a ''higher'' being.  We are here to learn to use the gifts we have been given, to develop our spiritual nature.  If you fail the class, you have to resit the year - i.e. you are returned to take the same lessons again and again until you ''get it''.  It suffers from the same problem as the Theatre Game theory i.e. the Ebola baby.  What lessons are you learning there except for futility?

Prison/Exile - I have been considering how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world...

We are in prison on Earth: either a) because we committed some crime in a higher dimension and have been cast down like fallen angels or b) some demiurge tricked our bodies of light into associating with matter.  Sometimes I think, when playing around with this idea that perhaps exile is a better way to describe this - We are exiles here torn away from love by bitter strife - some of us are here as voluntary exiles, some are refugees, some of us were banished... Either way the reason seems to be ''escape from Prison'' and return home - wherever that is.

War - Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of War!

The ultimate showdown between Good and Evil, we are here to fight for one of two sides - is there a final resolution to this battle or is it simply dynamic equilibrium between Chaos and Law? Will Ahura Mazda win in the end or will he always be opposed by Ahriman?


So trying to blend some/all of these possible narratives I came up with:

The Universe is an interactive educational game with excellent graphics where we play characters whose starting conditions and internal moral compasses vary widely - The nature of the game is historical - we explore history between the axes of the future (where the game atcually exists) to the past and it consists of moral decisions in a kind of ''time-war''.  We have become trapped inside this game due to the malfunctioning of the Demiurge nominally in charge of it therefore the actual function of the game - our education - is now meaningless.  We are being educated for no reason.


What do you think?  How do you justify your actions in the grand scheme of things?  What model of purpose do you ascribe to - what are you and why are you?

*In William Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night the trans-migrants are aware that they will be reborn and also that death is the most pleasurable during youth so they all kill themselves by auto-erotic asphyxiation in mass hanging as teenagers to get the most out of it. (???)

1 comment:

  1. I'm surprised nobody else has commented on this yet. Such a good question, too. My own take on it is that our experience of materiality is sort of a virtual reality flight simulator. I suspect that we undertake this mortal coil because it's educational in some respect, but I am not convinced by the "school" hypothesis or that we "graduate" to some "higher" state of being. I think it may be more like a giant consciousness exploring itself through every possible iteration, at play. In this sense, I find very useful the Hindu concept of lila or leela, which I understand (misunderstand?) to be divine play. For what it's worth, my UPG hints that (1) the relationships we form and the moral choices within the context of inter-relationship are important. I don't think it's a matter of good vs. evil per se...but truth be told, I don't know what it is about. I read somewhere that a mortal incarnation is the only venue for experiencing an individuated point of view and free will. That argument does make some sense to me insofar as I wonder what other benefit there would be for the annoyingly limited perspective and cognitive capacities that seem to go along with humanness. (2) From the perspective of whatever aspect of ourselves is eternal, the fleshly experience is at least partially blissful. Yet (3) from the perspective of the mortal coil it is usually far from blissful and feels more like Philip K. Dick's Black Iron Prison. Make of it what you will. For my part, the more I learn the more I know how much I don't know!

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