- Jedediah Higgins House, Princeton, NJ, Interior, Buddha and lotus wall piece, cc-by lemasney
A very good friend asked me, “Who are you, now?” She asks because I had a major life event this year, in February, that changed my life. I gained some clarity about the answer, and here it is.
I am a consciousness here.
I believe that I am a part of the universe, a part like any other, moving along, exchanging materials, nutrients, and other effects, as best I can. I work towards the end of my time, making notes of my insights and ideas, so that my experience and record can potentially further the rest of us, and their ancestry, and so on.
I am a part of a collective cooperative evolution.
Our experiences are a collective knowledge. We are just starting to see tools, like Google, whose effort is to collect and make available the knowledge of the whole. It is an exciting time in mental evolution. It is moving quickly, and becoming unstoppable. I am relieved by this. Now for the process to maintain or improve its ethics is my new concern.
What is the purpose of life?
The purpose of life is to make it better than it was. To grow what is here into something better than all of us could individually. If our society saw this, we would change what we know as education, and let people simply be and grow into whatever they would like. I did not get that realization until later in life:
I am not wrong; I am not right. I just am. I am not everything, nor nothing. I just am.
I feel like I am a good organism, as opposed to a virus. I feel like I leave my ecosystem better than I find it. It is the best aspiration I can think of: To be a good organism; I’m a beneficial part of a holistic system.
This helps me to make many decisions. For instance, I want to be cremated because I feel like that would be just one more thing I could do, quite literally: to fertilize and help grow that which comes after me. I want to do this in life, as well.
Who are you, now?
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