I have apparently stalled in my blogging, if not my thinking. Back to blogging business.

I have been examining the questions that I have been posing to myself in my thinking and ultimately these paths lead to the biggest road of all – the meaning of life.

I have been an information or knowledge junky for my whole life. When I was a kid, before I was at school, I would sit in front of the TV watching news. I was fascinated by this window on the world and would absorb bits of information and parrot them back to my Mom as she was working around the house.

I’ve always been interested in how information fits together and ultimately, at least for me, that leads to a meaning of life. I don’t know if it’s hubris or naiveté. But I have always had this notion in the back of my mind, of searching for the biggest picture.

I have now come up with my meaning of life that is the background hum in my life. The big picture that brings meaning to everything I witness, experience and dream of in my life. I present it for your consideration. I am not trying to convince anyone of anything. I am suggesting the possibility that this could explain our existence. For me, this helps me make sense of the world and my relationship to it. I invite any and all comments. This is subject to revision, but I’m not sure how that could come about since everything I see appears to reinforce this meaning of life.

This series of blog posts will be fairly brief as it covers a huge amount of territory and I just want to get it out there. You can consider the rest of my blogging and really the rest of my life to be an expansion and elaboration of this.

So let’s start the beginning. That’s like hopping on a merry-go-round at the beginning, but you have to start somewhere.

Part 1. Why a meaning of life?

It’s almost a cliche to ask the meaning of life. A rhetorical question that invites a grin and throwing up your hands to say it’s a meaningless or silly question. The Monty Python comedy group made a movie “The Meaning of Life” looking at the absurdities and realities of life. Lots of laughs and self-recognition, but no conclusion. I’m here to come to a conclusion dammit! And sadly, fewer laughs.

But I think it’s an important question – ok, the most important question. It gets back to my piece on the most dangerous and the most important word in the universe….why?

If you take any statement and then ask why, and then keep asking why until you can’t ask why anymore, you will always ultimately lead to the meaning of life, or “just because”, which is a meaningless and unsatisfying answer (at least for me). Throwing up those hands and giving up is not an option for me.

“I’m going to the store.”

Why?

“Because I need to buy some pens and paper.”

Why?

“Because I’m going to school next week.”

Why?

“Because I want to learn.”

Why?

“I want to become a doctor.”

Why?

“So I can help people and make money.”

Why?

“Because people get sick and I need money to live.”

Why?

“Because there are diseases and I need to buy food and shelter and other things.”

I hope you can see where this is going. The answers become harder to come by and ultimately they point to a meaning of life. The ultimate answer to the ultimate question…the final why. What I am calling “the big picture meaning of life” or BMOL.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is a very funny book and movie that started as a radio play on BBC – Brits again, like Monty Python. In it, Douglas Adams, talks about the ultimate answer to the ultimate question as a proxy for the meaning of life.

As in The Hitchhikers Guide, you may be disappointed by my BMOL, but I hope you find it more useful than their ultimate answer to the ultimate question. And mine is much more testable in your life, with many more consequences flowing from it. By the way, the ultimate question is “why?”. So you need to come up with the ultimate answer to “why?”.

Do we really need to come up with a meaning of life? No. If you’re satisfied with running up against a brick wall as you ask the why’s, carry on. But I need a meaning of life. And I want the biggest one possible for that ultimate why.

Another reason is related to Pascal’s wager. Pascal was a French smart guy in the 1600’s – philosopher, mathematician, inventor, etc. Pascal put forth a postulate that one had to either believe in God or not. Since there is no real downside to believing in God, Pascal thought it is foolish to risk eternal damnation by not believing in God. So belief in God is a good and useful bet, according to Pascal – that’s his wager.

I make a similar claim, although I think it’s more fundamental – let’s call it Campbell’s wager. You either believe in an ultimate meaning of life or you don’t. But life is more rewarding, more fun, and more interesting if you devise a good and big picture meaning of life. You are the one to judge the goodness and the usefulness of your meaning. You could choose to have fun as the ultimate meaning of life, or to make as much money as you possibly can. I think most of us would find those meanings or purposes ultimately very empty, except in a very short time frame. I would suggest that fun or money are not sufficiently “big picture”. But to each his own. And you’re always free to revise.

I’m looking for the biggest possible meaning of life. If you said money or fun were the ultimate meaning of life, then someone could still ask why and you could give a number of different answers. I’m looking for the ultimate meaning of life as near as I can figure it.

Now you are going to hit a brick wall eventually. That’s a certainty. Ultimately every idea rests on an axiom that you can’t prove. There is always a starting point to any discussion. For me, the meaning of life is ultimately the axiom that makes the most sense to me, to explain human life. The answer that can’t further by reduced to a more basic “why”. If you’re working on the meaning of life, you want the most complete and most basic axiom you can arrive at – the one that explains the most.

So you can’t prove an axiom, if it really is an axiom. You can’t prove the starting point. But what you can do is take that axiom and see where it leads you. You can test it. Does the axiom make sense as a basis for what you observe and know? So an axiom, such as a meaning of life, is certainly open to investigation. And if an axiom leads to absurd or incorrect ideas, then you may decide to toss it out and search for a new one, or at least modify it. A BMOL or big picture meaning of life should constantly serve you and help you make sense of your life.

So Campbell’s wager is that it is totally worthwhile to formulate a personal, and “big picture” meaning of life – what I’m calling a BMOL. Some will argue that a meaning of life is impossible and absurd given the nature of the universe. That may be true, although we will be discussing the nature of the universe in more detail. And by concluding that formulating a meaning of life is absurd, silly or impossible, really says a lot about what you believe about life and existence. In some ways, you have a meaning of life inside of you, animating your decisions and actions, whether you recognize it or not. I’m advocating becoming aware of that and giving it some thought to make it more conscious. Even so, I believe that even an incorrect, but a “big picture” meaning of life will add immeasurably to the quality of one’s life. It helps to make your life more conscious and make yourself more awake to life.

Formulating a meaning of life and later examining how one’s life fits in with that meaning can only help you lead a happier and more interesting life. It can help you make decisions and trace the reasons for decisions or mistakes you might make. I think it can lead to making helpful changes in your life as you discover what works and what doesn’t as you look at your life in light of, and through the lens of a “big picture” meaning of life.

“The unexamined life is not worth living” is attributed to Socrates, by way of Plato. I certainly wouldn’t go that far and in any case, everyone examines their life at times – looking back and looking forward. But I think Socrates is suggesting a more vigilant and more conscious approach to that examination – a habit that animates one’s thinking and values. Personally, as I have come upon my BMOL, it has made my life easier and more relaxing, although challenges are always there. I think a good BMOL can make that examination process of life that Socrates advocates, infinitely easier and more rewarding. My BMOL has simplified my life, as well as enriching it.

I will leave this first section with a longer quotation from an extraordinary man, a great thinker, a towering figure in psychology and a brave explorer of the human condition – Carl Jung:

“If the demand for self-knowledge is willed by fate and is refused, this negative attitude may end in real death. The demand would not have come to this person had he still been able to strike out on some promising by-path. But he is caught in a blind alley from which only self-knowledge can extricate him. If he refuses this then no other way is left open to him. Usually he is not conscious of his situation, either, and the more unconscious he is the more he is at the mercy of unforeseen dangers: he cannot get out of the way of a car quickly enough, in climbing a mountain he misses his foothold somewhere, out skiing he thinks he can negotiate a tricky slope, and in an illness he suddenly loses the courage to live. The unconscious has a thousand ways of snuffing out a meaningless existence with surprising swiftness.” C. G. Jung – Volume 14 / Collected Works, Mysterium Coniunctionis

I hope I have made a case for considering a “big picture meaning of life”, a BMOL. So let’s get started. More to come. Much more.

We are here to change the world.

It’s time.

Begin.