I know that sounds rather presumptuous, but given that each of us is just one of many – and, when it comes down to it, not all that different from each other when it comes to what we bring to the table to take on the challenges of everyday life. That is to say, how different can we be in our overall approach to life, when as members of one species we are primarily driven by our shared biology, and the differences between us are no more than varieties on a theme, i.e., they are differences of degree, and not of kind.

Beyond that, there are the circumstances of our birth such as the place and social-economic environment that we grow up in including our culture –  that help shape us into the individuals that we are today.  That this will leave each of us as distinct and unique individuals with needs and desires and expectations from life possibly as different between two people as day and night is undoubtedly true, yet at the same time the differences again are a matter of degree, and not of kind.

And if I can shed some light on the meaning and purpose of life for myself by sharing my thoughts about it, perhaps this might help someone else to start thinking about what life means to them, and add some definition or context or value to their outlook on life in a world that, in my humble opinion,  is going down the wrong path in terms of pursuing the best possible future for our species.  This is not to say that I think the human race is irrevocably going to hell in a handcart, although there are many among us who appear to be doing their best to make this happen.

I’m thinking of the massive environmental damage being inflicted on our precious planet on a daily basis, and beyond that: who can begin to enumerate the number and variety of social  economic and health issues ranging from poverty to homelessness to starvation across the globe? Just this week the NY Times in an article titled The U.S. Can No Longer Hide From Its Deep Poverty Problem showed a tally of those living on $4 a day or less in selected developed countries, and it included 5.3 million people living in the US.  I don’t necessarily want to pick on the US, but with the highest GDP in the world you wonder how this can even be the case when a country is deemed the wealthiest country in the world.

Then there is the disturbing statistic that half of the world’s wealth belongs to the top 1%, while the top 10% of adults hold 85%, and the bottom 90% hold the remaining 15% of the world’s total wealth.  If you believe that these discrepancies  are simply a function of some folks working harder and smarter than others, and reaping the benefit of it, then bless you, but you may have to learn something about how some people, organizations and certain governments operate in order to produce the incredible wealth that they have accumulated.

So against these things  – and with the brazen assumption that there is a lot more going on in the world than meets the eye –  I am introducing “the larger context”,  which, I postulate, naively as it may be,  is the true meaning  or intent behind the world. It is the reason for it being there in the first place,  including our very own presence in it, and something I hope we will  be able to get a glimpse of once we look  beyond the nonsensical content of religious dogma  (of whatever flavor) and the unsupported and hence unintelligible notion that someone or something else is in charge of our world beyond ourselves.

Why do I think there is ” a larger context” or  “true intent” to life that we are currently not aware of?  Only because we are the offspring of the greater cosmos, and as such contain its “DNA” within every particle of our being.  We are in fact one entity! As a result, what motivates it likely motivates us, either directly or indirectly,  and then at  a level where we would be capable of initiating some course of inspired action commensurate with the evolutionary achievement that we currently represent. However, at the moment one might be hard pressed to think much of that,  given the aforementioned sorrowful status of the world today, and that would include the questionable quality of  leadership of some of the most powerful nations in the world at the moment..

But it is without question that our evolutionary path shows that the cosmos is on a mission, and to date we  appear to be that mission; it is just that we don’t yet know what that mission is about. But it would be unreasonable to think that this is a multi-billion year mission of self-annihilation, given the kludge that we are currently making of it, although I hate to think that we are  doomed to end up that way because we haven’t evolved enough in the grey matter department to be able to take care of it.

And so my hope is that by  gaining even an inkling of  understanding of the world’s greater purpose, on the assumption there is one  – oh, and what an assumption – we might eventually be able to abandon the current seemingly runaway path of self-destruction by rising to the occasion and take ownership of our destiny by determining as best we can what our role should be in this fantastic cosmic adventure that we have only  just woken up in.  Evolution is providing us with some pointers here, but we need to be able to understand a lot more of what has moved us along its path to the present moment  before we can start making more  sense of it.

In the end, much of this is about not being able to see the forest for the trees, or, for that matter,  the universe for the stars, when, usually, the whole is larger than the sum of its parts –  and so is the world; we’re just not seeing it at the moment, and my greatest fear is that we might never be able to.

The challenge here will be to translate these experiences into a language that allows the larger context to emerge so that it can be articulated and inspire us to create a destiny for ourselves that does justice to the effort that has gone into the making of us.

This effort is not easily understood – and if we even understood just the tiniest fraction of it I’m not so sure we would be much further ahead in gaining an insight into the larger picture.   No doubt I will be writing more  about that in a future piece …

For now we describe our arrival here on earth in terms of an evolutionary process over billions of years.  Nothing is explained in terms of why or how or where this process is heading for, and so we are left with a mystery. Being at the receiving end of this process, we can look back to some extent and infer that apparently this has been about the gradual enablement of what we call “consciousness”, and achieved by the development of ever more complex organizational structures within matter, reaching its current summit in the grey matter of our brains. Now what?

The one thing that this did bring about was the transition of life’s apparently intrinsic evolutionary pressures from a strictly internal process over billions of years to an external one, as evidenced by the ingenuity of our species to manipulate and restructure matter into ever increasing organizational complexity as reflected by the various aspects of technology that we are familiar with today. Through us, nature has achieved a quantum leap in the creativity department, now being able to push its evolutionary objectives over significantly shorter time frames. In this sense, human beings function as nature’s evolutionary agents, pushing these objectives along at a breakneck speed for no other reason than that it seems to be the natural thing to do …

Smart enough to move it along, yet not smart enough to know why, and that is probably a wise thing as far as nature is concerned, given our tendency to self-destruct, a function of being an intermediate, transitional and demonstratively unstable life-form, schizoid, capable of being both intellectually brilliant and emotionally brittle, or logical and illogical, and the latter most likely caused by that aspect of ourselves that is still very much the predatory, primitive beast in the field that we descent from.

So yes, where do we go from here?