Chapter 1 - Why Questions?
Chapter 2 - What is the Purpose of Life?
Chapter 3 - Does God Exists?
Chapter 4 - What Radically Changed?
Chapter 5 - The Law of "No" Land?
Chapter 6 - Who is the Enemy?
Chapter 7 - Who is the Eucharist?
Chapter 8 - Who am I?
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Chapter 2 - Part 1
What is the Purpose of Life?
As human beings, we have a strong capacity for learning. Few years back, I had an elderly close relative that was in a nursing care facility. With life’s busy schedule, it was very hard to find the time to visit him often. Once, during a random weekday visit, I approached his room as usual, and overheard him speaking to a nurse about his children and grandchildren. The nurse seemed very interested and was asking him questions that prompted answers I did not know about. As the nurse was stepping out of his room, I asked her what prompted the conversation with him. With a simple look, she said “I simply asked him what he learned from his life.”
For some reason, it did not occur to me to ask some of the deep and meaningful questions to him during my visits. As I walked in the room, I began with my cordial hellos, then quickly started asking some questions about his life. After few questions, I looked at my watch and realized it had been almost three hours of conversation. I explained I had to leave, but the promised to come back soon and continue with our discussion. As I started walking away from his room toward the exit of the building, I passed by the commons area where many of the elderly gather. It was at that moment that I realized that I was not at a nursing care facility. Rather, I was at fine aged intellectual winery; full of barrels that are just waiting for someone to taste and enjoy the knowledge that can pour out of them.
Chapter 2 - Part 2
Time does not know friends!
As we enter into and begin to dissect the topic of “what makes me happy,” we first need to know who “me” is? This is not the philosophical version of the question “who am I?” Rather, this is to understand what makes up a human being.
As we can observe, a human being is made of matter that has a particular mass. This mass contains organs that interact with each other allowing that mass to function physically as a human being. Some of those organs include a brain, heart, limbs, etc. All of which make up what we know as the human body. Each unique body begins with the formulation of DNA at the time of conception and ends when the members, in a general sense, no longer function where the body expires. These are all tangible things based on the physical evidence around us, allowing us to safely conclude that a human being has a body. However, from our observations earlier, we found things around us that are intangible. This leads us to ask if a human being has any intangible or non-physical factors aside from a body?
We know that the so-far reached conclusion for the purpose of life helped satisfy some of the tangible areas, but failed to satisfy the intangible ones. When considering non-physical factors or attributes of a person, we need take a step back and look for further evidence. This evidence might not necessarily appear around us, rather from the past, where individuals have lost their physical body, but something about them still lives on.
When considering someone who passed from this life, especially someone close or a loved one, we can certainly remember some of their physical features and attributes. We can also remember character, demeaner, temperament, the way he or she loved, the way he or she made us feel, etc.
We can probably also take individuals from history and figure out who they were based on the historical writings from them or about them. Even though their body has died, their spirit lives on. This is not saying that an actual spirit is roaming around. The “spirit”, in this case, is similar to saying a spirit of a team. It is something we can observe, but is not made up of matter. This evidence gives us a glimpse to a possibility that a human being has matter attributes and non-matter attributes.
The matter attributes we can easily define as a body, and the non-matter attributes we will give the commonly used title, which is soul. The body contains the appearance, physical parts and features, etc. The soul, for the purpose of our discussion, would contain character, demeaner, temperament, etc. We can look at the soul in this way: If the body contains the tangible attributes, then the soul contains the intangible attributes. Together, however, they make up the human being. Someone, of course, could make the argument that the intangible attributes are still a resultant of physical organs, DNA and the environment. Without discrediting that argument, we are using “soul” to simply distinguish between the tangible and the intangible. Although, even when we apply the definition we are using for soul, we could probably find identical twins with same DNA, yet are two unique individuals with two different “souls.”
Chapter 2 - Part 3
Let us take, for example, relationships, and particularly marriage. Marriage in itself is a limited source for many reasons. If someone wants to get married to achieve happiness and avoid unhappiness, then that person will look for ways to get rid of things that make him or her unhappy in the marriage. One of the things that make a marriage unhappy is arguments. Some would even judge the success of their marriage on how little they argue.
In a marriage, two people of different backgrounds, different styles of thinking, different mentalities and desires, and different temperaments come to live together. By the sheer differences mentioned, it is impossible not to have arguments between them. Thus, to say the purpose of marriage is to achieve happiness and to avoid unhappiness is not logical, let alone practical.
To take the marriage example further, we need to consider something about arguments very seriously. If arguments are a cause of differences, then the solution to the arguments becomes the cause toward similarities and unification. Thus an argument becomes a necessary part in order to build the marriage. In other words, arguments become a necessary purpose of a relationship and the goal becomes, not to avoid arguments, rather to know how to deal with arguments to maximize the benefit. This would mean that arguments are no longer a source of unhappiness within a marriage, although they do not feel good, rather an opportunity toward happiness.
The phrase “although they do not feel good” is what makes the so-far reached conclusion incomplete. Everything we had done earlier based the conclusion on the question “how does that make us feel?” In the example of marriage, experiencing something that does not feel good can draw the maximum happiness out of it. Similarly, in life, the purpose cannot be to achieve happiness and “avoid” unhappiness. If it was the purpose, then the only way to live is to avoid any possible means of conflict. If so, then we risk living a life where we detach from any real and meaningful higher functions such as relationship, leadership, goal, and future.
The reality of avoidance became very tangible a couple years ago when I had the pleasure of speaking at a function. The majority of the attendees where men and women in their 20s. I gave a challenge to the audience, at the end of my time, to not avoid unhappiness, rather to face it and work through it. Someone at the end of the function came to me and said “I wish my dad would have taken that challenge.” When I inquired further, I understood that the father was not present most of the time, but has buried himself in a business. In the person’s words, “I feel like the business is one of my siblings…more like the golden child in the family.” To give the benefit of the doubt to the father, I explained that it is not uncommon for a business person to spend a lot of time on the business. It does not mean that the father is not paying attention to the kids’ needs, rather is working very hard to provide now and for the future. The person nodded, but said, “it just seems that my dad does not want to deal with my mom, or any family troubles…he would rather not hear about any problems from us.”