Thread: Is life significant?

Significance is a measure of the value a person places on something and as people are all living things then life has more significance than anything.

To understand the significance of life, we must know the purpose of meaning.

Your responding to the topic header but there's a lot more to it.

The question really is, withno proof for myself in real life, do karma and dharma exist? Dharma being the set of lessons lfe has in store for you to learn and karma being the ripple effect of the choices you make.

If so, it means every moment has a hidden meaning, some deeper purpose in order to teach you something or let you complete karma chain. But I've never observed anything in reality that has made me believe without a reasonable doubt that any such universal laws exist. And if they don't, then moments only have the value we place upon them, which is true anyway, but there's no spiritual destiny attached to moments, no purpose in it... which makes it much harder to bestow my moments with significance.

Nothing inherently has meaning or significance. These are qualities given to things by people. Life only has a meaning if you give it one.

You're talking about a lot of nonsense like horoscopes, astrology and superstition. I personally find it sad if you find the significance of life from any of these.

Also many people live their lives believing their life is significant because that is what their religion says. There is nothing wrong with this, and though religion is misleading it is still enough to satisfy the more weaker-minded among our populace.

Yes life is significant, but only if you lead a significant life.

Originally Posted by skysaw

Nothing inherently has meaning or significance. These are qualities given to things by people. Life only has a meaning if you give it one.

Definitely. There is no absolute meaning, only the meaning we give to things (just like there is no such thing as evil, it is only a concept invented by humans).

:eyeroll:

This entire subforum is just a bunch of parrots.

Originally Posted by Omnius Deus

Your responding to the topic header but there's a lot more to it.

That may have something to do with the fact that I didn't read past the thread's title.

Originally Posted by Omnius Deus

:eyeroll:

This entire subforum is just a bunch of parrots.

Well you'll have to talk back if you want them to learn any new phrases

Does this 'karma' thing involve some sort of morals? As in, "bad" actions come back to hurt you, etc.?

I'm not really clear on your definitions.

Here's the belief I'm currently pondering:

We are born into the world with a maximum level of destiny. For some, it's higher than others (some have potential to be leaders, others doctors, others grocers). As conscious beings, it is our responsibility to fulfill that destiny. We can always come short of our destiny, of course.

It's almost like the concept of moira, except flipped (moira=each person has their share of hardships. They can't decrease them, only increase them).

Originally Posted by Omnius Deus

:eyeroll:

This entire subforum is just a bunch of parrots.

agreed... but.. even parrots doesnt search for life purpose, life meaning.. lol

Originally Posted by Omnius Deus

:eyeroll:

This entire subforum is just a bunch of parrots.

What are you trying to say, that parrots are awesome?

Very subtle,

Originally Posted by M-Cat

What are you trying to say, that parrots are awesome?

Very subtle,

he is not trying to say that parrots are awsome !
it doesnt need to try... he write - you read..
it is not like he writes - then you go trying to imagine what he was trying to say..
(egh)

Nothing inherently has meaning or significance. These are qualities given to things by people. Life only has a meaning if you give it one.

Sounds very existentialist to me?

At the moment I'd say that's the right view to take. If you want to be cynical then you can say that there is no purpose to life, and everything we encounter in our lives is an illusion, a sort of order created by humans. I ecountered this section from the novel Nausea yesterday:

And then, all of a sudden, there it was, as clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost its harmless appearance as an abstract category: it was the very stuff of things, that root was steeped in existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass on the lawn, all that had vanished; the diversity of things, their individuality, was only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft monstrous masses, in disorder naked with a frightening, obscene nakedness.

In my opinion that passage describes existence very well. We only glimpse a sort of layer of what existence really is; we can only percieve a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum with our own eyes, for example; gravity is another constant we consider essential to our everyday experiences and helps define what everyday life is yet it is just a number resulting from the mass of the Earth.

I think the way you should look at existence therefore is not as a soft mass of matter, but to indulge yourself in the concepts that man percieves and creates; concepts such as objects with edges, or speech, or music, all of these kinds of things. Just because there is no universal meaning inherent in them, it does not mean that we cannot create meaning which is just as valid. Once you stop asking the mute universe for the answer and instead create the answers for yourself, life does have purpose.

To Abra: when you mentioned "maximum destiny", couldn`t that also be percieved as one's full potential?

Originally Posted by Mark75

To understand the significance of life, we must know the purpose of meaning.

That's true, but we will never know the purpose of meaning, we just fill it with things we like or wanna do or think we should know to better ourselves, not things that we, as humans, are ment to do.

Originally Posted by Omnius Deus

:eyeroll:

This entire subforum is just a bunch of parrots.

Omnius, let me toss in my take on this topic of yours...



To me life is has distinct significance when you yourself believe you are the body and all its traits, including its personality or psyche. For one with such a belief, Karma and Dharma do apply in regards to this life they believe themselves to be leading.

When one reaches beyond this superfiscial belief one begins to see this transitory life as nothing more than a " pair of socks " that one wears.

Like a pair of socks, this life experience is nothing to be attached to. When socks get old, worn and frayed you simply toss them away and put on a new pair. Ones existant life is no different, and one should be no more attached to it than a pair of socks. Sure one enjoys the warmth and comfort socks give, but they dont last and are nothing to be attached to in particular. One pair serves just as well as the next.

Even so, one cannot discount life in general, as each individual is caught up in their own distinct karmic and dharmic experience. The thing that makes it unable to be discounted is that part of what is you is connected to all the others. If anything makes life generally significant in itself it is this.

Originally Posted by roguext22

he is not trying to say that parrots are awsome !
it doesnt need to try... he write - you read..
it is not like he writes - then you go trying to imagine what he was trying to say..
(egh)

quoted for incomprehensibility

Originally Posted by roguext22

he is not trying to say that parrots are awsome !
it doesnt need to try... he write - you read..
it is not like he writes - then you go trying to imagine what he was trying to say..
(egh)

You have never made a post on here I have been able to read without stopping and vomiting I'm afraid. Aww shucks.




Anyhow guise Meaning itself is entirely relative and has to be compared in order to have some kind of scale to it.


What is more meaningful than anything else in the end is a very odd concept.

Meaning implies purpose, and purpose implies working towards serving a larger purpose.

And off we trot into an infinite regress of purpose.

I think it's a silly concept which works on a superficial and basic human level of understanding but is pointless to apply to the bigger picture.