2002.08.18
2002.08.18
as it’s been about a year since i last did this, let me do it again (because someone mentioned something about it):
skooz skooz skooz skooz skooz skooz skooz skooz skooz skooz skooz skooz skooz skooz skooz skooz skooz skooz skooz skooz
heard bill moyers interviewing joseph campbell today on PBS (old interview). an interesting idea was presented. let me see if i can expand and clarify on what i got out of it.
our lives, as we’re living it, seem to not have a whole lot of meaning. we go through our day to day lives and there doesn’t seem to by any rhyme or purpose to the apparent random events that shape it. yet at the end of our lives we can look back and think if event A didn’t happen, then event B wouldn’t have happened and ultimately i wouldn’t be who or where or what i am today. looking in retrospect allows us to see a meaning that, while living day to day, we cannot see.
our dreams appear the same way. when you wake a dream appears often to have no real meaning or direction. upon careful analysis, however, the dream can and mostly does have meaning, though sometimes it take deep reflection to understand it and it’s influences. our unconscious will digs up the images an events in dreams and so there is a meaning behind it all.
by the same token, it is as if something greater than ourselves were dreaming us, some larger unconscious will that dreams of people who dream. if this were the case, then our lives do have meaning, at least for this other will.
further, coming back to the chain of events that eventually lead to the culmination of a life, the events often -almost always- involve other people in some way. just as others affect us (the chance meeting that leads to love, marriage, children, or whatever) we affect other people. it is a large web, all with eventual meaning.
now, i am no philosophy specialist, or theologist, or scholar of any sort, so i don’t know if any of this has been covered before. but it seems to me that if someone were looking to justify the existence of god, then this would be one way of doing it (though the skeptics, myself included, could poke holes in it). it also seems to me that this could be the philosophy or basis of some religions, whether overtly stated or implied. i am also wondering if the existentialists ever delved into such ideas, specifically the negative existentialists like satre and camus.
anyways, there’s your deep thought of the day. discuss.
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