If the point of one's life is rooted in the material world, life will become pointless if one's objectives are not achieved, whether due to one's own fault, or due to the many other impeding factors; ignorance and idleness are not the only reasons for material failure, mediocrity, or insignificance ('I had developed a theory that most people lost money in stocks through ignorance of markets. I discovered many more reasons later on.' Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill's Story).
Sometimes the fact that a person has located their purpose in material outcomes or processes, even the material manifestations of spiritual growth, e.g. sponsorship and service, becomes apparent only when illness or adversity prevents ordinary daily actions. Immediately, gloom and panic borne of a sense of futility strike and have been known to strike so deep that the individual relapses or worse.
Unless a person is drugged, dazed, or doolally, they need to discern a point to their existence to trudge onwards. Viktor Frankl said something to the effect that the one thing people cannot live without is hope, and I think hope is closely tied to a sense of purpose: the hope is the hope that one's life is not in vain, that a purpose is thereby being served.
If one cannot succeed materially, even as a good service member and sponsor in AA, for reasons beyond one's control, is there a point? What if the point lies in the relationships with those one loves dearly and devotes years or decades to, but they all die? What point is there then? Does one simply start again from ground level? What if what one has built is destroyed or superseded, meaning that there is no legacy? How can one go on?
Those who are awake at all must discern a purpose to live fruitfully and happily and are quite distraught without it or at the prospect of its loss. The offence at the purpose of life appearing to be confounded is so universal, the need for purpose must be held to be innate. Is the need for purpose natural, though, in the sense of emerging out of the physics, chemistry, and biology of the natural world? Or is its origin otherworldly—is it, in fact, supernatural?
Pitstop: We need a purpose to live fruitfully and happily
Question: Where does this need for a purpose come from?
Might purposefulness be a lesson of nature? Self-evidently not. Nature, red in tooth and claw, teaches futility. The philosophers widely teach the futility of this plane when seen in isolation (from Ecclesiastes to Marcus Aurelius and Anthony de Mello). It is equally clear from experience and observation that much of what people construe to be their purpose in the material plane is hard or impossible to achieve, fragile, volatile, transitory, or worthless. The natural world—the natural life—teaches the vanity of purpose on the natural plane.
Almost all of nature exists without purpose. Photons, atoms, plants, animals beside humans (and arguably some of their companions), have no purpose. They're driven automatically in endless chains of causality. The force comes from behind. The billiard ball is struck and moves. It does not move towards. It moves away from. It does not set its own objective then move towards it under its own steam.
One might argue that purpose is a more sophisticated form of mechanical drive. This is a basic error that must be swiftly swept from the table. These phenomena might appear similar (because both condition action) but are in fact fundamentally different.
Purpose, for our ... purposes, is not the mere blinding instinct that governs the conduct of animals. For the object of human purpose must be identified, examined, and assented to, from amongst an array of possible purposes: it is not programmed. It is chosen by the will following a process of sorting and sifting; it is not the predetermined object of a lower, material force that directs the will towards it. It typically needs to be understood, at any rate in part. Sometimes its sense is seen dimly, but there is always the trust in its rationality. A purely irrational purpose (collecting all of this or that) might satisfy temporarily (even for years or decades) but will ultimately ring hollow. A compulsive compensatory psychological mechanism (e.g. alphabetising one's spices to allay anxiety) cannot be conflated with purpose; it is not subject to the will; it is not of existential significance; and its accomplishment is not imbued with the same satisfactions.
Purpose must therefore be reasonable (and reason self-evidently cannot emerge from the physical world: reason depends on the validity of inferences, and the validity of inferences is measured with reference to abstract principles that exist irrespective of the existence of a material world; moreover, the mental process that arrives at inferences that are understood and assented to cannot be driven automatically and necessarily by a purely physical deterministic system, since forced assent to an idea is no assent at all, as Stalin's cronies will testify. If we agreed with an inference simply because brain chemistry forced us to, the agreement would have no meaning, and the inference, no value; reason would be dead in the water. An inference can be assented to either because it is rational or because of chemistry. It cannot have dual causality.)
Pitstop: That purpose must be rational and reasonable
Question: Is it reasonable and rational to have a material-world purpose?
One might argue that a few very talented and lucky people are able to achieve very great things, and that, although this is a selective boon, we must all strive towards such very great things, even knowing in advance that most of us will fail. There are, indeed, the stars, the prodigies, the apparent successes, who do positively affect many lives in a highly visible way and leave a legacy sometimes for thousands of years, having streets named after them, and suchlike.
This system fails on three levels.
It fails firstly on the question of legacy: a legacy that spans the globe and lasts for a thousand years is impressive until one considers the span of time and the span of the universe. Even the greatest material successes are, relatively speaking, no less trivial than well-washed dishes or a well-worded PowerPoint deck. The sun is burning out. Nothing here is eternal. Most civilisations fall to dust within centuries. Most ways of life—within decades. Most people are forgotten within a few years of their death.
It fails secondly because of its lack of universality: the drive to achieve a purpose might be universal, but what does a person do when they realise they're not going to be in the select cohort of those who do achieve large-scale objectives in the material world? Proxy satisfaction through worship of others' successes is a poor substitute for having one's own purpose. Collective satisfaction is no better a substitute: if it were, it would not need to be fostered so forcefully in commercial, administrative, and Communist settings.
Pitstop:
- It is not reasonable and rational to have a material-world purpose
- Reason does not emerge from the material world
- It must therefore originate in the world of the spirit
Question: Are there any other flaws in hypothesis of the material-world purpose?
Thirdly, and more importantly, though, does this hypothesis not strike you as unfair? That billions must struggle to even survive, that millions die in infancy, that countless others are cut off before or in their prime, and are thus denied their shot? Is the glittering purpose, rarely achieved, not mocked by the endless desert of apparent failure? Does the ocean of futility not snuff out the solitary sparks of occasional brilliance? Is Ecclesiastes right?
Of course this is unfair. And yet: where does this sense of fairness, so crudely violated, come from? Once more, certainly not from the natural world. Ask the numerous species currently being annihilated. Ask the urban foxes hit and killed by early morning traffic. Ask the hatchling turtles who are picked off by gulls and vultures. Nature does not teach fairness, and evolution does not favour those who practise it. Yet a sense of fairness, like the the sense of purpose and the assent to the rational, are universal and ineradicable human traits.
Pitstop:
- It is not fair that we should be endowed with a need for a valid purpose without being given the means for fulfilling it
- Fairness does not emerge from the material world
- It must therefore originate in the world of the spirit
Summary so far:
- To live well, we must have a purpose
- That purpose must be reasonable and rational to be valid
- That purpose must be achievable to be fair
- The material world does not offer reasonable and rational purposes
- The material world does not offer a system for achieving purposes that is fair
- The phenomenon that people necessary seek the fulfilment of a reasonable and rational purpose in a system endowed with fairness cannot emerge from the material world
- Whatever world this phenomenon originates in must therefore be purposeful, rational, and fair
- Let's call this world the world of the spirit
- The world of the spirit is therefore, amongst other things, purposeful, rational, and fair
- These three characteristics of the world of the spirit (purposefulness, rationality, and fairness) are the defining characteristics of people, in distinction to animals
Question: How can attainment of purpose be sought whilst living here, in the material world?
Let's dispense immediately with the idea of 'doing ever so well' in a material sense (see above) and look at the example of a man I knew of whom one knew he had lived a purposeful life.He drove a bus for handicapped children for a living. He lived on a minimum wage, I should think. He lived in a council house in Poplar. He'd been a petty criminal but was sober a couple of decades and went to a lot of AA meetings. He loved his local church. He died young, painfully, of pancreatic cancer.
However, this gentleman's eyes shone, and he had a healing effect on anyone he met who was open to it. He had achieved that rare quality of peace, in this realm. One can well speculate that a higher spiritual purpose was achieved by what might appear to a casual observer to be a very ordinary, unremarkable life.
His purpose in the world of the spirit cannot be known but it can be espied and intuited.
If the purpose system is rational and fair, purpose must be achievable down here in the material realm. It is not automatically the case, however, that that purpose be discernible down here. A theorem is correct even if not every geometry student has the knowledge, experience, and insight to see it. A purposeful life is purposeful even if not every observer has the knowledge, experience, and insight to see it.
Pitstop: We can live a purposeful life but might not see the purpose
Question: How does one discern how to attain that purpose?
If our purpose can be attained here, it must be achievable through attitudes and actions (internal and external) available here. That means that our attitudes and actions here are sufficient for this attainment, provided that we adopt the right attitudes and take the right actions.
How do we discern those?
Note that the purpose emerges not from the material world but originates in the world of the spirit.
This means that the knowledge of the right attitudes and right actions (together with the power to carry them out) must also originate in the world of the spirit and travel down to us in the material world.
The channels: prayer and meditation.
Final conclusion: Seeking to do and doing God's will today is enough to attain one's purpose