THE MEANING OF LIFE

The question of the meaning of life is ambiguous for different type of people and depends on theirs worldviews, on quality of theirs intentions, on the way they are living and on the sphere of application of skills. Every school of spiritual seeking uses their own classification for estimating quality of "seekers" . However, according to our point of view, the most laconic, open for understanding, academically and theologically approved classification is represented by a founder of St. Petersburg hermeneutics school dr. S.V. Chebanov in his work "Elements of anthropology. Methodological aspect"1.

Briefly his position can be represented in the following: … you should speak about a human and a biological specie Homo Sapiens from different points of view. Position like that could be formulated in categories of Orthodox tradition, using ideas of Gregory Palamas. He distinguished 2 different manifestation of life: life by action and life by essence (life of a soul). Angels and people can live by essence; life by action belongs to Homo Sapiens and animals, they have to "vivify connected to them theirs bodies", angels don't have bodies, so they don't need to vivify them. It can be represented by the next scheme:

  angels human animals
life by essence + + -
life by action - + +

 

In this simplest classification one can see the evolutionary stages from an "animal-human" to a "human-angel", and the humanity is divided on two categories: angel- and animal-like people.

The meaning of life of an "animal-human" is digested into getting as much comfort as possible and into genetically based reproduction. The most full description the biological human that lives by action is represented by the American dream doctrine, that is characterized by the maximum of consuming activity and the minimum of spirituality.

A spiritual man, living "by essence", gravitates to minimization of consumers' system, to self-cultivation, that represents in developing of his spirit, that could exist independently after living of a physical body. During the conflict between biological and spiritual interest, the unavoidable conflict between mutually excluded the spiritual and the animal needs is appearing.

Thereby, initially the problem of the meaning of life is reduced to the radical choice between spiritual and animal perspective of the development. After that choice you could see two opposite conceptions of being. Often sapient two-legged face the problem of the choice, some times they hang up on the "half-beast half-angel" station, besides, on the basis of inner conflict are not only difficulties of the transformation of organism, but also the social danger of straight-out realization of the highest ethical (angels') practices of being. Majority of people that care about highly thoughts and attempted to change life-style according with theirs high-spiritual worldviews can not resist the burdens of spiritual climbing, they betray this worldviews for the sake of conjecture and they extremely painful get the very fact of existence of developing systems. The characterizing features of behavior of "disgraced" is pharisaical attempts to equate with "unyielding" people, to disсredit theirs achievements. That is unavoidable that a man, who holds spiritual path will be detached by orthodox people, by obstruction, in extremes - one can be physically terminated. A well-known example of the violent reprisal with Christ is the usual social reaction on the "angels" behavior.

In the final analysis the meaning of life homo-compromise boils down to "playing angel" masking the lowest animal motivation level that determines real behavior and actions. Variations of this fake game, in which everybody is playing, are endless: from traditional hiding of the needs of nature till physiological, political and spiritual inspiration. Besides every form of compromise is accreted by massive excusing philosophy, 'cause the rest lifetime of the "betrayer of the spiritual path" is just excruciating pastime. The most significant for the biological way identification is "marriage" as socially excused way to avoid solving the highest problems with replacing responsibility for the evolution to the next generation.

Proceeding from the evolutional logic, the chain of deaths and births can't dawn in monotonic infinity and have to be finished by appearance of a being, that is able to metamorphose - the abrupt transition to the evolutionary new quality. Everybody has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-…, so in the millennial deepness of time we can figure the critical quantity of ancestors. Thereby, in the period of pre-marriage life every human being is given a chance for metamorphose, temporally existing on the top of a generations' pyramid and pretending to be the humanities' hope on transformation to a being of another order.

In regime of the intransigent spiritual seeking the meaning of life is just coming to form in yourself, in allotted time, a clot of truth, in which one should fix the essence of the Conception, and identify "the real Self" with the incorporeal creation and previse its' mission after disintegration of the physical body. That is one justifies the hope of the chain of generations, that had sacrificed themselves for the better being was possible to appear. The work to resist the multiplicity of social and biological temptations, indeed that is full of dangers and overcoming the meaning and the way of life of sapience beings that made the choice in favor of "the being by essence". In this paradigm existence of the majority of family people is considered as sacrificing, and the meaning of theirs lives is reduced to growing up intellectually developed and spiritually filled kids, that have a chance to transformation. Trusting the statement of world religions, undeveloped souls (monads) of "victims of the evolution" are not wasted in vain, but they either are involved in reincarnation or included in trophic webs of "spiritual consumers", whose representation is manifested by the existing religious institutions.

The evolutional meaning of life of all humanity boils down to generate a new evolutional group of beings, that are different from the ancestors by several ethical, energetic, informational and metabolic features. When this new evolutional branch is appeared, the quantity of its' ancestors should be reduced to biocoenologically sensible, and ecologically balanced level.

 


1 «Ресурсы ноосферного движения. Материалы международной конференции». Ноохора, Институт «Открытое общество», Рыбинск, 2004 г., стр.69