What's the point?

neonspectraltoast · Sep 22, 2011

I don't think you can really tell what is going on to get abysmal about it. What is life? You couldn't even know from imagining a lightning bolt striking some primordial soup. What's the difference between a human being and a Venus flytrap, really? You feel the point; you don't explain it.

hickey · Sep 29, 2011

Faith in All, Trust in Self, Love in Knowing, Peace in Being................. You are

Beauty awakening............ Attracting All for a Reconciliation, Presence Amongst Perfection....

Awareness of Being, Existing to Experience itself, for All Conceptional possibilities will be done....

Casting light and removing shadows from what you know we are,

and you hearts out there reading this know: We come from Love and Return to Love for the purpose of giving and taking Love Now.

Love is All and is perfect...always has been...always will be...just like you.

(This ring a bell with anyone out there? Call me Swami Givashita)
P.S. ... if love is not entering your heart, try defending all who have hurt you instead of merely forgiving them.{like your an attorney: give them your best defense. Also, Never defend yourself, say "Thank you for trying to look out for me." And for pete's sake: Smile smile smile...eventually your mind will follow because people (strangers especially) will smile back,,,it's nice.
Call me Swami Givashita

Okiefreak · Sep 30, 2011

Cloaking Device said:

Infinity is hell

I mean, really, imagine it

Imagine the actual reality of spending infinity with your friends and family. Not just as long as you like, not the idea of having a bit more time, having unendable time. That is pure hell whatever you choose to do with it

You would end up killing and fucking and eating everyone you knew and then you'd see them the next day. forever

It would be cool for a few years but you'd end up longing to die

Perfection is also hell

Everything is meaningless. You remember on video games how you got frustrated and turned on the cheat mode so that you couldn't die and you had all of the weapons and couldn't be shot and it all lost it's meaning

Imagine experiencing that as a reality. There would be no point in wanting or dreaming about anything because it was just easy.

You wouldn't miss anyone because they were always there, you wouldn't want anything because you already had it.

Imagination would be pointless, thinking would be pointless, every endeavour or idea that you had would be fulfilled and joyful so they would become indistinguishable from another.

oooh heaven is a place on earth. it is, it's called crack. you smoke crack that is what happens, everything is great and interesting, if you have enough money to die from crack then you are already in heaven. that's my advice to people who live for an afterlife based on your ridiculous ill thought out ideas
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Having never smoked crack, I'm not in a position to dispute you on the basis of direct experience, but it's my observation that people who smoke it trade short periods of bliss for really messed up, miserable lives. On the other hand, my experience of God has always been interesting and, so far, increasingly enjoyable. Also free. but I don't believe in an afterlife.

Okiefreak · Sep 30, 2011

scratcho said:

Go skating. Maybe surfing. Get some sex. Help someone less fortunate than yourself. Don't obsess over not knowing the true nature of our existance. Whatever it is--we're all in it together and we'll all end up the same. Some of us need a state of belief and some of us don't. All and all-it's all the same. Call me if there's any change.
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Well said!

Sanguine · Oct 6, 2011

I'd say the point of life is whatever you want it to be.
Because nature has yet to establish one absolute meaning, like so many believe.

Do whatever the hell you want in life, the universe isn't going to so much as blink.
Just remember you aren't exempt from the consequences of your actions.

jamaican_youth · Apr 2, 2012

franx144 said:

Without belief in the afterlife what is the point in doing anything?
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Interesting. So without an afterlife, this life has no purpose? If that is true, then doesn't that mean the purpose of this life is to die? What kind of a purpose is that?

indydude · Apr 15, 2012

Don't obsess over not knowing the true nature of our existance. Whatever it is--we're all in it together and we'll all end up the same
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Together. That's the essence. We are not meant to survive as single entities but as partners, members of groups, tribes, societies. Helping one another survive is the meaning of life and the road to contentment and happiness. That is the message of the great spiritual leaders over the ages. Religions tend to distort the message.

scratcho · Apr 15, 2012

All is change. Therefore all is the same.

It's just a damn shame that some humans live in life- long luxurious circumstances while others go thru torture,humiliation,live in squalor and are killed because of human constructs that accept the worldwide conditions we see. If there is some kind of creator, what in hell is his/her idea of equity? We for sure don't know how to manage the only existance we're absolutely sure of.

Carlid · Apr 16, 2012

I like Albert Camus outlook on things@

The Myth Of Sisyphus

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.
It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Edipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.
One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
---Albert Camus
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ali2141 · Apr 26, 2012

Who cares? You're alive, so live. Purpose is unnecessary. Go out and live now. Go out and do interesting things, have a lot of sex, go skydiving or something. Make it a fun 70+ years, since you're here already.

themnax · Apr 27, 2012

the point, the real point, the only real point, regardless of belief or anything else, is to make the kind of world we all have to live in, more gratifying for everyone and every thing in it, instead of screwing everything up for each other.

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