Getting clear on what I believe and stand for PART 8

My interests don’t compete with your interests. I believe that this is an illusion. Sure, if we believe that we are just decaying matter, destined to brief, pointless existences before we return to total oblivion, we might get the idea that we have to stimulate our five senses in ways that feel pleasurable as much as possible before we die. Not that it ultimately matters. But if we are no more than smart animals, why not live in a way that is consistent with that belief?

This used to be my belief until I started to understand that God exists. That there is such a thing as a spiritual reality. My belief was basically that when you die you die. And whatever you have experienced up to that point won’t matter, since everything that you are and ever have been will be as if it has never existed. And since these are the conditions everyone else lives under as well, whether my life makes the world better or worse ultimately makes no difference.

Now that I know that God exists and that life does not end with death, this changes everything. I don’t need the threat of punishment or the promise of rewards in the afterlife to want to become a better person and live in harmony with the world and other people. I know that from this perspective, even though pleasure is not unimportant, the pursuit of consumption and pleasure as the highest priorities in life means that one totally wastes one’s life on nothingness. From this perspective, which is the correct one, our relationship with God must necessarily come first. And our relation to ourselves, the world and other people must come in second. And all of these things are tied together. If you are dysfunctional in one of these areas, you will be dysfunctional in all of them. And almost all of us are dysfunctional here to different degrees. 

Do you understand what I’m getting at? When we realize beyond any doubt that life has meaning, and that we need to look at life from the perspective of eternity and not finiteness, everything changes. Our priorities change. It makes no sense to compete for resources, strive for power and glory, seek gratification of the senses, or even to spread our genes for their own sake. We can still do all of these things if we find joy in them and can do them in a non-harmful way. But everything in our animal natures, that which is related to the survival instinct and places us in the frame of “survival of the fittest” becomes null and void in the face of a higher reality. Simply put, when we see that something is more important to us, and something is less important to us, it makes no sense to choose that which is less important, if it comes into conflict with what is more important.

With this higher perspective in mind, I don’t have to fiercely protect myself from others either, because it’s your loss and not mine, if you do something as stupid and pointless as hurting me for your own gain. 

The conclusions that I draw from this line of reasoning come in the form of a few questions: If you know that God exists, love is at the core of everything, that you will live forever and that all that belongs to your animal nature are things that you will have to leave behind when you die, what things are important to you? What do you need to prioritize? What is meaningful? What leads to true, meaningful happiness? I think that seen in this light, the cliché that “the best things in life are free” holds true. So why should I compete and cause harm, when there is something so much valuable in life that does not require any of that?

Photo by Jaime Spaniol on Unsplash