Of Purpose And Evolution

I’m sure you’ve deeply considered the mind-expanding insight that our highly developed capacity for self-reflective awareness and individuality is the product of a hundred thousand years of cultural evolution, and cultural evolution the product of three billion years of biological evolution, and biological evolution the product of almost fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution, and all of it just one unfolding process.

And no matter how you slice the cake, you come back again and again to the questions, for what purpose, to what end and what (if anything) drives this engine of evolution?

And theories abound and you vacillate and often feel trapped, ... what to believe? Because in a very real way it influences your quality of your life, degree of happiness and choices you make.

And the arguments predictably come to coalesce around two fundamental positions (thesis and anti-thesis), a given purpose, be it of love or divine intent and purposelessness or random coincidence, but both ignore the very tenant of which they speak.

That evolution is the evolution of purpose itself.

And here we stand at the very pinnacle of this remarkable 13.7 billion year cosmic journey, able for the first time to intentionally and deliberately create the purpose we so often assume to be the cause of the process, but which in-so-doing paradoxically denies the very logic of both the process, and inadvertently, ourselves.

And how an explosion devoid of purpose came to result in you with your profound ability to create it, is another story altogether, and it’s in mixing these stories that we, as always, manage to get ourselves into such a pickle.

There is nothing that defines more the incredible mystery of what it means to be human, than our ability to create purpose and impose that purpose on the process which created it. What could be more intimidating, creative, humbling or empowering?

So what’s your purpose [vision] and therefore the purpose of life?