The greatest contentment of life

Question from the Internet:

“Why is contentment so different for each individual?”

On the one hand, you are right. All people have seemingly very different and diverse desires and fulfillment that bring them contentment and happiness.

On the other hand, all of those desires and their contentment fit into the 6–7 categories of desires, which are food, sex, family, wealth, control, respect, and knowledge.

Moreover, when we go deeper and see what motivates all of those desires, we find a single, insatiable, and ever-growing desire for continuing existence and to justify our existence and our self in comparison to others.

So the 6–7 desire categories and the seeming myriads of individual and collective desires we all scatter ourselves over are simply the external clothing of the single and “primordial” desire to exist and justify ourselves while we exist.

This yearning and need to justify ourselves and to do this in comparison and mostly at the expense of others is uniquely human. Such motivation and intention do not exist in animals.

And this uniquely human motivation and drive comes from human beings inherently sensing themselves as standalone, separate individuals without any real and truly sensed a connection to others.

Human beings do not have the instinctive bond and mutual integration that all other parts of nature have. We do not feel that we can rely on others and nature’s system to automatically fulfill our needs as if we never left the “mother’s womb” — while animals do feel that instinctively.

Thus our whole life is spent on sensing and justifying ourselves and constantly trying to prove and protect our uniqueness and individual freedom — even if it is only illusory.

After all, how could we be separate individuals when we are all born from nature, belong to the same species, and are all integral parts of nature that exists and evolves as a single system? It is only in our generation that we start to awaken to this very unpleasant paradox of sensing ourselves as unique and separate individuals while at the same time realizing that we all exist in a globally integrated and totally interdependent system that is also an integral part of nature.

And we do not know what to do with this paradox; our inherent sense of individuality and yearning for individual freedom at this point is stronger than our animate survival reflex. We are ready to forfeit even our physical existence just to preserve our illusory individuality and freedom.

It is possible that if our collective situation gets worse and we continue to approach seemingly inevitable global self-destruction, the increasing and gradually intolerable suffering will soften most people and convince us to give up our illusory individual freedom and start existing as nature sees us: as a single, mutually responsible and mutually complementing species that is also a benevolently integral part of nature’s system — instead of being a cancerous body in it.

But we do not need to wait for such suffering.

We can learn, practice, understand, and start to tangibly feel that there is another form of contentment that is equal and the same for all of us.

We can consciously and purposefully practice and come to internally feel and digest that when we start existing “like nature,” where we all selflessly and unconditionally start serving and loving each other — above and against our inherent self-love and hate and distrust of others — we will give birth to a completely different and qualitatively much higher sense of collective existence. We can come to sense “life” in a way we never felt before.

At this stage, our personal lives resemble the lives of individual cells that believe that they can exist disconnected from the body they belong to. As a result, our life is dark and temporary, and it is aimless and full of unnecessary crisis situations and suffering.

If we — these single cells with a strange form of amnesia — revived our nature-like, mutually responsible, and mutually complementing interconnections and cooperation, if we started sensing life through the desires, needs, and viewpoints of others more than how we sense life individually, through our inherently egocentric and subjective viewpoint., we would gain a life experience that can be compared to how we sense life now above our individual cells and organs.

The gained “collective human consciousness” and “multi-angled” and composite perception of reality will catapult us into feeling and tangibly experiencing life above and unbounded by the inherently egocentric and subjective limitations of time or space.

Moreover, since we will not associate our existence and consciousness with the temporary biological body any longer, but we sense existence through the “collective cloud” we all form together above any subjective individuality, even physical life or death will not concern us anymore.

Reaching this state is the greatest contentment any human being can aspire for, and reaching this contentment is the actual Human purpose of our life — as defined by nature’s deterministic evolution.