Humanity Thirsts for Experience

            The meaning of life is experience. How sad and pathetic that so many come to inhabit this world, seeking the answer, and fall away unsatisfied. Worse, those who nobly die with the righteous belief that their purpose for existence was subservience and devotion to a deity. It would shatter their very beings to open their minds and see that God is the greatest lie ever told. So instead they live, day after day consuming purpose via obtuse old rituals written by power-hungry, delusional men. Even the few who break free of the traditional paradigms still may fall into lesser belief structures, such as Paganism, adopting ritual and worship again for the comfort and sense of purpose they provide.

            But true purpose comes from humanity alone. We have evolved from the primordial soup, risen above the base masses of primitive animals, to achieve the ultimate success of intellect, of self-awareness. Of individuality.

            So, where do we go from here? Oddly, we fight against our own progress, and have done so since day one. We develop order and patriotism, laws and structure, then cleave to them as the monkeys we left behind still cling to the absurd comfort, safety, and familiarity of the trees we came down from. The very nature of humanity is change, is daring to take the ultimate, terrifying leap into the unknown. It was once fueled by curiosity, but that human urge has been placated at last by over-saturation. Why bother to be curious now, when all that is knowable (or truly worth knowing, considering our limited scope of the universe) is already known?

            That, however, is a fatal fallacy. We have focused on facts rather than experience, emotions, and empathy. A world at peace, a love without jealousy, a humanity graced with universal acceptance . . . these experiences are real, they are possible, but they are, to this day, mere dreams—as the notion of a man walking on the moon may once have seemed to Copernicus. Should we not, least, abate our hunger for facts, having fully supped, and indulge a while in our thirst for experience? It’s not that we’ll never be hungry again, nor thirsty forever, but humanity itself is a single organism working in unison, as our cells and organs compose us, and like all organisms, its needs—so far as sustenance is concerned—are varied.

            We’ll never come to truly understand how the universe operates until we first experience why it matters at all that we know. After all, we did not discover the horrible wonders of the split atom until we experienced a need for that understanding. But can’t wisdom come from positive, progressive needs, rather than superficial ones—protection, domination, self-preservation in the face of an enemy—and thereby carry with it a mark of pride and accomplishment hitherto unknown to the human race?

            In short, if we may submit ourselves to love and benevolence, rather than fear and hatred, can we not better unlock human potential, solely through the experience of the most beautiful aspects of our shared humanity?