Life contains as many meanings as people on planet Earth. My definition of a good life contains several things from which Growth stands out. By Growth I mean the constant transmutation of older conceptions for newer ones that capture life more completely.
At school, we are taught to look at concepts and abstractions with increasingly more complexity as the years go by. This means we start with the alphabet, then words, then sentences until we can write and combine more complicated arguments using different sentence structures. This type of attitude is very important since it can be applied to every area of our lives. It tells us that a partially complete way to view a topic is sufficient but like everything in life, it can and should change. From this dynamic process, we get to greater awareness about ourselves and everything that surrounds us.
History illustrates the relevance of conceptions well. Every war has started by a mismatch of beliefs and conceptions either at an individual level between the leaders or as a community. At a personal level, every disappointment we have in life starts when our expectations about a certain thing are not met or when something unfortunate happens we were not expecting. It follows from our human nature since we are more guided by Ego than Rationality.
Why it is important?
Every balanced human being deep down wants to help improving society but normally conceptualises greatness acts that are external to him. In contrast, the most impactful place to make change is starting by improving oneself.
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” by Nelson Mandela [1]
On the very core of humans, we can change both for morally better or worse.
How to improve?
Being free from any form of preconception is humanly impossible, but we can try. Due to our social conditioning, society pressure or other dogmas we simply neglect questions that can enable our leaps in awareness.
During ancient times in India, they were already noticing the difficulties of dealing with this problem. The Blind Men and an elephant parable [2] describes a group of people that had never seen an elephant and decided to examine one just by touching it. Each of them looks at a different part of the elephant such as leg, tusk, ear among others and describe it by what it resembled to them. All of them were partly correct about their observation but none of them understood the animal fully.
This can be viewed as more than just human senses. We can find an analogue between different religions or even between different sciences.
Hence, the best is to try, look and combine the information from every point of view.
Can we always improve our awareness?
Carl Sagan explains how habitants in flatland feel [3] when they are introduced to a creature from a higher dimension.
They can only partially understand him and they will feel very confused due to their conceptions and limitations. We are flatlanders in this cosmos perceiving it through our 3 dimension lenses. Truth be told there are things we cannot understand but we can always make the effort to accept and even embrace them.
The meaning of life starts and ends within each of us but to actually make some progress we need to be comfortable navigating in a turbulent ocean with dangers like Ego, society preconceptions and other dogmas.
Updated on 25/03/2021
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnURElCzGc0