My current purpose is to take care of my wife's medical and health needs, to make sure she has the medical benefits needed to keep up with her current and future courses of treatment. Hopefully, I'll serve this purpose for many more years.
My kids are all grown and perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. Hopefully, they'll eventually give us some grandkids to help nurture and raise, lending us a new purpose.
Thank you, FJ, for your gracious response to my question. I agree that our purposes are seldom our own, and I feel incredibly selfish sometimes when I think about this. It's the clash of how I was brought up to believe, versus how I have changed over time (Theseus' ship). I think our "purpose" changes, and we can't always determine how it will change. We can only determine how we will respond to life.
We can certainly do that, ducky. But unless there's some witness to it, that purpose very likely dies with us.
And mankind desires "immortality".
Plato, "Symposium" the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a new existence in the place of the old. Nay even in the life of the same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a man is called the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses between youth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and identity, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation—hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always changing. Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears, never remain the same in any one of us, but are always coming and going; and equally true of knowledge, and what is still more surprising to us mortals, not only do the sciences in general spring up and decay, so that in respect of them we are never the same; but each of them individually experiences a like change. For what is implied in the word "recollection," but the departure of knowledge, which is ever being forgotten, and is renewed and preserved by recollection, and appears to be the same although in reality new, according to that law of succession by which all mortal things are preserved, not absolutely the same, but by substitution, the old worn-out mortality leaving another new and similar existence behind—unlike the divine, which is always the same and not another? And in this way, Socrates, the mortal body, or mortal anything, partakes of immortality; but the immortal in another way. Marvel not then at the love which all men have of their offspring; for that universal love and interest is for the sake of immortality.'
And "Creation of a purpose" is also a form and process of 'generation'. And all generation comes from opposites. Immortality from mortality. ;)
Through the recollection (of others), we will live on. Through the works we leave behind, we will live on. Through those who's lives we've touched, we will live on. Call me an Informational Unitarian living in a surjective process without Unitary Operators. :p
Thanks, guys. Yes, jen. I got it last month. Things are a little better now, pàinwise, but the discomfort persists. However, yesterday i saw an exercise on youtube. Seems to help
Comments
My kids are all grown and perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. Hopefully, they'll eventually give us some grandkids to help nurture and raise, lending us a new purpose.
We just take it one day at a time.
And mankind desires "immortality".
Plato, "Symposium" the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a new existence in the place of the old. Nay even in the life of the same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a man is called the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses between youth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and identity, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation—hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always changing. Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears, never remain the same in any one of us, but are always coming and going; and equally true of knowledge, and what is still more surprising to us mortals, not only do the sciences in general spring up and decay, so that in respect of them we are never the same; but each of them individually experiences a like change. For what is implied in the word "recollection," but the departure of knowledge, which is ever being forgotten, and is renewed and preserved by recollection, and appears to be the same although in reality new, according to that law of succession by which all mortal things are preserved, not absolutely the same, but by substitution, the old worn-out mortality leaving another new and similar existence behind—unlike the divine, which is always the same and not another? And in this way, Socrates, the mortal body, or mortal anything, partakes of immortality; but the immortal in another way. Marvel not then at the love which all men have of their offspring; for that universal love and interest is for the sake of immortality.'
And "Creation of a purpose" is also a form and process of 'generation'. And all generation comes from opposites. Immortality from mortality. ;)
Good to see you again.
I've created a lot... But they fade with time as people grow and change. So here I am, growing and changing too. ;)
And being is an unchanging state. We are always "becoming". ;)