Originally Posted by Busby

You may well remember the moment when, as a child, you put the question 'Why am I here?' and mum or dad gave some sort of nonsense answer because of course the solution to such a question lies in realms of which we have no idea. Any possible answer lies somewhere else, unknown. Or you, as a mum or dad were completely unable to even think of a possible reply. So it has always amazed me how quickly we adapt to life. Some of us are so quickly or easily adapted that we don't mind putting our life at risk - for hobbies, dangerous activities, wars and so on. It's almost as if we know that it doesn't matter soooo much. Maybe deep down we know things that we could not yet comprehend. We cannot imagine being in a non-conscious condition. It could possibly be that some of us even know it.

Personally I have difficulty with the idea that we are here to learn, improve ourselves, grow, or even have to believe in something. In my opinion (and this has taken decades to be at true for me at least) we exist in this world as we are. That is we exist as mind and matter. There is no need for anything else. These 'spiritual beings' who sort of guide us, create us and cause us to come into existence (as results of cosmic actions) are, or would be, recognisable (perhaps) as swathes or coils of energy, the sort of clouds of light and energy we see when we look out far into the universe.

This picture easily represents the energy forms given names in the Hindu tradition. Each of them having a goal, each goal set by the natural tendency of atoms wanting to take their place in the scheme of things. In Greek philosophy atoms were understood to be in the form of grains, each of them jostling for a place just as a bird or a fish jostles in the swarm or shoal.

Quantum philosophy seems to show that atoms are aware of themselves and it follows that the whole of creation has some sort of awareness, no matter how stumpf (as we understand it) it may seem to be.

For me this is all in the mind. I don't mean that it is all an illusion, but something - the slowing down of time, the slowing of light, the curvature of space creates reality within a great and universal mind in which we humans have reached a point where we too are slowly becoming aware of our place in the newly discovered and utterly mind-blowing suggestion that there are at least two trillion galaxies in the known universe.

The reason we are here is that this universal intelligence which or who isn't interested in whether you eat pork or are circumcised has only one target, one without end - to experience in one way or another everything that can possibly be experienced.

Fantastic.