There are really only two important facts of life, in the following order of priority:
First, you’re going to die.
Second, here you are.
That’s the whole story in a nutshell.
If you think about it, anything that happens to you, any thought you have, any feeling you have, any event that occurs, any experience of any kind, any non-experience of any kind, can be categorized under those two understandings. Those are the two things that matter in terms of a human life.
a.) You’re going to die; you won’t be here endlessly (as you are now); and
b.) You are here; you exist.
You don’t really know how you got here. You don’t really know what it means to leave here. Nobody does. But those are the two facts of life. The ‘facts of life’ aren’t the birds and the bees; those are the facts of procreation. The facts of life are, life is short and then it ends. You die. And here you are existing with no idea of how all this happened and, maybe even no idea of who you really are. Or maybe vaguely some idea that something eternal is going on, something infinite is happening—but maybe, or maybe not, beyond that.
Those facts of life, when considered seriously, are sobering. It means time is limited and is running out. And it means there’s something to understand, there’s something to figure out, there’s something to know. Otherwise, what’s the point, of that you already exist? What’s the point, of that you’re here? Common sense, the innate knowing of any minimally intelligent adult, tells us that there’s some drive, some need to understand what this is all about—to the best of our ability.
“Why am I here?”
How did you get here? You will never figure it out. That’s a mystery. Nobody ever has, nobody ever will. It is what I refer to as an ‘unknowable’. There is the unknown, and then there is the unknowable. At least as long as you’re in this body, you will never know how you got here. You might have some idea. You might even have come to some clear sense. But it’ll be broad. It will be part of a pattern. It won’t specifically be all the details.
And in fact, it all works in patterns. The mistake we make is to think that it’s about “me,” or it’s about some specific thing that we can get our mind around. In some ways, with some things, we can. But generally if you really delve into it, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that everything that works, works through patterns. Everything that happens, happens through a pattern.
And one of those patterns, you call “you.” But that pattern is going to die, and that pattern is here now. So it calls up endless questions.
What I’m suggesting to you is that all those endless questions are the trick, the mind-game of avoiding facing what has to be faced, what’s essential, what is the nub of what’s real. I’m suggesting that those two questions are the important ones, those two considerations: that death is coming and that here you are, existing.
Those are the considerations that deserve your attention, that can take you into something, forward toward something—that can answer some of those peripheral questions that may or may not be answerable, but they aren’t as much the nub as those two facts of life.
The mind seizes this stuff and goes in all kinds of directions: “Are there angels?” and “Is there a creator?” The list is endless. I don’t have to list off all the eighty thousand possible questions that people have. I’m not saying there’s no value to some of those questions. I’m saying there’s not a whole lot to learn from them. But we get caught up in them. “What is time?” “What is space?” It goes on and on and on, and the mind can occupy itself with these questions for a lifetime, preventing you from facing the simple facts that you are going to die and that here you are.