Notes on Purpose
The Pyramid of Human Motivation - The 5 P’s
There are four material motivations and one immaterial:
Preservation - The most fundamental motivation: Don’t die. It is a reactive motivation. We acquired negative sensations to help motivate us for self-preservation:
Pain to tell us to immediately stop doing things that are causing injury,
Hunger to warn us we are low on energy
Thirst to warn us we are dehydrated
Fear to give us a sense of awareness to danger
Pleasure - Emerges from the fundamental motivation for self-preservation and expands upon it. Pleasure incentivizes proactive motivations through reward sensations.
In addition to satiating hunger and thirst, different types of food and drink taste good so we will select higher calorie foods
Sex feels good so we are incentivized to procreate and form emotional bonds to stay together to ensure our offspring survive
Prestige - Emerges from pleasure, specifically sexual pleasure. Rather than reproducing randomly, humans select mates. The process of selecting sexual partners prompts us to start judging and ranking potential sexual partners by their beneficial attributes. A social hierarchy emerges. Individuals try to increase others' perception of themselves and climb the social hierarchy so we can attract the highest value mate. The primary function of this social hierarchy is to incentivize us to maximize our potential, and also selects for desirable traits.
Power - Emerges from perception. This is the highest motivation the material world can offer as it has a non-material component - your own will. Power is the ability to impose your will on others or the material world around you. The desire for power emerges from prestige since power is the ultimate way of demonstrating your high status.
Purpose - Purpose is immaterial, but it's very real. Purpose exists in the mind; matter has no purpose in itself. Materially, a bowl is a just configuration of atoms bonded together to form a concave shape. We call it a bowl because we created it for a purpose - to hold liquid. Flip that bowl around and place it on your head and it is no longer a bowl but rather a hat, whose new purpose is to protect your head from the sun. However without a human mind to give it purpose, it's just atoms. Not to get too Philosophy 101, but there is a real quandary of whether anything actually exists if there is no mind to perceive it. Even if it did, what difference would it make if there was no consciousness to attend to it?
Now rather than being content with the material motivations, everyone ought to ask themselves the question “what is my purpose?”. How you answer this question is the first of two foundational decision points that underpin how we perceive and interact with the world. Both of these decision points have a binary choice. I will get to the second decision in a bit.
Decision 1: “There is a God or there isn’t”
As mentioned previously, purpose only exists in the mind. So when you ask yourself “what is my purpose?” here is our first binary choice:
There is a greater Mind which created you purposely, or
There is no greater Mind, and therefore no higher purpose.
Setting aside evidence or arguments for either option, let’s rather look at the philosophical and motivational implication of each choice, taken as if it were true.
If there is no greater Mind and therefore no higher purpose to our existence, then the human mind is the only thing that gives life any purpose or meaning. Your own mind determines its own purpose. You become your own god. And since Power is the ability to manifest your will upon the material world, then obtaining Power is the highest possible purpose.
While you may assign yourself some alternative purpose, it will inevitably be small and irrelevant since the material universe is not eternal. Everything will eventually end. And what does it matter to you if anything else persists beyond you when you end? The death of your consciousness may as well be the end of all existence to you. You may make your life’s purpose to climb every mountain on earth, but what difference does it make if you succeed or not? You could dedicate your life to caring for kittens or to torturing kittens; both would be equally pointless. On top of that, there is no way to say that caring for kittens is in anyway a ‘good’ purpose whereas torturing kittens a ‘bad’ purpose, for what is ‘good’?
“Good” can be defined as fulfilling its intended purpose. A ‘good’ commuter car is a car that can get you around the city easily and affordably. A ‘good’ truck is one that can haul large loads. What then, constitutes a ‘good’ person or ‘good’ behavior?
Since there is no Higher Mind who created everything for a purpose, ‘good’ can only come from a human mind. The challenge is there are billions of human minds, and with no Higher Mind to act as a judge or provide a metric against to compare, there is no objective way to measure whether any individual’s concept of ‘good’ is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than any other. “Good” “Better” “Worse” all become subjective and ultimately meaningless terms. The closest one can get to a collective agreement on a definition of ‘good’ without a Higher Mind is if:
A single individual can enforce their own standard of ‘good’ on a large group through the accumulation of enough Power, (therefore might is right) or;
A collective of individuals can come to an agreed upon set of behaviors that they call ‘good’.
However, these are still relative definitions of good, since they are not eternal and do not apply to everyone at all times. It is impossible to objectively judge one collective’s moral framework against another’s. Ancient Aztec practices of ritualized daily human sacrifices or Nazi ideology of eugenics can not be regarded as morally deficient compared to modern western morality. From their perspective, modern western morality would be considered immoral. (As an aside, the two types of societies that can emerge without a philosophy of objective morality from a higher Mind are, as I mentioned earlier, a dictatorship of the ‘God-King’ sort we’ve seen in ancient Egypt or Imperial Japan, or a communist style system where the state or ‘collective good’ was its de facto deity. It would be impossible to have any notion of individual liberty or individual rights in either of those two societies, as an individual going against the god-king or collective would be the ultimate evil. So in a very real sense, it is as it is written in 2 Corinthians 3:17 - “Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”)
Not only would there be no such thing as objective virtue, but there would be no real value in behaving virtuously even within the subjective moral framework of your society. Because without a Higher purpose in life, the pursuit of Power and Prestige are the only matters of any importance. Any individual would only care for their society to perceive them as virtuous so they can elevate their prestige and power. This incentivizes people to display performative acts of virtue without substance. A Godless society leads to an epidemic of virtue signaling, a degeneration into moral relativism, sociopathy, and ultimately self-annihilation. A society that denies Truth must follow through to its inevitable end.
And, ironically, the belief that “there is no objective truth” is self-contradictory, as it must be taken axiomatically as the only self-evident truth. It is like a person who can only tell lies cannot say that he is a liar, for if he said “I only tell lies” that would be a truth, and therefore be a self-contradictory statement. He must say something like “with the only exception of this statement, I only tell lies.”
The other option is that there is a Greater Mind that created the material universe with purpose. In that case, there would be such a thing as an objective good that you could measure human actions against. Truth, beauty, justice, virtue are all very real things, though immaterial. And we recognize these very real but immaterial attributes in the material world as people or objects come more in alignment to their intended purpose. In such a case, the pursuit of power, prestige, pleasure, and preservation are all just a means to achieve your ultimate purpose and not the purpose in themselves. The pursuit to understand and act out your purpose, in this case, would be your ultimate objective.
However, by accepting this premise, it leads to another question: If a Mind created the material universe, did He create it and leave it like someone creates a toy and then shoves it into a closet, or is He still actively engaging and participating with His creation? Is He an absent or a personal God? This question leads to our second foundational existential decision point.
Decision Point 2: “Christ was God or He wasn’t”
There is a quote by C.S. Lewis in his book ‘Mere Christianity’ that struck me.
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
For the longest time I never quite understood what he meant, but now I think I do.
Jesus Christ is the single most impactful person to have ever lived. He is so significant that every single set of religious beliefs must try to fit Jesus into their framework of the world:
Buddhists believe that Jesus was a Bodhisattva
Some Hindus believe Jesus traveled to India as a teenager and learned yogic traditions to become the guru for the Jews, and when He died he merged with the Hindu Godhead. Others believe He was a reincarnation of the God Vishnu.
Islam believes that Jesus was a great prophet of God, perhaps even greater than Mohammed himself.
Atheists claim Jesus was a profound moral teacher.
But practically no one claims that He was a fraud or a fool.
You have to make a decision about who Jesus was. And no matter what the Buddhists, Hindus, and Islamits, and Atheists say about Him, however flattering it may be, they ignore what the Gospels claim Jesus said about Himself - that He and the Father are One. He is the Word of the Father, who took on flesh so that we may know the Father through Him. Because of Christ, we can have a personal relationship with God and actually call Him our Father. Before Christ, no one anywhere contemplated the One God as their Father, as being a father implies an incredibly personal relationship. A father loves his children more than he loves himself. We were once estranged from God, but through Christ we can be reunited with Him.
Again, let’s set aside arguments for or against whether or not Jesus was God, and simply look at the implications of each statement as if it were true.
First, if Christ wasn’t God it must mean at least one of the following is true:
Jesus was a fraud and used elaborate tricks to deceive everyone around Him
The apostles were frauds and lied about Jesus’ words and His resurrection as well as used elaborate tricks to deceive the people around them
Both cases require extreme amounts of self-deception, and an unfathomable magnitude of coordination to pull off the multitude of hoax miracles that Christ, the apostles, and the saints are purported to have performed over the decades. Additionally, the complete lack of motivation for them to go about creating the hoax of Christianity adds to the implausibility. Why would Paul, for example, who was in the jewish high society and was an aggressive persecutor of Christians, give up his high status and affluent life to lie about his claim to have met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus? Why would he dedicate the rest of his life to living in poverty, imprisonment, abuse, and ultimately suffering martyrdom for what he knew was a lie? Why did all the apostles do the same? And how did they perform so many purported miracles? And these were not simple parler trick miracles either. They were raising people from the dead, healing people from their decades old infirmities, and manifesting natural events like earthquakes to destroy prison cells so they could walk out, being burned at the stake and having the flames cause them no harm, just to name a few.
It could be the case that Christ was false, but if He were, then it wouldn’t get us any closer to understanding the nature of the greater Mind that created the material universe. Rather than providing some answers, it would just add more seemingly unresolvable questions.
But, if we take Christ at His word, then the Mind that purposely created the material universe is personal. He created you with purpose, intervenes directly into the material world, and invites us into a personal relationship with Him. Once you accept this premise, then so many contradictions, paradoxes, cognitive dissonances, and questions whose only logical answers end in despair, all begin to fall away. Like a jigsaw puzzle that you could never fit together because you didn’t know the picture you were trying to make. Once when you see the picture, then all the sudden all the pieces begin to fit.
Our existence, our consciousness, our fallen nature, our purpose, the otherwise inexplicable miracles, the meaning of suffering, the reality of beauty, fundamental axioms of science; they become illuminated when you look at it through the point of view that Christ is the Living, personal God. It is like Lewis said: “it is by Christianity I see the world.” It is not direct evidence alone that I believe in Christ, but the light of the risen Christ illuminates the world so I may comprehend it.
So what is the purpose of your life? Ask Christ and pay attention. We all have many parts to play - , some great, some small. But ultimately and singularly, our purpose is to be loved by our Father and to love Him back. To quote Nat King Cole: “the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”