Why should we struggle?

A young political activist, in Iran, who is experiencing ontological and existential crisis, asked me to tell him why we should struggle and why we should leave a comfortable life and enter a risky and thorny world of politics? He said that if I want to answer through the ideas and thoughts of others, then I shouldn’t bother myself, as he can read it for himself and possible he has read what I’m going to use in order to respond.  He said that I want to read your very OWN response which trickels down from your own soul and mind.

So, in order to share my thoughts and feeling, I was looking for a proper time.  For me the proper time is the time when my mind and soul meet and from that creativity sparks and that time was when one night, I woke up after three and before four in the morning and I wrote this:

Then what?

Maybe the most important characteristic of human, which differentiate it from other beings is the ability to ask: “Then What?”.   In other words, as far as we know, human is the only living being, who is in search of meaning in life and give meaning to life.  For me, that means that such meaning does exist in the essence of existence, otherwise the living being which has come about in universe and live in universe/existence, would not be able to ask a question, which the question as well as the answer/s would not exist in life.

However, to find the answer, for those who are asking the question, is a kind of ‘finding’ in which everyone need to find it for herself/himself and of course in different level of intellectual, emotional and spiritual development our answers might differs, deepens or becomes more mature.  Or we understand it better than when it initially came to our mind and soul.

To find the answer to this question have been accompanied with the eternal questions, which imbedded the foundation for ever thinking people:

Who are we?

Why are we?

Where do we come from?

Where do we go?

For me:

Life is a mystery

In my view, these questions and quest for answers forms the central cornel of all religions and philosophies.

For me:

Life is a mystery and enigma, which doesn’t exist in the matter itself. (In fact, physicists are telling us that ‘matter’ itself is a mystery, which they cannot access to, at least, 85% of.  They call it ‘dark matter’ not because it is dark but because it is not visible and only its effects could be traced.) and this tells me that human being cannot reduced to the ‘matter’ only.  Any attempt to try to find the answer there will lead to a dead end and different forms of nihilism and ontological fear and anxiety.  In truth, the mere fact of these questions and attempts to find answers are telling me that although our existence starts from the ‘matter’ but will not end in it, hence there is other dimension in us which we are calling it ‘spirituality’.  It means that there is another dimension in us which is in its continuation of it, or maybe to challenge the matter.  Maybe this is why human being is a collection of contradictions and embodies conflicting emotions, thought, hence directions, and through the principle of ‘choice’, which does not exist in the ‘matter’ as a determinate entity and determinism, choses between ‘good’ and ‘bad, between selfishness and selflessness, between selfish love and selfless love, between self-centred love and freedom-centred love and between suffocating love and liberating love and to chose between them, makes one to fly to the peaks of creativity and development or to fall in the valley of banalness and regress.

For me: 

Life is a mystery which to drawn in it creates intoxication/drunkenness.  The kind of drunkenness, which not only does not lead to a terrible hangover, but into a deep joyfulness and peacefulness, as one finds oneself to become one with the soul of universe and to experience moments when one like a baby smiles in sleep, every emotional and spiritual cells become drunk and live that smile of the baby.

For me, one in those ephemeral and still eternal moments, is when the intellect spread its wings into the timeless and space- less sky of the soul, hence to overcomes the limits and determinism of the matter, and as the result to become drunk in the mysterious essence of being.  It is there where I find the meaning.  Itself is the meaning and love and the goal, which is in continuous /eternal serach.