Life as a collection of perceived extremes

I challenge you, reader, to think about ultimate extremes.

I challenge you to imagine being at your basest, your lowest, your most painful and most dejected. I want you to create for yourself an ultimate image of depravity, lifelessness and misery. Try to make it such that you can NOT imagine a scenario more despicable or callous. In other words, try to think of how incalculably BAD life could be.

Now hold that thought. Quarantine it, and put it somewhere in your mind for future reference. It might be painful to even approach with thought, but just humor me for this exercise.

Next I challenge you to imagine a circumstance in which life could not be any better for you. Think about being the paragon of happiness...seeing everything for what it is and being listlessly happy to the point of harnessing infinite good. Let your mind conjure up a setting in which you as a living human have no worries, no sins, no anxieties and only the purest of positive feelings. This, for you, should be the extreme GOOD life.

Take this second extreme and place it next to the first. Notice the clear disparity between the two...notice the huge chasm of well-being that exists between being ultimately, extremely miserable and being ultimately, extremely happy.

Now consider this: life on earth has been, for you, nothing more than a collection of experiences that fall somewhere between these two extremes. You have never felt worse than your definition of extreme misery and you've never really known happiness beyond your definition of extreme contentment.

Do you really wish to know reality and to see everything as it is, independent of your flawed faculties of perception? Is this even possible?

I say yes, yes it is.

The first step to doing this is to take the two extremes that I had you imagine...take them and crush them. Destroy them. Watch them, in your mind, burn away like smoldering cinder. Blow away the remaining ash and believe that there is no such thing as an objective extreme. No one knows exactly to what extent we can feel good or bad - those extents are only shaped by what we've been shown or experienced so far in life.

Understand that your life, my life, your ancestors' and progeny's lives, have all been lived between two extremes that could have been completely rejected and redefined at any time with enough will and wisdom.

I think it's critical to gain wisdom in order to learn more about why we're here, alive, sentient and tasked with the burden of being encapsulated inside a body that can be both ultimately miserable or ultimately happy at any given point in the course of it's tenure on earth.

For, to understand our respective purposes in life is to live with an ongoing thirst for answers that can't be obtained. This understanding is never fully gained, however it is lived and exercised through actions and communication. If anyone tells you they understand exactly what human life was created for is living in a fantasy land. No one knows exactly why we're here.

What those on higher planes of wisdom understand is that the seeking of meaning in life is what propels us and in some way pacifies our yearning for answers that are never really realized. It's enough 'to live the quest'.

Pretending to have all the answers is tantamount to saying you have none.

The answers we seek won't ever reveal themselves to us as the answers, rather we are destined to make sense of our realities as we traverse them, always between our two extremes, and always hoping to be closer to ultimate happiness.