How does one help another not to be terrified of the thought of the ultimate uselessness of all things?
It's terrifying, no?
Uselessness.
Well, I mean, you can talk about how actually they are quite useful.
Everything has a use.
You know, like money has a use.
Alcohol has a use.
Everything has its use.
The question is whether those uses or those purposes are beneficial or detrimental.
So I did a video on this and my take on it that I think is whether it's perfectly honest or not, it's quite useful.
I just mean some people might disagree, but the point being that when we say that the world has no purpose, or let's say life has no purpose, it's not something negative.
It's actually something liberating.
Because the Christians, for example, say that the purpose of life is belief in Jesus Christ, is to gain faith in Jesus Christ.
And
If that's the case, then we're all really in big trouble, right?
And we've got very little choice.
There's not much we can do with our lives, except our lives become a question of whether we're worshipping Jesus Christ or not, whether we have belief in Jesus Christ or not.
Nothing else matters.
You have no freedom.
If the Muslims are right, then belief in Allah is the only thing that matters.
I'm trying to think of other crazy religions.
Most of the Eastern religions are pretty non-crazy, aren't they?
Hinduism.
Hinduism gets you stuck in whatever, I don't know.
Not really.
But as soon as you have a purpose, the point is you have a purpose, you get stuck.
If the purpose of life is to make lots of money, then that's all you've got, is whether you make money or not.
Saying that there's no purpose in life is completely liberating.
You can do what you want.
If you want to become a mass murderer, go for it.
There's nothing intrinsically stopping you from doing it.
The only problem with such a thing is that it goes against your own intentions.
You do it thinking it will make you happy or it will be a benefit to you and it actually is to your detriment.
The fact that these things contradict each other.
We're not worried about purpose because we're trying to find benefit or
clarity or simplicity and so on.
So I think explaining it in that way that it actually brings freedom and allows you to worry less about what is right and what is wrong or what is the way and actually focus on what brings peace, happiness and freedom from suffering and what doesn't.
What actually makes sense is maybe the best thing.
What makes sense supersedes the idea of having a predefined purpose, which would of course be completely arbitrary.
There's no reason for us to believe that faith in Jesus Christ is any better than faith in Allah.
Nobody looks like they have anything to say on this.
What would you do if someone was afraid of, you know, maybe we can be more general, being afraid of letting go, no?
I have one meditator right here right now who's, you know, she's much better now.
Today she said to me how much better she feels.
And then I finally looked at her with this question in my mind.
And it was amazing to think, you know, okay, what did she look like when she first came?
What does she look like now?
And you can see that she's a different person.
She's radiant, she's much more alive, much less a character and much more a human being.
But in the beginning, she was very afraid of letting go.
Or she had these questions about, how can I convince myself to let go?
One classic answer that I would always give is that you never let go of the things that you don't want to let go of.
Maybe that goes along with purpose as well.
If you believe that X, Y, or Z is the purpose of life, then don't believe us that it's not.
But certainly don't just take your own blind faith in it.
If you believe that there's a purpose, look at that purpose and try to understand it.
If it's just a fear, if the person gets the fact that there is no purpose to life, but they're just afraid of it, then the best thing is to look at the fear.
Don't worry about whether there is or isn't a purpose.
Look at this fear that you have and try to understand what's there as opposed to what's not there.
I just think purpose has no place in ultimate reality.
That's long and short of it.
Nobody else?
Stop it.