Why Don’t You Meditate?

“Pain is unavoidable. Suffering is optional.” — Buddha

There are things I consider logic and evidence based. Factual. The notion of a round Earth is like this. And there are others that contain such large elements of “faith” that I can’t call them “fact” but rather starting points. I begin with faith that X or Y is true, and then look at the inductive and deductive logic chains, and see if they all hold. “Equality” between races is like this, “Equality and complementarity between genders” is another. Lots of logic, lots of evidence, but ultimately, I have to admit there is an irreducible amount of “well, I’m just going to start with this assumption, because if I start with the opposite assumption the world goes off a cliff” sort of thinking involved.

One arena of such speculation is “the meaning of life”, something that gets debated a lot in Freshman Philosophy. Some will say there is no meaning, others that we have to make a meaning, others that the meaning has been handed down to us by supernatural agencies. I like the Dalai Lama’s assertion that the meaning of life is to be joyful. This seems verifiable through observation of everything from bugs to billionaires, so while I cannot “prove” it, if we start with that assumption, I see nothing in human history, behavior, or aspiration that doesn’t follow.

So I’ll take it.

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If we start with that assumption, the next questions are things like: what does that mean? How shall we find it? How does a moral system flow from…