But what is important? What is the purpose of your life? It may seem like you have some imperative task, or some ultimate goal, but if you trace it back, it’s probably not that essential. I suspect that some fairly meaningless event(s) happened to you and you chose to create attachment to it.

When I look at the human race from the highest perspective that my tiny human brain can manage, I see only a single goal; Survival. But for what purpose? Just as our primitive ancestors didn’t have a grasp on the way we see our own existence now, I believe that we don’t have a grasp on the purpose for our existence in the future. So, let’s just say for arguments sake, that we do have a purpose, but we just don’t know what it is yet. What we do know, is that if we haven’t evolve to the stage where we do know what this purpose is by the time the sun dies out in about 5 billion years, then we’re probably going to have to figure out some way of getting out of here.

Imagine we figure out space travel, and develop a reliable and abundant source of energy. Assuming that we can travel a fraction of the speed of light, it’s going to take generations of travel in order to reach other planets/sources of information/sources of energy. We could place our human bodies in time capsules, but then we’d end up being eaten by Aliens and Sigourney Weaver would have to blast them all to hell. A safer and more practical solution would be to spend the years of travel, continuing to evolve, until we reach our next destination. Then we’d have to travel even further, and so on, until we finally came to the ultimate destination… The Meaning of Life. It may not be a physical destination, it may not be a mental state of mind, it may just be a restaurant at the end of the universe, but as I mentioned before, we’re not evolved enough to be able to understand what it is yet.

Those people (if we can still call them people by that point, since we evolved from something other than people, we’ll probably evolve out of it too, but we’re still connected), are the ones that are handed the task of continuing the human race until we reach that destination; they are the Interim. We are the interim. We are the ones who are responsible for continuing this seemingly insignificant task of survival.

So, what do we do in the meantime? We play games, we act out different characters and pretend to ourselves and other people that there truly is significance in our individual existence. If your parents birth control had worked, or that time I got hit by a car when I was 5 years old was fatal instead of just breaking my collar bone, things wouldn’t really be so different. We like to think that we’re valuable, or that we’re having an impact on something vitally important. As a species, we are invaluable to our own future existence, but as an individual, if you don’t invent that Perpetual Motion machine, it doesn’t matter, someone else will.

So while we’re either stuck on a space craft travelling millions of years to get to a new galaxy, or stuck on this planet waiting billions of years for the sun to cough up it’s last fireball, the question will always be…

What are ‘you’ going to waste your life doing?

From my reading, which comprises mostly of information from the book The Human Mind: And How to Make the Most of It by Robert Winston; I have learnt to understand the brain as this entity which develops in relation to the repetition of events and the importance that we attach to them.

So, there you have it, the simplest explanation of how our mind learns to serve and protect us. But what happens when your conscious mind thinks that it has a better way of dealing with a situation than your subconscious. Where are the powers in place which prevent your body from releasing ‘fight-or-flight’ chemicals, and how do you convince your legs to stand their ground when facing fear?

In some situations in our lives, we may need to be wary and follow our instant gut reaction without questioning it. But for someone like me, there seem so few situations that I would really need any adrenaline assisted actions, that it almost seems a useless function. However, after 30+ years of brain training; by the repetition of thought patterns and the exposure to stressful or painful situations, I still have a noticeable number of ‘buttons’ that could be pressed which my body responds to with an emotional reaction.

I am consciously aware of these emotional responses, and I acknowledge at the time that this may not be the direction that I want to go in, but simply by being conscious of something doesn’t make it easy to go against what your subconscious is trying to tell you. So how do we change that? What could we do that would give us the power to override our reactions at will? How can we be strong enough to break a cycle in a single second that has taken a lifetime to create?

If humans evolved the need for a system which allowed us to be protected from dangerous situations, and we are now living in a place where we no longer need such a system in place (unless you spend a lot of time sailing off the Somalian coast), then it may be possible to evolve into a species which can afford to take it’s time when making decisions.

But how do we do this? Wallace, Darwin… we need your help…!