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@canofcam@lemmy.world
Death. I mean, literally or, to be more precise, cosmically literally.
See, every living being relies on the death of other living beings in order to continue alive. Similarly, death relies on living beings (a dead being can't die again). I coined a Latin phrase that is quite similar to the Hermetic principle "as above so below": "Vita mortem manducat, Mors manducat vitam" (life devours death, Death devours life).
Death is the only certainty, the only truth, still living beings are wired to fear and avoid it (pointlessly, as there's not much left to do when the organs of a living being stop working altogether due to inexorable consequences of aging).
So, no matter how strange it may sound, the purpose of life is Death, literally. The true Mother Goddess.
With this perspective, is death really a 'meaning' to life, or is it rather a 'fuel' for more life?
If it's the latter, then that implies there is another meaning to life. There is a circle which keeps the wheel of life spinning - but where is the wheel going, and why?
The ultimate death of everything, perhaps, in which case I suppose you are correct.
@canofcam@lemmy.world
To me, it's more of the former. It's fuel only in the eyes of materialistic pursuit, which is a subset of survival instinct. When one let go from the mundane, when one wakes up to the fact that we're taking nothing with us after we cease existing, when one wakes up to the fact that what we call as "we" or "me" are illusions of a emergent property from principles of physics (sentience from a dynamic system of electric signals flowing through a self-organizing structure "living being"), then if gets easier to see death (and Death, the noumenon, which I symbolically see as "Death Herself" as in Morana, for example) as meaning rather than "fuel".
As for where is the cosmic wheel going, IMHO the answer is likely: to itself. Order emerged from chaos (Ordo Ab Chao) and chaos emerge from order (Chao Ab Ordine) and the cosmic cycle goes on indefinitely. Life, and by extension humans, are just a tiny part of the order which emerged from primordial chaos (Science calls it Big Bang, Sumerians called Her Tiamat) that's going to return to the same chaos (the inexorable "falling" towards maximum state of entropy).
This reminds me of my take a bit. The meaning of life is “Living to die”, meaning you live life to choose how you die. It’s more symbolic way of living more than anything else, because many things do factor into your death.
based take