The Purpose of Life & the Meaning of Suffering

This was a deep session, covering many thoughts that were new to me. Amongst them, we discussed:

• The meaning of your life and how your memories never die
• Is suffering a unique path to meaning? 
• The path of the Buddha vs Christ
• Suffering as impetus in Bernardo’s own journey
• The individual meanings of our lives
• How do you pursue your fate with the least resistance possible? 
• How can there be meaning and purpose if time is not real? 
• How the dead need us
• Life as a research programme of self-knowledge 
• Empirical observation indicates the reduction of suffering is not the goal

The recording is down below, and before that, some clips that discuss this in previous sessions.

Session recording:

Timestamps

0:00:00 Life’s purpose and the meaning of suffering
0:05:21 When a worldview stops holding you up
0:10:01 What happens to everything we learn?
0:15:05 A life need not be famous to matter
0:20:33 Does paying attention deepen our contribution?
0:25:19 How suffering moved Bernardo to question
0:30:27 Would we undo the events that shaped us?
0:35:04 Seeing a life through the eyes of history
0:45:06 As spies for God, what should we notice?
0:50:19 Why your life’s direction can change
0:55:15 Can there be purpose without time?
1:00:34 Must reality be lived to be known?
1:05:01 Physical causation and what the dashboard conceals
1:15:07 Can we step outside reality to understand it?
1:20:12 What metacognition might obscure
1:25:28 Imagining eternity without borrowing time
1:30:31 Is one life more valuable than another?
1:35:25 Why we need to understand evil
1:40:26 Life as a research programme of self-knowledge
1:45:05 Is reducing suffering nature’s ultimate goal?
1:50:25 What the Christian story asks of us
1:55:31 Suffering can be terrible without being meaningless