What’s the most important question you can think of? Let me go through a few ideas:

“Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where do we go when we die?”

None of these questions actually need to have answers, and none of them actually need to be answered. It’s remarkably ambitious to try and find out, and remarkably presumptuous to claim to know. I’m honestly not very interested. I think we will never know, and we will have to learn to accept that, and transcend the desire for some sort of primitive notion of purpose or destiny- a notion that limits more than it liberates, really, and constrains more than it empowers.

These are questions that Buddha felt shouldn’t be answered. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_unanswerable_questions

“Why is there something, when there could’ve been nothing?”

We cannot know for sure, and even if we could, it shouldn’t change anything. What we do know is that there is something- however you want to choose to define it- if you want to be strict you could ask “Why do we seem to perceive of things”, which would escape the “how do we know if something is real” quagmire. It doesn’t matter if what we perceive is “real” or not- it affects us, somehow, and that relationship is worth considering, and salvaging.

“What are we?”

I think this is a rather important question, something that we all ought to think about. I like to think of us as manifestations- I do think it makes sense that there ought to be a reality independent of our perception of it, although of course I can’t prove that- and it would be rather presumptuous of me to claim to be able to.

Manifestations of what? A lot of people describe it differently- Schopenhauer described it as “the Will”. A lot of Eastern philosophy describes this too- the idea of a sort of “force”. Einstein was quoted as saying- “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.” That makes sense.

There is something that would appear to “drive” everything- though not really-  and to call it God by associating it with traditional ideas of religion would be to insult it, because it is so much greater, and yet so much more subtle. What is it that makes a plant grow? What is it that makes universes and brain cells look identical? I think physicists discover a sense of it when they study the universe, I think musicians discover a sense of it when they play music, I think it is self-evident in nature, in mathematical patterns and elegance.

Actually we aren’t so much manifestations as we are vessels. We’re mediums. Mediums and vessels for what? For ideas- for information. The root source of all this information would appear to be some sort of pattern generator- that is, to me, the heart of the universe, Spinoza’s God, Schopenhauer’s Will. What is our DNA? Information, encoded in our genes. If we had any “purpose”, this would be as close to it as I can think of- to transmit information. Life in general seems to seek to propagate itself. We are but waves, we rise and we fall, but we are all a part of the ocean- which, in contrast to our limited experiences, could be reasonably considered to be infinite. I find this thought to be awe-inspiring, and somewhat comforting. Do the shores contain the ocean, or does the ocean sculpt its shore? Obviously they both happen at the same time, and neither would have meaning without the other. The same applies to life and death. Death is, in Steve Job’s words, very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent.

Let me get to what I think is the most important question you can ask yourself, or each other:

“How should life be lived?”

If you are a vessel, what sort of information do you want to carry with you? How are you going to propagate it? Where, and how? Whatever your perspective about life- whether it’s a gift, a curse or any other simplification you can think of- the most important thing you can do is to contemplate how it ought to be lived. We are in a unique and privileged position because we have the capacity for choice.

Are we the only ones, actually? How does a plant decide how many flowers and leaves it should have? How does an animal decide where it should look for food, or where it should rest? Do they make choices? Or is it random? I should imagine that it’s a bit of both- it starts out almost completely random, perhaps, and then natural selection weeds out the bad or ineffective choices, leaving us with the better ones- or rather, better choice-making mechanisms, at least within a specific context or environment.

We are still somewhat unique, though, because we have the ability to imagine things that we have not observed, and we have the ability to not act on our thoughts and impulses. We also have developed extensive modes of communication and expression- all of which, ultimately, allow us to make more well-informed choices. All of these things allow us to actually confront a question such as “How should life be lived?” Answering this question allows us to escape from first-order natural selection- we can avoid the pitfalls that less complex life forms might fall victim to, and this suggests to me that we’re currently in the middle of what is going to be some of the fastest evolution our planet has witnessed (to our knowledge, at least). It’s an incredibly exciting idea- it’s like watching a plane take off after watching it cruise along the runway. It’s either going to soar, or burst into flames and fall to pieces- and we get to determine which outcome we get, depending on the choices we make.

How should life be lived? I’m nobody to tell you how you ought to live yours. But I’d like you to do yourself a favour, and take some time to think about it.

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2014 UPDATE: I think I spent too much time thinking too big. I think it’s good to think big, but it needs to be balanced by thinking about the things that you can really change. So beyond thinking big, I have to think ‘doable’. So while it’s fun to think about how life ought to be lived, it’s practical to also think about how each day should be spent.