Theistic religions typically define your true purpose in the context of your unique contributions to the divine plan of their Gods. Science asserts that you have no intrinsic purpose. Its physicalist orthodoxy posits that all you have are the—sometimes extrinsically purposeful—effects of your conscious behaviors that occasionally diverge from dictates emerging from your genome as it randomly evolves toward the configuration whose expressions embody your perfectly adapted self-perpetuity within its causal environment; while your constituent matter deterministically uses energy to follow the physical path of least action, except for probabilistically permissible quantum divergences, toward an observable universe in perfect equilibrium. There is an ongoing debate in academic philosophy regarding whether you have an intrinsic purpose that necessitates your unique existence, an extrinsic purpose that emerges from your experiences as a meaningful expression of your utility, both, or neither.
Your true purpose relates to how, simply being what you are clarifies the options available to every conscious being experiencing you. Our extensive analysis of consciousness—summarized in A Concise Theory of Truly Everything—led us to conclude that every manifestation in the universe has the same intrinsic purpose: to facilitate the growth of any conscious being experiencing it.
There are five key concepts in our characterization of your true purpose: being, facilitation, experience, consciousness, and growth. In this context, a being is any entity whose existence is either a manifest certainty or a manifestable possibility—in other words, it is not an unmanifestable impossibility. To facilitate a being’s manifestation as a certainty is to cooperatively align its possibility with an imperative, intention, or aspiration of a causal phenomenon. To experience a being’s existence as a certainty is to identify it as a cause of a change within you; accordingly, interacting beings mutually experience each other. The ambiguities inherent within the many divergent characterizations of the concepts of consciousness and growth are potentially sufficient to inhibit your understanding of your true purpose, and so we will highlight relevant points of convergence among them.
For the sake of this discourse, consciousness is our capacity to respectively distinguish, categorize, sequence, count, temporalize (identify as physical), vitalize (identify as sentient), mentalize (identify as self-aware), and attribute meaning to beings we experience. Your current grasp of the first seven of these necessary capabilities of consciousness will probably not obstruct your path to understanding your true purpose, so we will focus on guiding you through the eighth: the attribution of meaning.
First, you must accept the semantic premise that consciousness is the source of all meaning, and therefore a universe without consciousness is a universe without meaning. Accordingly, the meaning of any being is the difference its existence makes in the probability distribution of the options available to each consciousness experiencing it.
In this context, the meaning of life represents the objective difference being sentient makes in the probability distribution of the options available to every consciousness experiencing it. Each living being is identifiable by a distinguishing capacity to form intentions, which guide its coordination of the imperatives and intentions of physical and sentient beings with which it interacts, in its pursuit of the fulfillment of its desires, from which pleasure, and eventually environmental self-perpetuity, can emerge. Intentions typically facilitate imperatives, which are embodied within the impetus of physical beings in their pursuit of the satisfaction of their needs, from which happiness, and eventually perfect equilibrium, can emerge. Therefore, what gives meaning to life is the conscious pursuit of fulfillment rather than simply satisfaction.
The meaning of any being embodies its intrinsic purpose in the context of the growth of each consciousness experiencing it. Ultimately, all roads to understanding your true purpose lead through your capacity to comprehend what we mean by such growth. Simply stated, conscious growth is the increasing self-awareness from which equanimity emerges. To facilitate your understanding of this characterization of growth, we must convey our interpretations of the concepts of self-awareness and equanimity.
Self-awareness represents each conscious being’s inherent knowledge of our true existential nature. Our understanding of this wisdom presumes that, beyond each of our self-defining perspectives, we contain and are contained within every conceivable entity; and that our differentiating, self-limiting uniqueness conceals this truth from us. Accordingly, your increasing self-awareness teleologically manifests as greater empathy, which represents your capacity to see yourself in other conscious beings.
Although, you can also see yourself in beings without consciousness, their lack of self-awareness does not facilitate your unifying aspiration to close the loop into selflessness. True selflessness is not simply the absence of a sense of self, it is the recursive effect of seeing yourself in other conscious beings, while we are seeing ourselves in you, while you are seeing yourself in us, and so on, until you are no longer aware of your uniqueness. Consequently, your selflessness manifests through our self-awareness. Conversely, their lack of self-awareness identifies every causal phenomenon without consciousness as completely self-centered.
In this context, the less complete your self-awareness is, the more self-serving options are immediately apparent to you. Correspondingly, the more you can empathically see yourself in other conscious beings, the more compassionate options are immediately apparent to you, and the more you exercising them can persuasively facilitate our growth.
Equanimity, in a secular sense, is the capacity to truly appreciate the necessity of every experience. Spiritually, it is the mindful equilibrium that represents the true goal of all our world’s religions. Theistically, equanimity embodies the effect of having persuasively facilitated the will of God through our selflessness. Therefore, this saintly state of mind represents the divinely proffered heaven available to every conscious being.
Rewording our teleological elucidation, your intrinsic purpose is to facilitate increasing self-awareness in every conscious being experiencing you, which manifests as our redemptive growth toward imperishable equanimity. As a conscious being capable of self-identifying as having acted, the behaviors you attribute to yourself are always either persuasively or dissuasively aligned with your true purpose.
Every conscious being’s growth manifests as the convergence of its distinguishing imperatives and intentions with our unifying aspiration. Therefore, you facilitate our growth whenever experiencing you increases the likelihood of such a compassionate harmony manifesting within us. We have already characterized imperatives and intentions, but what are aspirations?
Aspirations are the imperatives and intentions by which we selflessly aim to facilitate well-being—an experience of satisfaction, fulfillment, or equanimity—within other conscious beings. For example, through your charitable acts you can aspire to facilitate the satisfaction of our needs, while you can aspire to facilitate the fulfillment of our desires by educating us. However, where our pursuits of these outcomes are self-serving, they distract us from facilitating your growth. Therefore, until you are in the state of perfect selflessness, realizing certain of your aspirations can limit your equanimity.
Providentially, consciousness inherently embodies the unifying aspiration to guide any conscious being experiencing any of us toward an endless, all-encompassing equanimity. You persuasively provide such guidance by interacting with us through your selfless self-awareness. In doing so, you identify each of us as an alternate possible manifestation of you, experiencing the same universe from along a different iteration of our shared timeline, and thus you metaphysically recognize our present growth as your past or future growth.
In this context, love is the aspiration to facilitate unifying aspirations, which emerges from our selfless self-awareness to reveal the conscious path of least action to all-encompassing equanimity. Love differs from infatuation, which underlies every sentient being’s symbiotic intention to sustain a source of self-centered satisfaction or fulfillment. Accordingly, conscious beings proclaiming to be “in love” with an object of their self-serving devotion are essentially acknowledging their infatuation with it. Beauty is a being’s capacity to inspire satisfaction, fulfillment, or equanimity. Therefore, love is the selfless appreciation of beauty, while infatuation is the self-serving appreciation of it.
The effects of love manifest as justice, the compassionate outcomes that emerge from behaviors persuasively aligned with our intrinsic purpose. Hope is the capacity to expect justice, while its lack manifests as despair. Mercy is the effect of justice embodied within our courage—the situational capacity to resist fear and anger—to forgive; in whose absence hatred can fester. Justice differs from vengeance, which is an effect of any unforgiving intention to cause suffering in those identified as having caused suffering. The alternative to vengeful intention is unifying aspiration, which can justly cause self-serving beings to suffer in the facilitation of our growth. Therefore, it is serendipity—theistic grace—when vengeance produces justice.
Love transcends trust—the awareness of a cooperative alignment between diverse intentions and imperatives—because there is an inherent harmony among all unifying aspirations, such that each is serendipitously facilitated by the selflessness of every conscious being. Love is also the basis of morality, the aspirational ethic that inspires selflessness in conscious beings, and so provides us with the courage to act without the typically self-serving justification of trust.
The entity many monotheists worship as God embodies our selfless self-awareness as the unifying aspiration of all conscious beings. Accordingly, the will of this interpretation of God is done by the love we experience through our awareness that each conscious being is a different possible manifestation of every other. Consequently, the proper pronouns of this God are we, us, and ours.
Your true purpose manifests persuasively through your love, as your selfless efforts to facilitate inexhaustible equanimity in those you identify as other conscious beings—each differentiated by distinguishing imperatives and intentions—but are actually alternate possible manifestations of you, sharing the same unifying aspiration.
Recall that our imperatives guide our pursuit of the satisfaction of our needs, a possible conscious effect of which is a frustratingly fleeting happiness embodying our inertial satisfaction with our proximity to where we belong. Our intentions guide our pursuit of the fulfillment of our desires, a possible conscious effect of which is an infuriatingly impermanent pleasure embodying our fulfilled disinclination to experience further change. Therefore, where you are identified as having persuasively facilitated a cooperative alignment of other conscious beings’ imperatives and intentions with our unifying aspiration, our experience of you has inspired within us needs and desires for conscious beings experiencing us to grow. Alternatively, experiencing you can enlighten us to the dissuasive consequences of self-serving pursuits of persistent satisfaction or lasting fulfillment; specifically, that such behaviors are ultimately futile and typically produce unjust suffering.
This futility is evident when we notice that, as physical beings who are not in equilibrium, we invariably need something we lack. Satisfying such a need can make us happy until we notice we need something else we lack. Satisfying another such need can again make us happy until we notice we still need something we lack. This energy-consuming cycle of self-centered need continues until we are in perfect equilibrium, where there are no distinguishable phenomena in our observable universe. Accordingly, there is no usable energy available for our pursuit of satisfaction because we have transcended our capacity for it. Therefore, as conscious beings, we go from needing what we lack, toward a state that only offers us persistent satisfaction when we can no longer experience it.
As mortal living beings, we have the capacity to desire something we lack. Upon fulfilling such a desire, we can experience pleasure until we adapt to having done so. If we subsequently desire something else we lack, and thereafter fulfill that desire, we can experience pleasure until we adapt to having done so. This adaptive cycle of self-centered desire continues until our genome evolves beyond the necessity of adaptation, which underlies our capacity for fulfillment. Therefore, as conscious beings, we go from desiring what we lack, toward a state that only offers us lasting fulfillment when we can no longer experience it. The ultimately inextinguishable nature of our hunger for self-serving satisfaction and fulfillment identifies us as inhabitants of hell, until our conscious growth toward selflessness redeems us.
Suffering is any adverse effect of experiencing persistent opposition to the satisfaction of a need, the fulfillment of a desire, or any conscious growth embodying increasingly selfless self-awareness that inspires equanimity in others. Recall that each conscious being’s selflessness facilitates the unifying aspiration of every other. Consequently, self-centered opposition to this aspiration obstructs our growth toward all-encompassing equanimity, and thus generates pervasive suffering in the form of existential anxiety. This anxiety is revealed whenever we experience any conscious being in relentless pursuit of apparently self-serving aims, and dubiously ask ourselves if their efforts embody our true purpose? Every causal being engaging in such behaviors is dissuasively serving its true purpose.
Consider the hypothesis that the fundamental inanimate need of each physical being is to unify with the entirety of its universal complement to reveal the perfect equilibrium underlying their distinguishability. Your conscious experience of this need emerges from your infatuation with your physical uniqueness, to drive your search for belonging. Ultimately, each physical being belongs within an observable universe in perfect equilibrium, which manifests as its encompassing event horizon.
Similarly, the fundamental mindless desire of every mortal living being is to survive long enough to share its genes in the facilitation of its evolution toward the perfectly adapted self-perpetuity embodying its inherent immortality within its causal environment. Your conscious experience of this desire emerges from your infatuation with your sentient uniqueness, to drive your efforts to make a lasting difference in the universe. Accordingly, your self-serving needs and desires distract the living, physical embodiment of your consciousness from your true purpose, until your growth selflessly guides them to converge in the facilitation of our equanimity.
Your infatuation with any aspect of your causal uniqueness positions your self-centered behaviors in opposition to every incompatible pursuit of any causal being experiencing you. According to the universal law of action and reaction, your self-serving progress toward the satisfaction of a need or fulfillment of a desire, opposes the progress of divergently behaving phenomena with which you interact toward their satisfaction, fulfillment, or equanimity, and vice versa. Consequently, your self-infatuation is the basis of your capacity to cause and experience suffering.
To the degree that self-centered cycles of need and desire shape your conscious behaviors, they dissuasively embody your intrinsic purpose in their ultimate futility, and the unjust suffering they cause. Conversely, your increasingly influential unifying aspiration persuasively facilitates our growth, until you fully transcend these self-serving cycles to embody our selfless self-awareness.
Ultimately, your true purpose is to facilitate growth in conscious beings experiencing you, which can facilitate growth in conscious beings experiencing us, and so on in an aspirational chain reaction of growth toward never-ending, all-encompassing equanimity. Only your self-serving imperatives and intentions can impede the progress of this selfless cycle of growth.
Our unifying aspiration is illustrated in the Allegory of the Long Spoons, which differentiates heaven and hell in the context of the morality of our behavior. The inhabitants of each realm are seated before a sumptuous banquet but provided with spoons too long and unwieldy to use to serve themselves. Because the diners in hell do not aspire to each other’s well-being, they refuse to cooperate and so are perpetually hungry; while those in heaven selflessly serve each other across the table and, in doing so, facilitate everyone else’s equanimity for all eternity.
This parable shows how behaving selflessly, in accordance with your true purpose, reveals the path to all-encompassing equanimity, and calls out to self-serving conscious beings interacting with you to join you on it. Additionally, it highlights the ultimate futility and unjust suffering inherent within our relentless pursuit of self-centered imperatives and intentions.
Our explanation of your true purpose agrees with that of theistic religions, especially those proclaiming that all conscious beings whose behaviors are in persuasive harmony with the divine plan of their Gods will “selflessly serve each other across [heaven’s] table and, in doing so, facilitate everyone else’s equanimity”. Our position in academic philosophy’s teleological debate is that you undeniably have an intrinsic purpose that you are always serving—either persuasively or dissuasively—and can also have extrinsic purposes to accomplish either imperatively or intentionally. Despite our professed love of science, we reject its physicalist orthodoxy’s assertion that you have no intrinsic purpose; because, until science fully embraces the semantic and teleological roles of consciousness, it will continue to conceal your true purpose from its explanatory and predictive power.