evernote raw:
we have survival instincts. all living things want to continue to live.
evidence of this in humans is fear, anxiety, amygdala, fight or flight. hunger, thirst, pain. these are bodily signals that compel the person to take action to ensure survival.
if we did not have these we would not survive.
life would not live
but life wants to live. we know this b/c we have survival instincts.
but what about non-living or stuff in the universe that is not “alive”
rocks, the ocean, the sky, the planet. stars, galaxies, atoms, energy.
these too seem to be infused with a will to be.
after the big bang, clouds of galactic dust began to gather and compress into a young galaxy. why? science would say b/c gravity. philosophy would say b/c the will to be.
we have to transcend the physical explanation; the physical explanation is telling us what is happening but is not telling us why it happened. what is driving the gravity to “act” – why does mass create a force that draws two objects together?
we cannot escape the idea, anywhere we look in the universe, that everything in the universe, not only “living’ organisms but all matter and energy in the universe seems to be pushing or driven in the direction toward existence and expression, rather than away from it.
it is fundamentally a positive force, rather than a negative force. if the universe were built on a fundamentally negative force, there would be a will to oblivion; we would not have survival instincts, our species would cease to exist; galactic clouds would never have formed galaxies and stars which made elements which made planets which made life which made us.
it is a philosophically absurd notion that underlying the universe is a negative force proven by the fact of existence.
now we might argue b/c of the eventual heat death of the universe that there is ALSO a will to oblivion and that the will to be and the will to oblivion are both always present and at odds with each other, that the cycle of life of the universe is where these tow forces play out their battle. will to be wins for a while, then will to oblivion wins in the heat death. then another big bang and it starts all over again.
we don’t currently know, and we may never know. not only do we now know, we don’t even know if it is even knowable – in nature and considering human cognitive limitations. so for now, during the will to be phase, we must live in accordance and alignment with this universal force.
it is positive, it bends toward expression, toward fulfillment of potential, toward actualization. love is an expression of it. love is the spiritual/ emotional form of gravity in physics – it is an expression of the will to be.
Polyphonic 