My websites have come and gone many times over the last decade, for one reason or another. This should be the final stop -- the destination after years of knowledge and experience in programming.
Where does life lead us? What is the purpose of life? Why even ask this question?
Let's first understand me. My purpose and my personal goals.
For all of us, we like to think we have personal goals. Ambitious or otherwise, we all have goals in some way, in order to keep us sane in a dying world. Without the goals, life has no purpose or meaning.
Throughout most of my life, I thought like this. But I have found recently that I have been wrong.
Let's start from the beginning. I was born in Bristol, in the United Kingdom, and lived a relatively modest and unimportant life. This was until I started questioning myself.
When I was around 13 or 14 years old, I started discovering ways to improve my life and seek personal goals. This is probably sooner than most people. I was studying at Brimsham Green Secondary School in Yate, and from there was where the "programming journey" started. There were no programming courses, all of my programming knowledge is self-taught.
This, however, was a time when I was simply exploring new ideas. My life wouldn't really "start" until I was nineteen, when my eyes started opening to further ideas.
And yes, if you have been paying attention to the detail on this website, "The Spiritual Transition" was born. But this was an idea at this point, and what I thought was "spirituality" back then is nothing compared to how I think about it now.
Spirituality is subjective, sure, but there is a certain extent of "knowledge", so to speak, that differentiates the spiritual from the non-spiritual, or perhaps even religious spirituality which I would consider a separate category altogether.
The Spiritual Transition wouldn't really take off until I explored writing for the first time. This was, in fact, advice given from my father who suggested I begin this franchise by writing books.
Writing is difficult. It is somewhat of a spiritual experience as it opens your creative mind to newer ideas. Creativity is in all forms of art, be it writing, art itself, music, and yes, even film-making and video games. However, electronic mediums should not be confused with spiritual creativity.
Creativity in the case of video games can simply be the process of performing logic and behaviour to get a result; the player on the game-screen as they work out puzzles or defeat the invading enemy.
Creative blocks occur across all forms of creativity, but spiritual creativity is different. Aside from some obvious controversy surrounding this particular topic, there is no doubt that writer's suffer the most from creative blocks. It is gruelling and painful, forcing you to go back on yourself and rewrite entire chapters.
I am a programmer. I have suffered creative blocks in programming, but I would take creative blocks in programming over writing any day.
However, programming is also difficult. If you are programming creatively, i.e., making a video game comprising of ideas that have not been accomplished before (research & development), creative blocks can hold a programmer back for just as long as a writer can with working out what should come next in the story.
Creative blocks can only be healed in time. Time we, unfortunately, do not have. Sometimes it's worth going back to the original question.
Where does life lead us? What is the purpose of life?
No matter how creative you are, even if you are a professional in your particular subject field or can churn out book after book without stopping, what is the purpose of it all?
This is when we must question ourselves. This is what I have been doing for the past ten years, and each time I go back and decipher my stupid brain, I realise I have been procrastinating all this time.
We like to seek personal goals to maintain stability in an unstable world, but these personal goals do not mean anything if it only offers temporary stability.
The Spiritual Transition I came up with because I wanted to help bring purpose to people and their lives. It is not a goal, it is method of forcing people to question themselves.
How could you possibly comprehend attempting to suggest people question themselves? Good question.
At the end of the day, all we spiritual "teachers" (for lack of a better term) give our advice and leave the rest to you. You cannot teach spirituality.
This is why religious spirituality is flawed. Whether it is Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, or others, the concepts surrounding these religions is the teachings of a single source reference, a Bible or Quran. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing personally against religion, but members of these religions must understand that these so-called "spiritual" teachings do not represent spirituality.
Spirituality is the process of questioning yourself. If you are taught that a single reference source is all there is to know and do not question further, then you are not spiritual. It is what you may consider "cognitive dissonance", the delusion under which an individual may suffer when faced with information that confronts their core beliefs. It is a harsh reality people must accept.
Question yourself. Ask yourself: Where does life lead? Why do I have personal goals?
Does life lead to heavy burdens or ascension (and we can discuss ascension later)?
Do my personal goals align with my own feelings about the world? This question is important if you procrastinate often. Perhaps the goals you are working towards do not align with your feelings about the world.
People who refuse to question themselves are those who cause the most suffering to others around them. To put it bluntly, "ignorance is the cause of all suffering", as the Dalai Lama once said.
That is not ignorance of knowledge. It is ignorance of the self. If you do not question yourself, who knows what untold suffering you may unleash upon the world.
We can talk about those who "rule us", how "evil" they are. In many ways, they help us tolerate our own internal suffering when we face up to those in power. Their reflection is nothing but an illusion, like everything else in the world. They are a bitter resemblance of our own suffering when we let them in, let them supplant their rage and anger and engulf us into rabid violent monsters.
Their anger becomes our anger. Their hatred becomes our hatred. Violence will not stop until it stops with us. The key is to refuse to concede to the anger and hatred of others. But how do you do that when we are bombarded daily by illusory disinformation?
Question yourself. Always return to yourself. If something angers you, turn away. Question yourself. Put yourself in their shoes and question yourself as if you are them. Why do I do this? Do these actions align with the personal goals and my feelings of the world?
There can be no telling how the minds of "clever" but incredibly stupid people work.
But this is no way to pursue our true nature. Sometimes, it's just better to walk away and do not participate in the goals of others, who in all likelihood have goals that align perfectly with that which seeks to rule us.
Question yourself, question your motives and your ideas.
As for me, I continue to explore the realms of the unknown; delving deeper into unexplored realities and perform my own "transition" of sorts. This, I hope, will allow me to uncover the writing and the ideas I truly wish to seek. To align my goals with how I feel about the world and work with what knowledge I have to attain those goals.
That's how I approach life now. Perhaps you would like to explore life a bit more and work out how to approach it differently.
