Why Life Isn't Fair

Because it isn't.. but there is actually a reason why.

The primary reason why life isn’t fair is due to the following fact:

The idea of fairness is built upon the presumption that the purpose of life is survival.

If the purpose of life were survival, then yes, in an Intelligent Universe (which ours undoubtedly is¹), life would be fair to all, in order to give each being an equal chance at a lengthy survival. i.e. Equip each person with an equal overall resource pool — even if the makeup of that pool is somewhat varied, the overall net amount would need to be fair. Furthermore, as life unfolded, it would need to remain fair throughout.

As it turns out, however, in this Intelligent Universe, life is decidedly, obviously unfair.

What, then, does this tell us about the purpose of life?

Photo by Andy Holmes on Unsplash

It sure isn’t survival.

If the purpose of life is not survival, then what is it?²

The answer to that question must be ‘arrived at’ in one’s own language — this is what gives it meaning.

So, let’s explore a bit..

Look beyond survival. Don’t ignore it. Acknowledge it as a thing. Then look beyond it.

Try this thought exercise:

Allow yourself to imagine: What if I knew I was going to survive. No matter what. I can check that box. ✅ And it will remain checked.

Then what.

Let the idea that survival is a ‘completed task’ filter into your mind. Holding that idea in mind, project yourself into tomorrow, still feeling that way.

Then the next day.

Let it percolate into next week. Your next birthday — what if you’re still feeling it by then.

Then what. What lies beyond that need for survival.

Does this change what you do with your day?

Honestly, it may not. (Though, in some cases, it absolutely might.)

Either way — might it change how you do everything you do in your days, knowing your survival is ensured?

What else is present, that wasn’t there before?

What is absent?

Knowing Life’s Purpose³ may or may not change anything externally. But it changes everything internally.

Many of us know life is not about what we are doing. (External focus.)

It’s also not about why we are doing whatever we’re doing. (Sorry, Simon Sinek. Why is an internal focus which is more True than an external one — What — but it is still ‘story’ based. This makes it Internal-ego⁴ focus.) Why is the birthplace of the spiritual ego.

If Life could ever be pinioned to one idea (lol), one might say Life’s essence is most closely experienced when we focus on how we do our doing.

From what place within us does our action originate?

From tension? From control? From a desire to achieve so we will gain some down-the-road improvement?

Or is it from peace. From satisfaction. From contentment and acceptance. From knowing. From trust. (Internal-Self focus.)

^ This is the how. The ‘in what way’. How we live.

When we discover how we are living, we unlock understanding of Life’s Purpose.

Think of it in terms of increasing clarity..

Like a lens coming into focus.

What consciousness is the most blurred, opaque, distorted of the three ways of processing life. This is the consciousness origin of the child (and the ‘adult’ who has an aged body but is still a child from a consciousness perspective). External focus drives us toward vague shapes and roughly defined ideas. We ‘ape’ whatever the thing is we are trying to duplicate, because we hope that thing will bring us success, relationships, love, fame… survival.

Why consciousness is more in-focus. We can see figures now. This is the consciousness origin of the adolescent (and the ‘adult’ who has an aged body but is still an adolescent from a consciousness perspective).

From Why consciousness, we can see so much more clearly than the people whose lenses are still in What consciousness. We know enough to know our way is better, broader, more intelligent (and it is); but we often don’t know enough to know there are multiple stages of experiencing and processing life. We get angry at What consciousness people. We get angry at them for not-knowing what we know. “They should know better.” Well, they don’t. Yelling at them or calling them ‘wrong’ is not going to help What-centered individuals grow. It’s just going to antagonize them and make them feel like they’re being punished or put on display for being stupid. Both of these experiences lead to the brain shutting down, the survival instinct kicking in, and only irrational, unreasonable behavior is accessible to the What-centered being until they’ve had time to calm down and become un-triggered.

Internal-ego focus of Why consciousness has us involved in personal story. Conveniently, we are often the hero, and our perspective is often the ‘rightest’ one. “Other perspectives are cool and all — we’re open-minded — but ultimately, this is the right way.” Internal-ego focus drives us toward completing a mission (story) or fulfilling a purpose (story, ego-boner about oneself being epic and secretly more awesome than everyone else). We do not yet realize one of the most important questions we could ask ourselves is:

“How did I decide that this is what is important in life?”

“How did I decide that this is what matters?”

Introspection into that question (phrased two ways) will result in clarity on the drivers of one’s life. One will dis-cover that all passions, causes, and callings are complete and utter nonsense because the drive to fulfill them was instilled and shaped by parental/authority figures and societal influences in early and ongoing life; parental/authority figures and societal influences which, in and of themselves, are pathologically unhealed and dysfunctional. (i.e. “The blind leading the blind.”)

But then, it keeps going. It doesn’t end there. If one continues introspecting, one will find that, actually, all passions, causes, and callings are beautiful and necessary. “I mean, our world needs racial, gender, and sexual equality. It definitely does. But it was the way I was going about it… that’s what was making it more about my ego than about the cause itself.”⁵ < This is the flavor of realization that comes from this stage of introspection.

This is when our lens turns yet again, and we emerge into the crystal clear picture of How consciousness.

How consciousness is even more in-focus. Not only is the picture in bright, crisp clarity, but there is an obvious sense of inter-connectedness to everything. This is called ‘context’.

Good is not always good. Depending on the context, sometimes good is evil.

Evil is not always evil. Depending on the context, sometimes evil is good.

This realization makes labeling things ‘good’ and ‘evil’ a clear waste of energy — and often a hindrance to experiencing the truth of a situation — so the practice is effortlessly discarded.

With good-and-evil out of the way, much energy that was wasted is no longer leaking from us. Now, a whole new layer of the picture becomes visible. Like a Magic Eye rendering, we suddenly see a whole other image that was there the whole time, we simply had not been able to relax our vision enough to let it come through for us. And this vision is Beauty itself.

This additional layer is a deepening of that above-mentioned context. We now see that not only are ‘good’ and ‘evil’ not what we thought they were, but we effortlessly⁶ see that, in reality, both are useful tools Life uses to help us see things in new ways.

That person in our lives who we discovered to be a narcissist, or gas-lighter, or controlling manipulator? (Or all of the above and more..)

That was Life.

You would not be a person who is interested enough in the subject of consciousness to still be reading this article if it were not for Life putting that person in your experience. Life used evil as a tool to turn up the heat, crank up the volume, until eventually it was hot/loud enough you couldn’t stand it anymore and walked out. Burned it down. Created a new life. “I might be alone forever. But that’s a helluva lot better than being with someone and being miserable forever.”

Evil can sometimes be Good.

Often, the truest things we can ever say about a situation are things like:

• Time will tell.

• We’ll see.

• Maybe so. Maybe not. Guess we’ll find out.

• Everything is connected. Somehow, this is part of that unfolding perfection.

• Perhaps it will be clearer later on.

We all have both light and dark within us. This is not a bug, it’s a feature. Note that everything in life has both light and dark — heads and tails, positive and negative, good and bad, up and down, night and day, masculine and feminine, life and death.

Are you not part of Life?

Then why is it that you should be only good?

“Everything else exists in polarity — as does everyone else — but me… oh, well, I’m mostly good, of course. Way more good than evil, that’s for sure.”

Accepting our Shadow is the key to bringing it into the Light.

There is a Light that exists beyond our world of light and dark. There is a Good that exists beyond our world of good and evil. There is a Love that exists beyond our world of love and hate. There is a Peace that exists beyond our world of peace and war. There is an Abundance that exists beyond our world of abundance and limitation. There is a Health that exists beyond our world of health and disease. There is an Intelligence that exists beyond our world of intelligence and ignorance.

There is a Life that exists beyond our world of life and death.

The idea of fairness is built upon the ego’s presumption that the purpose of life is survival — the mindless prolonging of life (lower case ‘l’) regardless of context.

To the ego, life is about survival. That is literally the ego’s only job is to help facilitate it.

But the ego can only see the world of the lower case letters. The world of duality.

There is a world beyond it. But the ego does not live there. The Self lives there. Thus, only the Self can experience it.

Our ‘work’ — if we can be said to have any — is not to destroy the ego. Our work is simply to put cart and horse back in the order that is most conducive to a harmonious, joyous life experience.

We can leave our ego in charge for as long as we like. And it will give us the best results duality can deliver.

If we ever decide we want different results, we will need to operate from a different perspective.

We can change. Do the work required to change and put our Self in charge. At first, it may seem like not much is happening. It is not a light switch. More like a Polaroid image. Slowly, gradually, our center of gravity shifts. Until one moment — we cannot be quite sure when, it’s usually only visible in retrospect — we realize we are different.

No longer buffeted by the winds of circumstance and conditionality — or if we are, the winds no longer disturb us as much as they used to — we now see that Life is unquestionably, whole-ly Good. The Good beyond duality.

Now, we can trust Life. Even if Life brings us ‘evil’, we know it is still Good. Even if Life brings us ‘limitation’, we know it is still Abundance. Even if Life brings us death, we know it is still Life.

💠

1. Please note: This statement is made from the perspective of having been raised in religion, then seeing through the delusion of religion and reaching the limitations of that model, then living in the world without any attachment to a ‘God’ model, then dis-covering the Truth — of the Intelligent nature of Life — through direct, personal experience.

We may have doubts about the nature of Life sometimes. Trust that this is — ironically — part of our Path. Life uses everything, even doubt, as a tool for our development. If we find ourselves in doubt of this Truth, go deeper into the doubt. Don’t fight it. Go into it. Investigate it. Ask it questions — Why are you here? What are we actually doubting? Let’s get clear on that. See the doubt through. Find the foundation of our doubt, and it will reveal its true nature to us.

No matter where you stand in relation to the statement: We live in an Intelligent Universe; know that you are standing exactly where you are supposed to be.

2. The idea of fairness is built upon the ego’s presumption that the purpose of life is survival.

To the ego, life is about survival. That is literally the ego’s only job is to help facilitate it.

So, if we find ourselves disagreeing that the true purpose of life is not survival, this tells us something about where our consciousness is centered. The place from which our minds are operating is not our Self, but our self.

In one aspect, we can measure our degree of ego-centered awareness vs. Soul/Self-centered awareness by measuring our degree of comfort/discomfort with the statement: The purpose of life is not survival.

The trick of it is: When we say that sentence out loud, to our conscious mind, many people will attempt to save face and say, “Oh, pfft. Well, duh.” But if you asked their unconscious mind… a very different answer may float/rage to the surface. Kidding yourself on this only kids one person. Take honest stock, do your best to tune in to how you truly feel about this deep down. That is your measurement.

The more comfortable one is with the statement, the more likely it is one may already be practicing what life is about. That is another way of measuring, and is the essence of the saying: “The proof is in the pudding.”

3. This article is not meant to be esoteric or suggest some ‘hidden secret’ that only a select few special people can know. The Purpose of Life is a deceptively simple, obvious Truth — which is why so many people either miss it or dismiss it. (“It can’t be that… that’s too simple and obvious. That.. that’s nothing.”)

It can be discovered by sitting in the woods, listening to music, or dancing (if one enjoys dancing). It can be discovered by sitting in an empty room doing nothing, or sitting in a full room doing everything. It can be discovered in any setting, at any time.

The power of the Truth lies both in its simplicity and in arriving at the real-ization of that Truth within oneself… in one’s own language.

In my language: The Purpose of Life is to be alive. All else is window dressing :)

4. A later article will explore how the ego is heavily influenced by external sources. Calling Why an Internal process is a borderline misnomer, due to the degree of external influence existent in most people’s egos… in most people’s Why.

In other words: If Why is the driving force of one’s life, one is not living for oneself. One is not living out one’s ‘own’ story. One is living out the story that has been crafted for them by years of external influences, which have gradually been digested, assimilated, and regurgitated in the form of statements such as: ‘this is what I’m passionate about’; ‘this is what matters’; etc.

What makes Why consciousness internal is that part of the process of digestion into the unconscious mind. The drive is coming from within. (Which is why these individuals often feel so frenzied — their unconscious mind is pushing them to fulfill something it has arbitrarily determined it needs, in order to be fulfilled/happy/satisfied/at peace.)

This is in comparison to What consciousness, where the drive is overtly — and often consciously — influenced by external sources.

5. The problem is not the causes, the problems are:

(1) there are other agendas at play that are often unacknowledged and/or intentionally ignored — those agendas need to be revealed for what they are and neutralized by all who support the cause, then the mission of the cause may continue in its purest form; and

(2) Why-fueled individuals will always resort to anger when they do not get their way. Healing the root of Why-centered consciousness is needed, first, then (again) the mission of the cause may continue in its purest form.

The spirit of the cause can then be real-ized, without all the extra baggage/drama the ego carries with it.

6. The term ‘effortlessly’ is not used as a ‘casualizer’ of this process. Nor is it used to sound cool. The term is used in its literal meaning: without effort. In other words, when one reaches this state, one realizes two things instantly and in immediate sequence:

1. This other way I was being (i.e. assigning a label of ‘good’ or ‘evil’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, etc. to anything) is both incorrect/errant, and it limits my ability to experience the truth of what actually is happening in the moment because I am so busy trying to label it as one or the other or even shades of both.

2. Why would I continue to be this way? That would be a strange and self-limiting choice. I’m going to put this practice down as it no longer has any use for me. In fact, I now see that it has only been a hindrance, all along.

^That is what is meant by ‘effortlessly’.

This process happens internally as a download and feels as though the entire thing takes place over approximately 1/10,000th of a second. Calling it a ‘sequence’ is more a matter of course than an accurate description of the feeling. The feeling feels like it happens all at once. Only upon reflection is a sequence apparent.