Sometimes expectations are, where we are either able to find ourselves, or fail to meet our own standard for happiness. What happens? I often wonder what the age is for reviewing our own standards. Do we wonder how we inherited them and allowed them to become our own expectation? Have we considered abandoning them? In creating our own standards, we decide to allow ourselves the power to control how we find what brings us inner joy and life satisfaction.
For a long time I have been pervaded with a paranoia that my life was being paralleled with an overlay that is meant to mirror my own life, yet fails to. I went to school to study Religion and Public Life. In one of my seminar classes, the topic of essentialism came up. I didn't know what it was at the time; to be honest, I was grappling with nearly everything I was studying. I held on to whatever narratives I grew up with since childhood, and tried to integrate them with everything I was trying to understand and learn. I struggled with the idea that somehow I am no longer in control of my own destiny, over and above what I already believed to be predestination. I always believed that we are fated to a certain outcome in life. With essentialism, it seemed that all that was discarded. That we are not in control of how we choose to find what we are fated for. So what was the point of uniqueness and individual choice?
This experience left me stumped and I dropped out. Reflecting on autonomy, 11 years after that seminar class, I am glad I didn't rush into any swift conclusion, but instead allowed myself to have the time and space to ponder at my own leisure. How I managed to stay somewhat functional all this time I can only attribute to Divine grace. It has certainly brought the idea of essentialism to a new and certain reality. We are essentially from a source that is transcendent and that enables us to be the same without being identical. From what I remember from the context of that seminar class, it sounded like sentient beings have nothing to differentiate them from one another. So how about animals and humans? Intellect and instinct are not necessarily the same thing
Perhaps an application of this could be, can a dead person's brain be kept alive, and mined to be read or cloned? Could a person live this experience and not realize it wasn't their own memory they were experiencing?
An ethical question if nothing else, but it confirmed that my paranoia had some grounding. These are difficult questions to have overnight answers to.
The objective of being a Life Specialist is to promote the ethic of the importance of the process of thinking. Having someone else's thought-out answer is the beginning of allowing yourself to engage with a conundrum. Without grappling with the question as though you don't have the answer, is like cheating yourself of a nuanced original conclusion that is true to you. This thought process, though traceable to someone else, can enable you to build your own conviction for why you have an affinity for that scholar or individual as an authoritative source to learn with.
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