Four profound ambiguities make human existence challenging.
- Life – with life comes birth, but also death.
- Sentience – with sentience comes pleasure and happiness, but also pain and suffering.
- Sociality – with sociality comes compassion and cooperation, but also aggression and conflict.
- Imagination – with imagination comes enhanced capacity for creating and helping, but also enhanced capacity for destroying and harming.
I am not neutral with respect to these ambiguities. I value life, pleasure, happiness, compassion, cooperation, and enhanced abilities to create and help. I devalue death, pain, suffering, aggression, conflict, and enhanced abilities to destroy and harm. These values serve as a compass that helps me navigate the complexities of life and keeps me on the path of becoming who I want to be.
My spirituality is my way of responding to, and coming to terms with, these four ambiguities of human existence.