Hence it seems reasonable to assume that what keeps us alive often in a very direct sense is the willingness to know more about life itself, whichever way you do it depending on which life you live, it might be through science, experience, religion, wealth e.t.c. This is not an unusual concept in eastern religions where life is describes as a play or as a dream and there would be absolutely no point in going on if you knew everything in advance, hence for it to go on we must find out more and more gradually as it progresses.
At this point I would recommend you to watch a documentary by that aired on BBC "Horizon-How long is a piece of string" if you can't think of a way to do that I will explain the main concept below.
If you watched "How long is a piece of string" skip this. The concept that is important here is rather simple and goes like this: depending on how accurate you want to measure something/know something, for example how long is a piece of string you will have to take a closer look and the closer look you take the more difficult it becomes to give an answer. For example any pice of string is infinitely long, and that was demonstrated on a map in the documentary. If you measure a country on a map with a ruler you will get very rough measurement of it's borders, If you take a long string and lay it on the border all the way around and then measure the length of the string the length will be longer, and if you use special tool you will be able to follow all the curves of the border even better and the length will be even longer. And you can keep doing it, measuring more and more accurately, zooming in more and more to accurately measure every bump on the border, and as you zoom in to infinity, the length will also grow to infinity. Or simply put, google fractals, a mathematical concept where you can zoom in in infinity and it just keeps on going revealing more and more.
Now how does life look for a child? It is pretty simple, children have very few problems, world is very simple and very much centered around you and your friends. Border so to speak is measured with a very rough ruler.
As children grows up he or she experience more of life, learns new things, life becomes more complicated, that is the measurement process gets refined and one is able to see more bumps of life and really measure them, that is feel real love for the first time, hate, and all other things that goes with life. More one grows up the more life is coming at you, not only that but you also set up goals for what you want to "measure on the map", goals you want to achieve, thing you want to know. And the journey begins:
And as long as there is something ahead of you that you want to know, experience e.t.c. as mentioned in the beginning you will just keep "zooming in" towards that, or just keep on living, keep on measuring, experiencing, exploring life, demonstrated with video of fractals above.
It is easy to see in the world of science, where we measure our world around us trying to make sense of it. We want to measure it as accurate as possible invented better and better microscopes and then we discovered atom, and eventually we even split that, and we wanted to see what it consists of, and now we are talking about string theory and quantum physics. Hence we are back to how long is a string, but on another level.
I think at this point the analogy between life and zooming in on a fractal is described to such extent that it should be possible to grasp it intuitively.
And we keep at it, exploring life as we live it zooming in more and more in hope to reach the final point at which we will understand it all. But of course the more we keep at it the more keeps coming, which results in new inventions new religions and general evolution of the human race but understanding it all is left for the unknown future, either to religion, you will understand it all after death, or to science that hopes to understand it all someday.
Now, some cleaver lad figured all this out few thousands of years ago and said; all this desire is what moves the circle of life, fractals were not invented back then so analogy with zooming in on them could not be made, and if I just sit for a while and do nothing, not even think then I will stop this zooming in and will see it all in its wholeness. So he did, sat in meditation, for a long time, and then he got enlightened, talked about all being one e.t.c. This is not about this guy, because I really don't know much about it so I really can't say.
But people today keep on doing same thing, and many claim to have reached enlightenment, seen the whole picture, realized the unity of it e.t.c.
And they are happy for a while, finally they have seen it, and they tell everyone about how wonderful experience it is. Fact is it is so wonderful that they try to experience it again, so they pick up meditation again and keep at it, and of course what they have done is to start zooming in again in hope to find new experience if they just try a little harder, which is to say they keep zooming in again towards infinity and more they try the more is coming.
And no two enlightenments are the same for this reason because of course no two lives are the same and everyone sees the deferent part of the fractal they happen to stand on at the time they experience enlightenment. And the reason one knows that people that have had experience of enlightenment did't see it all as it is but only a local part is because they try to have same experience again, to see more.
Now looking at this analogy, where by living as you do you zoom in right or left in this fractal life, what is the method to see, understand it all as a whole? Zooming out obviously, but how does one do that? And who knows if there is an end point in the other direction?
