The Great Human Conundrum

Everyone is eventually confronted by the great mystery of their very own conscious existence, but the importance of our conscious existence is initially overshadowed by another priority that must be considered first. Our conscious existence is embedded in an elaborate combination of things including our own physical bodies that makeup the world of things around us. Establishing some measure of rapport with this physical world must be considered a first priority to simply engage in the basic aspects of survival. The extraordinary fact of conscious existence is not even immediately recognized by most as a specific matter requiring consideration. That consideration comes later.

Our preoccupation with the physical world is further complicated by the more superficial matters of being happy and content in the context of living in this external physical world. An elaborate array of feelings are generated in our conscious existence by physical sensations originating from contact with objects in this surrounding physical world. These sensations when properly chosen entice this intangible happiness and contentment out of the two sensation extremes of pleasure and pain. Initially, it seems that this surrounding physical world is the source of both our survival and our happiness and contentment.

These two separate and distinct things, our conscious existence and the elaborate combination of things in the surrounding physical world, are the core components of the great human conundrum of life. No one is immune to the effects of this conundrum, and it is impossible to ignore. At a minimum, a sufficient understanding of our immediate surroundings is required to survive the many challenges that our very existence forces us to face, but ultimately beyond simple survival, our conscious existence’s nagging anticipation to be happy and content is what keeps forcing us to deal with this human conundrum.

A common approach to the most puzzling of these questions is to defer considering them in our initial rush to be blindly engaged in this great celebration of life. Such is the case with the whole matter of our conscious existence. Most don’t consider this for years. Some don’t consider it until they are near death. The key to really understanding the human conundrum is to recognize early on that there exists two different but interconnecting pieces of 1) a physical world with its pleasure and pain and 2) a conscious existence with its desire to be happy and content. These two things need to be considered together to be successful in life.

The choice to subsist on knowing only what is needed to just get by seems sufficient in one’s early years, but as time passes and the trials of life beset us, the answers to these more difficult questions become a greater priority. Eventually, everyone wants more than just the bare-bones survival this basic understanding of these immediate surroundings is able to support. They also want to be happy and content, and they eventually realize more knowledge enables this better quality of life.