Yuval Noah Harari: belief

Transcript context

…What is it? So what life is, if you ask what life is, life is feeling things, having sensations, emotions, and reacting to them. When you feel something good, something pleasant, you want more of it. When you feel something unpleasant, you want to get rid of it. That’s the whole of life. That’s what is happening all the time. You feel things. You want the pleasant things to increase. You want the unpleasant things to disappear. That’s what life is. If you ask what is the meaning of life in a more philosophical or spiritual question, the real question to ask, what kind of answer do you expect? Most people expect a story. And that’s always the wrong answer. Most people expect that the answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” will be a story, like a big drama. That this is the plot line and this is your role in the story. This is what you have to do. This is your line in the big play. You say your line, you do your thing. That’s the thing. And this is human imagination, this is fantasy. To really understand life, life is not a story. The universe does not function like a story. So I think to really understand life, you need to observe it directly in a nonverbal way. Don’t turn it into a story. And the question to start with is, what is suffering? What is causing suffering? The question, what is the meaning of life? It will take you to fantasies and delusions. We want to stay with the reality of life. And the most important question about the reality of life is what is suffering and where is it coming from? And to answer that non-verbally, so the conscious experience of suffering?…

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