Santa Christina

When things slow down during the festive season, it's a perfect opportunity to contemplate the nature of existence, or to spend quiet time in prayer or meditation. Life on one level is straightforward. Pay attention to details. Every action has consequences. Cause and effect is common sense. On another level, life is a huge mystery. Why is existence happening? This is an unanswerable question. It's popular to state how consciousness is an accident of evolution, as if consciousness could be problematic. Perhaps dogs and cats are better off. They don't think so much. For them thinking is more on the level of stimulus response. Seek pleasure. Avoid pain.

Human awareness or intellect opens a vast panorama beyond running around to satiate animal needs, venting aggression, struggling to control others, or to simply bask in ignorance. Perhaps the deepest human yearning is for knowledge and wisdom. Much of human experience occurs on the invisible level of thought, often very abstract thinking. The triangle is a traditional example of a conceptual construction that doesn't exist in nature. One could find shapes that resemble triangles. But the concept triangle is a geometric construction containing properties or thought constructions, for example, the interior angles add up to 180 degrees. One's intellect enables exploration, plus a search for meaning and deeper understanding of the experience of being alive.