The Questions of Existence

By Michael Ryan

This book is an exploration of why we are here, who we are and where we are going. This book contains no answers, only questions that will hopefully inspire us to think about where we are heading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Ryan
• Release date: Sep 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311961877

Michael Ryan

Michael Ryan is the author of three previous books of poetry. Threats Instead of Trees won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and was a National Book Award finalist in 1974; In Winter was a National Poetry Series selection in 1981; and God Hunger won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1990. He is also the author of A Difficult Grace, a collection of essays, and a memoir, Secret Life. His new memoir was excerpted in The New Yorker and will also appear this spring. Ryan is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of California, Irvine.

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The Questions of Existence

By

Michael Ryan

The Questions of Existence

Michael Ryan

Copyright Michael Ryan 2014

Published at Smashwords

This book is dedicated to my family, friends and everyone who has supported my work… even though they did not always understand what it was about…

Preface

I have created this book essentially to share my own views on life, existence, existentialism, religion, peace, war and essentially everything we face on a daily basis that makes us question why?

This book is not intended to form a new religion, nor is it meant to be a source of answers to existence or guidance to live your life by. It is also not to speak against religion nor put down other peoples beliefs. This book is simply meant to share my ideas, believes, views and maybe make you or others ask the kind of questions that will inspire you to find the answers for yourself.

I do not make any claim to be a person with a lot of answers, only a lot of questions. I have however had many conversations with people in my life with the intension to help them figure things out and several of them insist I have changed their lives. I myself have also gained new insight into things in my life from the ideas of others that have helped me evolve as a person. That being said, if I can share any of these thought’s or ideas with anyone, and they can help a person benefit in any way then I hope this book is useful and enjoyable to you. If my beliefs or the things I talk about in this book conflict with or go against your beliefs or opinions, please understand I am only sharing my understandings of existence and why we are here, I am not trying to push my beliefs on you but rather trying to give you an alternate point of view of existence for you to ether consider or disregard. This book is not about any one subject, it is about multiple things that inspire questions of existence and the meaning of life. In this book we will examine many subjects about why we are here, the problems we have in the past present and future and what can be done to make life better for all of us. Thank you and I hope you enjoy this book!

Contents

The question of god and existence

Religion

Why do we hate?

War and Peace

The political problem

Synthetic or organic

Self-sustaining renewable energy

Wasted Minds

Questions of the existence of time and the universe

Life after death?

Spirituality and meditation

The Transcendence Problem

The course of the world

Blueprint of a perfect world

Closing Statements

Chapter 1

The question of god and existence

For many people the question of god and existence are the same. What is God? What is existence? These are questions we have yet to answer. I personally do not believe in god, I feel that God is a manifestation of religion and I believe that man-made religions tend to warp what makes beliefs in things like a higher being or deity into something more of a repetitious and continual procedure of rituals, and do so in a way that tends to bend a person’s believe system into something that others use as a system to control others.

If you stop and actually think about it, how can you believe what someone else has taught you to believe? A belief is something YOU do and something YOU have it is not something taught. And yet for some reason, most people throughout history have chosen to believe in someone else’s beliefs simply because they were taught to. To believe what someone teaches you is a choice, if it was a true belief you would have come to believe it yourself. I was taught to believe in god my whole life, and for a large portion of my life I did believe in god but only because I was taught to and I was too young to understand that this was only a fiction. I say this is a fiction because while it is possible that there may be some higher being in the universe that may in fact have had something to do with our creation, I seriously doubt this higher being is anything like what religion describes it to be. Even though I was taught to believe in god something about it never felt quite right. I always had many questions, things just did not add up. I would always ask why thing are the way they are and most of my life I was given the vague and empty answer of you must go on faith, while I felt more and more empty myself.

I could never understand if a god existed and created the entire universe how could we be left so alone? Why could we not shout up to the heavens and actually get an answer? And then I realized, Maybe the god that religion has taught us about does not exist. Now let me stop here for a moment and explain before I continue on. I am not nor do I claim to be a man with all the answers. If I had all the answers I would be God or some other god in which case I would be the answer to all my questions. I am just a man and except for the very simple truth that I do not have all the answers, I know that my knowledge of the universe is very limited.

That being said, the people who have created and who now run religions are also men and women and also do not have all the answers, but somehow they make claims about their complete and exacting knowledge of who their gods are and what things they have done even as far back as the dawn of time. How can man claim that he knows that god created the earth in 6 days? Even if it was possible does man's memory go back further then a time he existed? Religion was