Copyright 2012, Randy Strauss, All Rights Reserved.
Why live? For experience, pleasures, growth, and creation. Experience is made up of our sensations, emotions, thoughts, and attitudes. Part of our thoughts are our intention and the meanings we invent as we manipulateg the physical body to survive and carry out our intentions.
Pleasures are both the shallow pleasures of life, such as a movie or a walk, as well as the deep pleasures, such as connection and contributing to others.
Growth is the ability to appreciate more things, more experiences, more thoughts and people, and to experience them more deeply, more richly.
Human creativity can be seen as contributing to the project of creating the universe and its future. Our creativity can add to humanity and civilization.
The long, and only partial, answer:
Some might wonder, how, without God, can you be "one with the universe"? When I learned that I invent my identity, then I realized I can identify myself as an individual, as part of a family, as part of a team, a community, as a country, as humanity, as life, even as part of the universe itself. When I learned that I create my experience of separateness, I saw that I must know connection as well. I knew what it was that I was denying myself. I can be me, us, family, team, nation, humanity, or the universe.
Lots of people think "If I was God, I could do anything." And yet, as a human, we can't even change our growth or be taller or keep our hair. It's hard enough just to exercise and eat sensibly. So I can "be" all of my body, yet not control it. The same is true for being everything.
Why live? The main reason to end life is to end suffering. It turns out, suffering is optional. One can even have intense pain or embarrassment without suffering. Suffering is unavoidable. But one can learn to quickly let it go.
If you're not enjoying the above, they're available.
Enjoy,
-Rand