Welcome to my exploration
of existence.
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Self-Discovery | Life Purpose | Self-Actualization
My Personal Exploration in 2024
What does it mean to be instrumental as a human, and why does it matter?
Rachel Browne
info@emergent-voice.com
With only a finite amount of thoughts, words, and actions on the planet, I want to make them count—for my life and the legacy I’ll leave behind. I believe it’s important to be a well-defined instrument for evolution to work through while being effective at creating and living a life right for me. I want to live as consciously and as potently as possible.
Hypothesis: To be "successful" in the pursuit of instrumentality is to effectively create the life we envision, and to genuinely thrive as the organism we are, including the myriad things we have no control over, like loss, grief, natural disaster, etc. This includes things like understanding our nature, correct vision, aligned action, strong will, and accurate seeing, along with discipline, resiliency and surrender.
How I’m thinking: I’ve been viewing myself through a biological lens, extrapolating concepts from the causality of determinism to feedback loops in biomimicry to the Eightfold Path in Buddhism, and applying them to myself and my life to make sense of this new way of seeing things. I‘ve been asking myself questions like, as an organism, what am I trying to do here? What is my design? What is fixed, and what is flexible? What are the environmental conditions I need to thrive? How accurately am I seeing reality and the nature of the variables—the people, places, things—that make up my environment? How congruent is the feedback I’m giving to my environment? What are the thoughts, words, and behaviors of people who seem to be very instrumental and successfully thriving as the organisms they are? What are their characteristics? How are they different? What are the cues they give their environment?
Every great story has a central question. The same is true for you; you are a story of the universe’s writing, and thus, your life has its own central question. This is what I call your existential question.