This is a thoughtful article. Thanks for posting it.

You question whether we are: “slaves to nature’s evolution or bridges to an unnatural order…” Are there really no other ways to look at this?

You ask, “What, then, is the natural function of personhood, or of humans, the cleverest, most ambitious of apes?” People overcomplicate things. We are unsettled and challenged by the mysteries of things we cannot understand. We have to find a reason for everything, to figure life out from the smallest particle to the largest object and system.

Why does there have to be a function of personhood? It is only the conditioned mind that believes that there must be.

Sorry to go Zen on you, but what is the function of a flower in the middle of a field a thousand miles from any human being who would otherwise try to understand the purpose of its existence?

Our recognition of existence is bound up in the sentence “I am.” After this comes the endless curiosity, interactions, emotions, creation, destruction, rebirth, investigations, and suppositions of humankind. In simpler terms, the conditioned being that we call the self does not simply observe. Because of the way our minds are trained we are compelled to make sense of the world that exists inside of us. Thus, we turn the simple into the complicated.

We people-animals exist as bodies in this world, and we concomitantly exist as a ball of ideas called the self, and beyond this is some thing that is aware enough to recognize that it is aware. This is our role but not why we function or exist. The latter is mostly answered by suppositions and unsubstantiated ideas and theories.

Finding a “why” is impossible, because we are trying to take a snapshot of a force or movement that is too complex and dynamic to examine and make sense of.

I am not sure what you mean by “mystical perspective.” Who are these mystics of which you write? Is it a certain school of thought? I don’t follow. You wrote of the “mystical perspective that takes naturalness to be the ultimate pattern…”

Naturalness is only perceived to be, but not actually. apart from what we are. It is perceived to be beyond our control and that we are the effect of its whim, unpredictability, chaos, movement and evolution. But if we were to remove the self then this concept and concern disappears.

Unless I am reading this wrong, it seems like your article is a more focused and nuanced discussion on the meaning of life. But who other than the conditioned self needs to know?

If we entertain the materialist/physicalist reductionist mindset, we may ask why it is important to figure out life and all of its parts, how the world works and what we are as organisms, including our relationship to other lifeforms and the far reaches of outer space. We live such a short life and then die to disappear forever, so what drives the both the materialist and idealist forward in the quest to conquer the physical world and explain how it functions when they will soon be dead and not have to worry about such things? We aren't satisfied with the answer: That's just the way it is, because we are compelled and impelled by a force beyond the mind's comprehension. The self is a fragmented entity trying to grasp the implicate order.

I can’t assume to take the position of the mystic, because it’s not clear to me what is meant by the word, but I will say that it may help people to go out into nature and observe it. Then it becomes obvious that there is movement, phenomena, objects, lifeforms, and their interactions. Nothing more and nothing personal.

Even the so-called mystics and devotees of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and other such spiritual paths are assuming that there is a purpose to life, often expressed as the importance to know what we truly are beyond the self. Or the purpose is expressed as paying off your karma or becoming enlightened. My contention is that there is no purpose and no inherent meaning. And there is no reaching or obtaining enlightenment, because without the self it is obvious that all that you want is already inside of you — the you of wholeness.