Sense of Purpose:

I ask myself, what is a man's connection to his end? By end, I refer to his life's mission. This ambiguity remains curious. The expression "his end" could also refer to his demise, his ceasing to exist. I would like to explore this union of meanings, which I suspect is interconnected.

The end of a man, within the scope of his timeline, is tied to the finiteness of his life, his biological function. A man ceases to be when his body succumbs to the ephemerality of the physical form. This is, therefore, a notion of finitude, very literal and consensual in the sense that death is consensual and seemingly undeniable due to the aversion we have to it.

However, we can view the expression "his end" as something greater, in which we dimension the man within a mechanism larger than himself, thus having a role in the whole. This is the ascetic meaning of end, as opposed to the physical-temporal meaning.

Often, in the search for our end, we are more afraid of the physical end, and it blinds us to the ascetic end. We seek a state of affairs and not a state of spirit, free from time and causality, only involved in being, which is full. That is the discernment we should have to separate the wheat from the chaff in our actions. It is a choice to live in the finite or the infinite. Because in both "ends," there is a hierarchy greater than ourselves, starting with death, from which we expiate our fears either by evasion or conclusion. In the first, we only postpone our judgment, with momentary comfort, in an attempt to forget the ultimate end—it's living in the "enjoy it while it lasts." In the second, we express a more serene will to be. Be what? Being is not a verb that requires a predicate. It is its own predicate. This place of existential fullness is difficult to express, and much harder to see!

I will walk to show you, humble reader, the ultimate will of being. Moreover, as I write, discerning what bubbles in my brain in an attempt to leave something clearer than the ancients did, I will try to free myself from seeking an instrumentalized end in my ephemeral state, but rather seek an end in my writing that elevates me to a higher level.

But let's be honest, what higher level is this that so many wise people speak of? It is easy to talk about this supposed spirituality, this "something more," a greater good, supreme love, God... but what is all of this? The answer is also not clear, better yet, it doesn't exist... It only perpetuates itself through the doubt we have about the first end, in ephemerality... And it is born out of uncertainty, fear, and the search for something greater that encompasses our status as passengers. It is always better to speak with mysterious airs and an ambiguous wisdom that says a lot and adds little. It is difficult to talk about this "truth" so obvious that it is easily dismantled by the cynics.

Curiously, this truth is only revealed in a more sensory appreciation, which sails with the actions that promote the postponement of the first state of end (the physical end). Connecting us to an idea of perpetuation, a hierarchy passed down from generation to generation, from passenger to passenger, surrendered to the winds of time. This is the ultimate idea of the ascetic ideal, that of antiquity and perpetuity, the liberation from time. Two philosophical currents can be outlined in this thought: one conservative and the other progressive, where there is an attempt to either inherit from the past or design the future.

A conservative maintains customs so that the wisdom of the past manifests in the present and the future.

A progressive corrects the customs of the past so that the experience of the past serves as a lesson for the present and the future.

The conservative forgets to look at the future with hope, and the progressive forgets to look at the past with respect. Both are focused on their historical niche, uprooted from the timeless line. The ultimate meaning.

Even the notion of good and evil plays a definitive role in our conceptions of ascetic patterns. These are the concepts most regularly employed in our days, but more relativistically questioned. The notions of good for some represent factors of justice, equality, or purely functional factors like the conformity between prediction and event. For others, they focus on values of altruism that promote the transmission of our being to the world. The latter is a state more in communion with prayer.