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The meaning of life, or the answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?”, pertains to the significance of living or existence in general. Many other related questions include: “Why are we here?”, “What is life all about?”, or “What is the purpose of existence?”
On the time scale of the history of the Earth, an individual human lifetime is a mere blink of an eye. We are born, we live, and we die. What is the point of living? If we are all going to be dead in the end anyway, what difference does it make what we do with our lives? Does the finality of death make life meaningless? Why did an All-Wise Creator put humans on this earth? Is there a meaning to human life, unrealized by most people? What is our origin? What is our destination? What is ? Humanity, it seems, fails to understand that purpose.
Taoist Sexual Practices Taoist sexual practices (房中术; 房中術; fángzhōngshù; ‘arts of the bedchamber’) are the ways Taoists may practice sexual activity. These practices are also known as “Joining Energy” or “The Joining of the Essences”. Practitioners believe that by performing these sexual arts, one can stay in good health, and attain longevity or...
Acupuncture Acupuncture is a form of alternative medicine and a key component of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in which thin needles are inserted into the body. Acupuncture is a pseudoscience because the theories and practices of TCM are not based on scientific knowledge, and it has been characterized as quackery. There is a range of...
Chinese Alchemy Chinese alchemy is an ancient Chinese scientific and technological approach to alchemy, a part of the larger tradition of Taoist body-spirit cultivation developed from the traditional Chinese understanding of medicine and the body. According to original texts such as the Cantong qi, the body is understood as the focus of cosmological processes summarized...
Otherworld The concept of an otherworld in historical Indo-European religion is reconstructed in comparative mythology. Its name is a calque of orbis alius (Latin for “other Earth/world”), a term used by Lucan in his description of the Celtic Otherworld. Comparable religious, mythological or metaphysical concepts, such as a realm of supernatural beings and a realm of the dead, are found in cultures throughout the world. Spirits are thought...
Hades Hades (Greek Haidēs or Aidēs) refers to both the ancient Greek underworld and to the deity that presided over the spirits of the deceased. This dual use was, however, a relatively late development in classical writing, as the term originally referred only to the god—as attested to in the writings of Homer. In...
Origin of life The origin of life, in the physical, chemical, and biological sciences, is the process by which life originated on Earth from non-living matter. It addresses questions of how, when, and what, and includes a variety of hypotheses regarding this development. Abiogenesis (Greek a-bio-genesis, “non biological origins”) is, in its...
Ragnarök In Norse mythology, Ragnarök is a series of events, including a great battle, foretold to lead to the death of a number of great figures (including the gods Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr, Heimdallr, and Loki), natural disasters and the submersion of the world in water. After these events, the world...
Optimism Optimism is a mental attitude reflecting a belief or hope that the outcome of some specific endeavor, or outcomes in general, will be positive, favorable, and desirable. A common idiom used to illustrate optimism versus pessimism is a glass filled with water to the halfway point: an optimist is said to see the glass as half full,...
Pessimism Pessimism is a negative or depressed mental attitude in which an undesirable outcome is anticipated from a given situation. Pessimists tend to focus on the negatives of life in general. A common question asked to test for pessimism is “Is the glass half empty or half full?”; in this situation...
Racism Racism refers to various beliefs maintaining that the essential value of an individual can be determined according to a perceived or ascribed racial category and that social discrimination by race is therefore justifiable. Racial prejudice often includes the belief that people of different races differ in aptitudes and abilities, such as intelligence, physical prowess, or virtue....
Islam and The Family While the warp of society is the individual person and the woof is social order, the unit of the design is the family. Families in which mutual understanding, sincerity and tenderness reign, form details of a harmonious pattern. But a family in confusion and disarray distorts...
Polygamy The term polygamy (literally many marriages in late Greek) is used in related ways in social anthropology and sociobiology. In social anthropology, polygamy is the practice of marriage to more than one spouse simultaneously (as opposed to monogamy where each person has only one spouse at a time). Like monogamy, the term is often used in a de...
Divorce Divorce, also known as dissolution of marriage, is the process of terminating a marriage or marital union. Divorce usually entails the canceling or reorganizing of the legal duties and responsibilities of marriage, thus dissolving the bonds of matrimony between a married couple under the rule of law of the particular country...
Motivation In psychology, motivation refers to the initiation, direction, intensity, and persistence of behavior. Motivation is a temporal and dynamic state that should not be confused with personality or emotion. It involves having the desire and willingness to do something. A motivated person can be reaching for a long-term goal such as becoming a...
Animal Cognition Animal cognition describes the mental capacities of non-human animals and the study of those capacities. The field developed from comparative psychology, including the study of animal conditioning and learning. It has also been strongly influenced by research in ethology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology, and hence the alternative name cognitive ethology is sometimes used. Many behaviors associated...
Animal Consciousness Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. It is a key subject in the discussion of animal rights. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia,...
Pain in Animals Pain negatively affects the health and welfare of animals. “Pain” is defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.” Only the person experiencing the pain can know the...
Bioethics The term bioethics was first coined by American biochemist Van Rensselaer Potter to describe a new philosophy that integrates biology, ecology, medicine, and human values. In the broader sense of the term, bioethics encompasses both biomedical ethics, dealing with questions of ethics related to medicine, and environmental ethics, dealing with ecological ethics, such as respect for...
Animal Welfare Animal welfare is the well-being of nonhuman animals. The standards of “good” animal welfare vary considerably between different contexts. These standards are under constant review and are debated, created and revised by animal welfare groups, legislators, and academics worldwide. Animal welfare science uses various measures, such as longevity, disease, immunosuppression, behavior, physiology, and reproduction, although...
Animal rights Animal rights is a philosophical concept in bioethics that considers animals other than the human species as bearers of rights. This means that animals should have their basic interests taken into consideration which would require humans to avoid animal exploitation in activities such as medical experimentation as well as food and clothing production. The fundamental...
![A 1st- to 2nd–century CE water tank relief panel showing two ardhaphalaka Jain monks carrying colapatta cloth on their left hand found in the ruins of Mathura (Brooklyn Museum 87.188.5).[7] This cloth carrying tradition to cover genitalia by ancient Jain monks in principle resembles the beliefs of the Svetambara and now extinct Yapaniya subtradition.](https://slife.org/wp-content/uploads/Jain_Narrative_Relief_Panel_mid_2nd_century_BCE.-1st_century_CE_18.4_x_61.6_cm_Brooklyn_Museum_87.188.5-80x80.jpg)
