Freddy Mercury

Foro is good at certain yoga positions, asanas I guess their called. He’s less good at the philosophy of yoga, which requires a belief in the eternal. The only thing that is “eternal”, according him, is how adorable he is, and Freddy Mercury….

There is one thing that Foro is sure of though, and that is that life does not have any extrinsic sense. It doesn’t mean that there is no sense to our lives, just that humans determine what sense there is, according to their beliefs. We are surrounded by a universe that is hostile to life, dark matter and dark energy. Dark energy makes up an estimated 68%, with dark matter making up another 27%. That leaves less than 5% for the rest of the universe, the visible stuff that we can see, that makes up our lives.

This looks about like the percentage of our DNA made up by our microbiome. 95% of us is non-human genetic material, consisting of millions of what we used to call “germs”. In the past, these are things we thought that we needed to eliminate. Turns out, they are damned useful, helping us digest things that we otherwise couldn’t, for example. Among these “germs” are many pathogens, the things that make us sick. However many of them are there all the time, but one thing or another causes them to flourish and when that happens, we become ill.

We might be useful for the universe in the same way (which is yet to be proven), but we might be something that is hanging in there, in a delicate balance. When things get out of whack, perhaps we will also flourish like pathogens, and the universe will react by stamping us out.

That said, there is no “meaning” to this. When we produce antibodies to control a flourishing pathogen, we are not doing this for some pre-designated reason, or because of fate or karma. Our body is sick and wants to get better, and we don’t have a whole lot of control over this.

We have no more control over life than we do over the fact that we will all die. Only Foro’s cuteness, and if you listen to him, Freddy Mercury, are eternal.