What are we aiming at in life? What is our destiny?
Well, part of it is freedom, which implies agency: acting from our-selves, and more exactly from our true selves rather than from false, superficial or merely habitual selves.
This is important, because it rules out a common fantasy - and a fantasy common to both secular and religious people who both often yearn to be overwhelmed, to passively be swept-up by life and bundled along in a state of fulfilment; without need (or possibility) of freedom, or of conscious agency. Such a situation as may be recalled from a (happy) childhood, or imagined for an earlier and simpler state of culture.
Yet this is both impossible and undesirable. Impossible because the dream has been there for generations, probably for centuries - and we are no further toward achieving it, although it would apparently be quite simple to do so. Undesirable because to return to full passivity in practice means intoxication or psychosis - and anything short of full passivity entails an awareness of falseness.
And undesirable too because of our destiny... but of course, that is something which each must ascertain for himself or herself.
But if we are not meant to be passive, and are instead meant to be active in living by agency and in freedom - it is important to recognise that this is primarily achieved in thinking. We may be, at times and in some situations, wholly-free in our thinking in a way that does not apply to our actions.
Actions are always constrained - but thinking may be free.
This primacy of thinking is hard for us to grasp and take seriously - but it seems to be correct. It is, however, not easy to do often or for sustained periods. Because freedom of thinking is only possible when we are thinking with our real, true and divine self - and that happens less nowadays than at any time in human history.
Why less now? Because of our wrong metaphysics and because of the unprecedented levels of mind-control, by which our thinking becomes merely part of vast and pervasive processing systems such as the mass media and the interlinked bureaucracies - our modern minds are often little more than conduits for externally-generated material...
So, thinking from the real self is a considerable challenge - yet if we do not do it, then we are not free - we are merely caused.
