The answer to life, the universe & everything

I think it depends on what life (humans, animals, plants).
I see the universe as just one enormous body of cells, just like those you'd see under a microscope.
Some life is out to protect those cells & some is hellbent on destroying them. I'll leave the which one's doing what question to your own imaginations.

There is no point to life outside of propagation of the species, which in and of itself is a depressing point of view, and fairly pointless, mindless venture. But this is what it is.

There is no god/s, there is no afterlife, no soul, there is life and there is nothing after it. Humans created deities in an effort to explain that which they had no (scientific) capability of understanding and explaining, and this was then co-opted to control the masses.

Luckily, or unluckily (depending on your point of view, current mood, belief system, et al) we have the ability to think, therefore we are. This gives us the ability / the burden to try to make sense of the senseless, but once you accept that there is no grand plan, no reason for being, other than navigating your meagre years on earth, the best you can do is strive for happiness for yourself, those closest to you and try to promote general goodness to everyone in the hope it rubs off on them.

This is difficult to accept which is why (I believe) so many people use the various crutches out there (religion, drugs, alcohol, other) to help them get through their days.

Or, maybe it is 42, or maybe I’m a heathen going to hell.

Hang in there kirstie. I think maybe some of what you're thinking may have something to do with the recent monumental birthday you just had. I'm a gentleman & won't say which on even though you said it. Try & find joy in the little things is the best I can come up with.

I have never thought if life has or not any purpose. If you ask me, I will say there isn’t any. But I don’t really care at all. I don’t need any purpose to live. I just live.

It is so good to have you back, Kirstie. You are a very important part of this place. Please, take care of yourself.

One can look at the world deterministically and everything will seem to be determined.

But everything is imbued with purpose, with intentionality, if you predispose your gaze to see it.

Look at how even something like a plant moves with purpose, such as towards light or water, even if so slowly for us to notice.

One can say it's just mechanics. But again, if you look at everything mechanistically then you end up seeing everything as machines. But there's no machine without a mechanic. The zeitgeist of our time has learnt to ignore that.

The word intentionality comes from the Latin intensio, which means stretching out, straining. Also effort.

Effort/strain (pain) and purpose/intentionality are two sides of the same coin.

It's why one replies to a thread like this even if they think (at a conscious, conceptual level, so at an abstract level) that there's no purpose in life. Meanwhile your lungs breathe air, your stomach, as it gets empty, makes you feel hungry, and your heart pumps away. And that's all deeply imbued with purpose. But that's concrete, not abstract. Concretion means growing together. Reality is a process of growth, a movement from potentiality to actuality. You do it as much as it does you.

That's what the universe is, the unfolding of a unity which is also a multiplicity, a unity which differentiates out into multiplicity, like a blooming flower.

That is what nature was for the ancient greeks. Physis meant just that originally: a process of growth, very much like the vegetal growth from seed to plant.

Is the whole of reality free or determined? Or do freedom and determination coincide once you take the perspective of all there is?

We are not free, we are freedom, as Bergson would put it. We participate in the freedom of the whole of reality. What constrains us is what makes us what we are. It's what makes us us. What merges us with everything else.

And it's a dynamic process, because we are change, we are time. Not the measured time of the clocks, that's just the map. The lived time (Dogen calls this Uji, being-time), which cannot be measured, because it doesn't have "spatial extension":

The eternal present, which carries with it the past and leans toward the future; the Here-and-Now where everyone is, always; where everything ever happens, ever happened and will ever happen.

No copernican revolution can take that away. We are, each of us, always at the centre of the universe.

Agency is always in the present, in the here-and-now. That's why we are free (why we are freedom itself).

If you move in synch with this flow that is reality unfolding, then purpose is what you do, not why you do it. The why is inextricable from the what.

Exactly. In fact from the chapter 42 of the Tao Te Ching:

The Tao gives birth to the One.
The One gives birth to the Two.
The Two give birth to the Three.
The Three give birth to the ten thousand things.
The ten thousand things are bolstered by Yin and wield Yang.
Together they harmonize as Breath.

Which is precisely what I was saying. 🙂

I believe I've sprained my brain doing mental gymnastics to read all of your responses. They've certainly given me something to chew on. 

Thanks so very much for putting in the time and energy to answer my question. Every answer counts, every answer is correct.