Hello GQG Friends!
This is Part 1 of a re-written and re-recorded Comprehensive Introduction that I have posted on the “About The Great Questions Group” page @ www.MarkDeMatteo.com
It is an outgrowth of even more clarity and refinement I have gained, as I have repeatedly shared the story of the beginnings and theme of this unique endeavor over the last several years.
Upon completion–and perhaps even prior–I believe it should serve as a great tool by which to introduce others to the significance of this growing educational forum.
Best,
Mark D 🙂
Origin and Purpose of the Great Questions Group
A Comprehensive Introduction
Prefer to Listen? Origin & Purpose of the Great Questions Group Pt 1
Part 1
For as long as I can remember, I have always been quite amazed and intrigued by the reality of this existence: What exactly is this incredible phenomenon called life and what is it really all about?
Perhaps you, like me, have wondered about what have often been called the Four Great Questions of Life:
Who am I?
Where did I come from?
Why am I here?
Where am I going–especially after I die?
Though there are indeed, many important questions we will ask ourselves over the course of our lives, these are undoubtedly some of the most significant, for they deal with such key issues as our origin, our meaning & purpose in life, and our ultimate destiny.
Personally, I was taught a basic Christian (Roman Catholic) belief system in my early life, as a way to perhaps answer these questions.
This, of course, included the idea of God and the possibility of an afterlife in Heaven.
And while I was drawn to these concepts and the comfort and hope they gave, I still had many unanswered questions.
Furthermore, I have always had a strong scientific interest, for I found that science was simply the attempt to understand and define the way things around us work.
Yet often found myself having difficulty trying to integrate some of what I was learning in science with what I was being taught in regard to my religious beliefs.
Then, when I was 15, my family moved overseas to the middle east with my Dad’s work and we lived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia for a total of 7 years.
Personally, I spent the first 3 of those years attending an international boarding school in Rome, Italy, finishing up my final years of High School.
While it was certainly a great experience on many levels, one of the main things it did was open up an entirely new world to me, as I had the opportunity to encounter many new cultures and belief systems.
This was especially true in Rome, as there were students there from many different parts of the world.
Since I was curious, whenever the opportunity presented itself, I loved asking others how they went about answering those Four Great Questions….and particularly the last one: What do you think happens to you after you die?
The various answers I heard, were normally quite interesting and usually even seemed plausible to me, although they were often quite different from my own personal beliefs.
And while I enjoyed learning about all these new perspectives, it also created a substantial amount of confusion within me.
For after considering them all even briefly, I quickly realized that though there were a few common themes and similarities running through many of them, there were also some very pronounced differences.
Furthermore, and perhaps even more significantly, no one seemed to be able to validate what they believed with anything beyond some very subjective and superficial evidence.
This certainly applied to me as well, for I couldn’t really prove what I believed, either!
Consequently, in light of this apparent lack of supporting evidence, I kept wondering if any of these answers were really true.
Interestingly, another unique idea that I also had presented to me during this time, was that all of these various answers were each, equally valid, and therefore, all I had to do was to personally choose any one that seemed to work best for me and I’d be good to go.
However, while intriguing, in this case also, the proponents of this perspective could not provide any real evidence to support this position either.
As such, my multi-cultural exposure left me more than a little confused and not being sure of what to believe…and even if it really mattered, anyway.
Yet in spite of all this uncertainty, my interest in those Four Questions continued to grow, for it was during this time that I was also seeing ever more clearly just how important this topic was ….and why.
To begin with, it was becoming quite apparent that this was a subject with a universal scope.
Living and traveling internationally had also taught me that people, at a core level, are all basically the same, and we all have a single, common, emotional condition we are all seeking–and that condition is Happiness.
Fundamentally, we are all simply trying to be happy…right?!
We may have widely varying ideas as to how to find it, but when we boil it all down, regardless of who we are, where we live, or what we do, happiness is the one primary objective we would all like to achieve and maintain in our lives.
I had already figured out that I certainly did!
However, the more I reflected on it, and asked others about it too, the more apparent it became, that it would be difficult, if not perhaps downright impossible for any of us to be truly happy, when we have no idea what the answers to those four fundamental questions might be.
The main reason for this, no doubt, is the simple fact that this life has a pervasive, underlying inadequacy woven into it.
Specifically, it is riddled with perplexing inconsistencies.
There is joy, yet sorrow; love, yet hate; beauty, yet ugliness; health and wellbeing, yet sickness and disease; youth with vigor and strength, yet old age with frailty and weakness; pleasure, yet pain; harmony, yet strife: wealth and plenty, yet poverty, hunger and need; charity, yet greed; compassion and freedom, yet tyranny and oppression; good, yet evil; peace, yet war; life and yet, of course, death…just to name a few!
I wasn’t alive long before I began to become aware of these stark and dramatic contrasts, and I’m sure you weren’t either.
This has always been a strange and puzzling reality to me–why should our world be filled with these inconsistencies?
In fact, the more I reflected on it, the more it seemed like there was something wrong with it–something unnatural…almost as if this world has somehow actually been wounded.
Moreover, I also quickly realized, that while most of us desire and will pursue the positive sides of these contrasts, at least some of the negative aspects were inevitably going to touch our lives–whether we want them to or not–and that their impact would consequently create significant roadblocks to any of our efforts toward achieving an overall, lasting happiness.
And even if we could somehow manage to keep most of these deficiencies away from our own lives, there will still always be others suffering from the effects of them somewhere…and that is enough to taint the complete happiness of anyone with even just a slight bit of compassion in their heart for their fellow man.
Yet undoubtedly the most significant and devastating of these inadequacies, is the one we unfortunately, cannot evade…the simple fact that we all eventually die.
Folks, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that we are all mortal and therefore, terminal.
The death rate is still 100%…so nobody get’s out of here alive!
At some inevitable point in each of our futures, our body will cease functioning and our life here on earth will end.
Furthermore, the amount of time we actually have before we reach that inevitable point is often quite uncertain.
This fact became readily apparent to me the year after I graduated from the school I had attended in Rome, when one of my classmates, a young man named Matt, was killed by a drunk driver back here in the US.
He and I were both about 19 at the time, and I had never known anyone that well, who was that young, that had died before.
This event drove home the reality that, not only will we ultimately die, but that we can do so at any moment…that our lives are, in fact, also quite fragile and tenuous, and as such, tomorrow is promised to none of us!
Following on from this, I also became far more aware of just how temporary literally everything in this life truly is.
Folks, I can remember reflecting on this with a clarity I’d never had before and thinking to myself, Now wait just a minute here, Mark! Time out! What is really going on here with this life?!
I mean, what if I try to live the best one I am able, and things turn out even better than I expect: For instance, say I am able to stay healthy. I become prosperous. Maybe even rich and famous. Consequently, I am able to do many, if not most of the things I want to do–including some that are meaningful and significant.
Additionally, I am able to develop and keep some strong, lasting friendships., and finally, am also able to find a perfect soulmate and have a beautiful, loving family.
Yet even if I somehow were able to achieve all this–and perhaps even more–in the end, how long would it all last? 80-90-100 years–maybe? And even if I did make it that far, I wondered about the overall quality of those final decades.
I had already been around enough older people to realize the obvious fact that, even at best, our final years will not be experienced with the same degree of health & vigor as we had in our youth, but rather through a continual and irreversible decline.
Now, please don’t misunderstand, I’m certainly not saying that I no longer valued any of those qualities and characteristics in that ideal life I just mentioned, or that I wasn’t still interested in the possibility of living at least a portion of such a life if I was able…for I no doubt was.
It’s just that I now began to wonder how satisfying it would actually be.
For even if I were somehow able to achieve such a life, it would no doubt still be touched–if not perhaps occasionally gripped–by at least some of the negative aspects I mentioned earlier, and finally, by the universal certainty of death.
Therefore, I knew that at least some of these deficiencies would be major obstacles to my achieving any kind of true and lasting happiness.
This brought me face to face with a rather simple, yet unfortunate conclusion: Since this life is temporary and filled with inadequacies, any happiness I might find in it will be the same: Both brief and limited!
Consequently, I had to come to terms with the fact that I desired a level of happiness that this life simply could not provide.
This realization did two significant things within me:
First, it began creating in me a growing sense of dissatisfaction with this current existence, for I was seeing ever more clearly that it would never ultimately be able to fulfill me.
Second, it also began stirring within me, a growing sense of longing for something beyond just this temporary, limited, reality.
As such, I found myself wondering about the possibility of an afterlife–a place where there might be something more and maybe something better.
A realm perhaps, where there were no inadequacies and there was some kind of permanence–what I had often heard referred to as Heaven, or Paradise, if you will.
As I’ve previously mentioned, I had already learned about this idea through my religious teachings as I was growing up, and it had always remained in the back of my mind.
However, in the glaring reality of my friend’s sudden and untimely death, the possibility of such an afterlife came right up to the forefront of my thoughts again and I began considering it more seriously than I ever had before.
Matt had been a living, breathing, vibrant young man with plans and hopes for the future, who had only barely begun his life, and suddenly he was gone…or was he?
That was the main question I kept asking myself: Where is he?
Matt’s body had quit working, but what happened to him, the person?
Was he really just gone or did he actually have some kind of an immortal soul or spirit that went someplace else?
And if so, where was this someplace, and what was it like?
Personally, I have always found it interesting that most of the religious systems I have encountered, all seem to incorporate some concept of an afterlife in their beliefs.
These ideas have always been intriguing to me, for some of them–including the one I was raised in–not only do include the possibility of going someplace better–as in a heaven, they unfortunately, also include the possibility of going someplace worse–as in a hades or hell.
Additionally, most also include the idea of something longer–in other words, the concept of an eternity–a reality having an everlasting duration.
As folks which live in a time-bound existence, it is hard for most of us to wrap our brain around the idea of endless time or an altered reality where there is no time as we now know it.
But regardless of how well we are able to, one thing is certain–an eternity would last far, far longer than even our longest lives here on earth!
Folks, I have always found this entire concept of an afterlife to be quite compelling, for even the remotest possibility of it actually being true, holds extraordinary implications, not only for my own future, but in reality, everyone else’s, too.
Yet, I had often wondered if the whole notion had any real basis in fact, or was it all just wishful thinking …and was there any way that I might be able to find out?
So, it was right around this time that I made a decision that would ultimately have profound impact on my future:
I decided I was going to study this topic: Specifically, this phenomenon called life and the reality of this existence.
I wanted to see if I could find any kind of objective evidence which might provide accurate answers to those Four Great Questions I’ve already referred to.
In particular, I was interested in Question # 4, as wanted to know what happens to us after we die.
Why? Well, because I knew one thing was certain–eventually, I was going to find out what was next, so it just seemed reasonable to me to consider this topic in advance.
And as I did, I also came up with several additional questions I wanted to research:
- Does an afterlife actually exist?
- If so, what is it like?
- Is it the same for everyone?
- Does everyone just automatically go there? (or)
- Are there any conditions to getting in?
- If so, what are they?
- Can we know if we have adequately met them?
- What happens if we don’t?
While I had no idea if I’d find answers to any of these questions, it still made perfect sense for me to at least try.
For the way I saw it, since I already knew I wouldn’t find the level of happiness I wanted in this present life, I figured I might as well invest a portion of it seeking evidence of a future life, where perhaps I could.
And if I searched, and found none, then I wouldn’t have really lost anything, except some time and effort.
However… if by chance I did find evidence of an afterlife, and maybe even found some answers to the additional questions I just mentioned, the knowledge gained would be of unparalleled significance.
And furthermore, if this knowledge perhaps indicated that there were indeed conditions for gaining access to that afterlife, and this awareness allowed me the opportunity to meet those conditions in advance, to ensure I gained entrance into that afterlife when I died, the return on my investment of time & effort would be matchless.
Finally, since I knew the clock was ticking, and I was now more keenly aware than ever of the uncertainty of my number of days ahead, I figured it would be wise to make this research project a priority in my life and get to it sooner rather than later.
And folks, this is precisely what I did!
After our 7 year tour overseas came to a close, my family and I returned here to the US in the summer of 1982–I was 22 at the time.
Shortly thereafter, I started this new project, which I soon began referring to as my Great Questions Quest…
Before long, this pursuit became a major sideline interest in my life, and has remained so now for over 30 years.
***This concludes part 1 of this Comprehensive Introduction. Part 2 will be released in near future.
