This eighteenth volume of AutoRicerca is the first to be published only in English. It contains an interesting conversation between D. Aerts, K. W. Ekeson, M. Sassoli de Bianchi and V. Schneider, on the secret of life. It also contains two original articles, written by D. Aerts and K. W. Ekeson, which complete the content of the conversation.

Nobody ever promised that things would be easy, and they are not. Nobody ever promised that suffering would not be intrinsically part of life, including part of your life, and it is.

Nobody ever promised differently, namely that each time again problems would arise, some hard ones, maybe some terribly hard ones, and some less hard ones, and that is how it is.

Nobody ever promised that it would be possible to solve even the minor ones of these problems at a first try, let stand the harder ones, and so it is.

Nobody ever promised that evil would not be lurking around, mostly even in those places where it can best hide its nature, and so it is.

The above short description is a good characterization of life in depth and we know why it is, because we, as human beings, have awaken to it in consciousness.

This is its nature because life is the moment to moment irreversible choice and constant fight against the spontaneous regression to ‘just being’, which on the local level of a human body we call death.

Every breath, every piece of food, every step, every smile, every embrace, every sprinkle of love, compassion, collaboration, construction, creation, are little parts of this constant fight against ‘just being’, or local death, the content of the second law of thermodynamics, and on a deeper physics level the separation of matter from anti-matter in time.

As little individual humans we are humble participants in this great endeavor of life, this great enterprise of struggle and fight, this deep endurance of suffering, this never-ending attempting of solving problems, failing and trying again, and sometimes succeeding in a local and modest victory.

The deep secret of life is that if you pursue a noble goal all the characteristics of life described above become the substance of meaning, which is the food of the human mind.

– Diederik Aerts