The Meaning of Life

Why are we here? What is it all for? What is the meaning of life? Why were we given the ability to ask ‘why?’? These are the questions that have plagued humanity since the first intelligent thought. The answers may be all around us, but if they are, we have not yet learned how to decipher them. So, we work with what we have and this leaves us with an answer that is both simple as well as complicated. I will make some simple, logical assumptions to open the path of understanding but then I have to contradict them later to present the bigger picture.

Assumption #1: There is no Supreme Being

Before you burn the object that you are reading this on, please read further; this will be one of the statements that I will contradict later. However, statistically speaking, you will never be presented with direct evidence of a higher power. Also, the authorities who claim that there is a God have lost all credibility through corruption of the message and the organizations that deliver them.  I will go into this further in another article.

Even if you believe, deep down, that there is a God – that something great and unexplainable is leading you down a specific path – still, statistically speaking, you will never be explicitly told the meaning of your life. Billions of people have gone before you and have not been told. You will never know if such a God feels it necessary for you to spend all of your life in prayer with specific rituals to show your faith. In fact, the idea that any supreme being could be offended defies logic. Any intelligent, semi-enlightened person cannot be offended because they know that there are reasons behind actions; causes and effects; ignorance and truth. There is no anger or jealousy – there is understanding and forgiveness.

So to spend your life in vigilance and austerity for a God that may or may not exist, though even if it does, it does not need your vigilance, may seem wasteful.

Assumption #2: There is No Heaven or Hell

Of course, this is directly related to our first assumption that there is no God. If we say that there is no God because there is no direct proof, we can also say that there is no Heaven or Hell because we have no proof of this either. If there is no God, nor heaven, nor hell, we can throw away the idea that somebody is watching us and that we have to be good little boys and girls.

Assumption 1 + Assumption 2 = Assumption 3: There is No Divine Meaning to Your Life

Since we’ve just concluded that we’ll personally never know of any divine reason for our existence, we must assume that there is none. We are all alone whiling away our time on this rock that is hurtling its way through space – our only explanation for anything being ‘science’. The Big Bang, expansion of the universe, chemicals randomly mixing and through some undiscovered happening, life being created – even this is told to us by ‘people who know’. So, again, we deal with what we do know: we are born, we live, and we die. 

So, what does this mean? Does it mean that there is no reason to continue living – that it’s all a waste? Completely the opposite! This means that your life is unique and precious and that you have full control over the meaning of your life and you can use it however you want - you are no longer a slave to dogma and its consequences.

Now that we have liberated you and given you control over your life, how do you want to live it? We hear all the time ‘you only get one life so cherish/live it’ and it’s very true. As far as you know you will only get one chance at this phenomena that we call life(and if there is reincarnation, we will not have consciousness of it, just like right now you do not know if you have had previous lives) so you want to make the most of it right?.

So will you try to just party all the time and have lots of girlfriends/boyfriends and be selfish and just go crazy and enjoy? It will surely be fun for a while and I definitely recommend everybody trying it for at least a little while but in the end you may find that it gets shallow and repetitive and lacks substance. You may start to crave deeper connections and a more meaningful purpose.

Maybe, with your freedom, you’d like to go the route of money and power – become a politician or CEO. Living like a king where people have to answer to your beck and call would be tempting to many. And as with nearly anything else, I also recommend trying this as well if it interests you. The lessons you’d learn on your climb to the top would be invaluable in any prospect that you have in life. But once reaching the top, with all challenges beaten, you may find yourself at a loss for what to do next. Again, you may find your relationships shallow – as they say, ‘it’s lonely at the top’. You may also do well to remember that you can’t take money with you when you die so the accumulation of excess is pretty pointless. Some of the richest people in the world are realizing the same thing and turning to humanitarian work to give them a more meaningful existence instead.

There are many ways that you can choose to live your life but ultimately you want to enjoy it. As somebody who’s lived many different lives, I recommend that others do so as well because when you do you will most likely come to the same conclusion that I have: when you’ve done everything for yourself that you can and have become tired of it, the only thing that will bring you lasting happiness is doing everything you can for others.

After you’ve already experienced the self-centered debauchery that life has on offer you may come to find that the best feeling you will ever have is the smile that you’ve put on somebody else’s face. And I don’t mean just a polite or flirty smile, or a ‘thank you for the pay-cheque’ smile; I mean an ‘I love you, I KNOW you, I want the best for you, you’re important, you mean something to me’ smile. This is not an easy smile to give and you may find this challenge just as difficult as a political campaign because you can only receive love if you know how to love. And love doesn’t include jealousy or is limited to romance – love is the ultimate promise that ‘I am there for you and I want the best for you, forever and always’.

So we come back to our meaning of life. Up until now we have realized that there is no divine reason for our existence that we will ever become aware of so we can choose to live however we want. Then I pointed out that if you go and experience all that you can of life, you will find the most meaningful path to be the one where you give and receive love. However, to fully enjoy this life of giving and receiving love, you want to experience the self-loving life so you can compare the two, giving the outward-loving life more meaning.

However, if you’ve gotten through the self-love phase of life and then enjoyed the out-loving phase and learned everything that goes along with them, you may find that there’s still more you want or need to learn about life. After all, learning is the greatest thing you will ever do and it is what makes it possible for us to love and become happy.

The Contradictions

If you’ve reached the giving and loving phase of life by learning the hard lessons required, you may have felt at some times like you were on a specific path – that no matter how far you seemed from being in the right direction - that things have been happening for specific reasons. Maybe something bad happens to you and you realize that the lesson you’d learn from overcoming that obstacle is exactly the lesson you needed to learn to progress at that point in your life. This may lead you to feel that maybe there is a Supreme Being; a divine reason for your existence. Only now, God, or the Universe, is working with you instead of seemingly against you.

So does this lead us back to the beginning with our initial questions of ‘why are we here?’? Not necessarily. If you’ve evolved through the self-love phase into the out-loving phase and have now reached a point of higher searching, you have learned many of the things necessary for the next phase – the search for enlightenment – best described as oneness with God and the Universe.

In the beginning we only had corrupt organizations telling us that there is a God. However, if you dispelled that thought and then lived your life as if there wasn’t a God, yet eventually came to the conclusion that maybe there is one, now you’re asking different questions. Instead of asking ‘Is there really a God?’ you’re now asking ‘What is the nature of this God and the Universe?’

Another question might be “Did spending a quarter of my life in selfish debauchery ruin any chances I may have had of getting a favourable place in an afterlife?” The answer to this question has to be “no” because no matter if we know the nature of God or not, any enlightened being would see that you lived through that phase and learned from it and went on to become a loving person and you would be forgiven.

There are different ways to reach enlightenment and when you reach this phase in your life you will have a better feel for what may work for you. This is a personal spiritual journey and though you can access many resources and find a teacher, just like the rest of your life, this will be something for which you must do the work and learn on your own.

Some of you may be asking ‘why go through the other phases of life if you’re telling us we can just start the search for enlightenment immediately?’ This is a valid question and this is why people join monastery’s - sometimes as children. However, if you’ve lived life and learned the lessons required to bring you to this stage you will have a stronger understanding of the moral principles required to undergo this journey. If you are told that lying is bad and of course you can understand why it is, you will know it in your mind but if you go out there and live and lie to people and get lied to, you will eventually learn in your heart and soul just how bad it is - you won’t even be tempted to lie.

The things you learn through life cannot be learned any other way. By going through the various phases of life you learn to remove all doubt and live a fuller, happier and more meaningful life. I have not reached enlightenment so I can’t tell you that you will find answers on that path. However I can tell you that if you follow the three assumptions and live your life how you want, with a definitive self-love phase, doing and learning and experiencing as much as you can, with occasional introspection, you will someday learn why it’s better to take care of other people before yourself. Many people, in the rush to become a ‘good’ person might think that they don’t need the self-loving phase or that they don’t need to do it for very long. Don’t rush. Enjoy your life, it’s always worth it. If you don’t get it completely out of your system by bingeing on it, you’ll carry around a little selfishness your entire life. Since real love involves giving without receiving it will make it hard for you to really get the full effect of it if you’re looking to receive love in return for giving it.

So enjoy life and really try to take from it as much as you can. Do everything to excess and then remember that when your current life starts to seem pointless that it’s because you’re ready for the next phase. Don’t be afraid of it – run towards it with open arms. The meaning of your life is whatever you currently want it to be.