The purpose of Life!

No other question has haunted me like this ever – What could possibly be the purpose of life? I am a spiritual person and at the same time a rationalist who doesn’t believe in “rules” of worshipping. I am not so religious though i pray everyday and i think religion is just a tool to move forward in understanding the purpose of life. You need a starting point somewhere to solve this puzzle and I think religion helps to give a head start.

Anyway, coming back to the question of what possibly could be the purpose of life: I have spoken to a number of people who are matured enough to understand this very basic question. As you can imagine, probably around 90% of humans wouldn’t even have had such a question in their entire life. Most of us are so into this tiny world that we cannot stop to look how big the universe is! But some say, the moment your mind starts asking this question, you are in the right path to learn the answer.

And so I asked… And a lot of them answered. But only the views varied from “No purpose at all” and “the purpose is to live it the way you want to!” to “to satisfy god and make him happy”. I think these answers were answered by logically thinking based on information what they all possessed. Most of the answers were logical because our brain works on logic. Unfortunately, the whole concept of spirituality is so beyond the grasp of logic and that makes it difficult to prove anything to be right or wrong. So how do we actually arrive at a conclusion for the purpose of life?

Why should there be a purpose?

Perhaps, the most interesting answer to this question is “why should there be a purpose to this life?” One of my friends asked me this question and i just did not have an answer. Logically speaking, i cannot rule out this option. But, I believe we are born with, what i call, a gut instinct. No matter what you hear, what you see and what you infer, you always ‘feel’ a certain thing to be either right or wrong. This feeling doesn’t really have any form of logic known to man. It originates within us, even though we are not entirely sure when and how it originated.

When i look around, i see a very detailed design involved in each and every creature and each and every object that surrounds us. We are naturally meant to perceive mountains to be beautiful and rivers to be soothing. It somehow feels that every bit was designed to perform a specific task. Why would so many things happen so very precisely for millions of years for no reason? If there is no reason behind anything, why do humans naturally look out for a reason behind every single thing? Since this doesn’t quite equate itself, i am forced to think … may be there is a purpose to this life!

Science and Spirituality:

Science tries to do a good job of plotting theories for all existing phenomenons. And that is pretty much what it can do at this point in time. We can’t create anything new that our mind cannot understand. We can build something in 3 dimensions but can we physically create something in 4 dimensions? We just cannot do that because our mind is not capable of understanding what it means. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.That said, science is very young and it grows older everyday. After many many thousands of years, science might be able to decode what the purpose of life is!

Emotion – the killer?

The rule of the world is ‘trade-off’. Every creature or thing in this world has a positive point and a negative point. The positive point is what science terms as survival of the fittest and the negative point is what keeps the creature from overpowering the entire system.Let us take the example of an octopus. Octopuses are extra ordinarily intelligent beings. They live in communities and have families. But their entire lifetime is just 3 years. Some scientists say that if they were to live longer, they might be the rulers of the world.

But given that did not happen, we humans, by far, enjoy being at the top of the food chain. Our positive point is that we can think and plan and execute. In short, our positive point is our intellect. So what is our negative point? Our negative point is emotions. If we didn’t have any emotions, we would not have had so many rules to govern ourselves and we would have been ruthless and even more powerful than what we are.
This brings us to another question. If i get rid of my negative point, can i become the master? If i get rid of my emotions, can i conquer the world. The probable answer to this question is once we get rid of emotions, we no longer have the desire to be the master of the world or to conquer it.

In a nutshell:

If you were to believe in evolution, then i would say the purpose of life was just an accident and we are just defining our future as we go along. So there isn’t a concept called a purpose of life at all.

But on the contrary, if you do not believe in evolution, like i do, then the whole purpose of life looks very very complicated. After a lot more thinking and a lot of reading and a lot of discussing, i came down to this theory:

There is more to this life than this world where we live in. There could be many many worlds – just like 500 years ago no one believed that there are many countries – and we are living in just one of them. Our body is just like a glass that can hold water. It serves as an excellent storage for the soul – some sort of energy. Every time the body dies, the energy is liberated back to the collection of energy from where it can get into another body in another world. By doing this the soul learns what it needs to learn.

One possible theory is that the soul gets stronger as it go through the hardships in this worldly life. The more it suffers, the more it learns, the stronger it gets. But, the next obvious question is why should it get stronger? Possibly there isn’t a single entity called god! May be god is the strongest soul that has actually gone through the toughest times and has the highest energy to handle the whole universe?

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This question is something that sticks to my heart and i would love to hear any comments you might have on this. So please feel free to write to me or post your comments in the box below!

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