The Purpose of Life by Ravenking

What is this life's deeper purpose? What are we here for? A question many ask, and to which a million answers are given. But I wish to add here my own private answer and my own reflections.

Many a meaning or purpose is attributed to being what life is about: For some it is to be Good, For others it means to find Love, for some it means being rich and a whole infinity of other things individuals have come up with.

But we end up with a problem the way I see it and that is that most people give their answers without any regard to what the end of life actually implies.

Nor do we look to nature before giving our answer to see her reflect to us perhaps some hints that would better help us find an answer.

I wish to start with the first problem and possibly the most important, and that is the problem of good and evil. You see we humans are the only beings in the universe with a sense of absolute good on one side opposed to absolute evil on the other. (The dangerous animals in the forest seem to turn into monsters , demons and devils at night to us modern humans.)

We look at the world trying to find and pinpoint the root of suffering and as we become confronted with violence or cruelty, we begin to find it easy to simply say that it was caused by someone or something evil. Doing so gives us an enemy, a target, even a potential solution! Since if I get rid of it, the problem will no longer be.

But I ask you where in nature do you see the animal kingdom behave as if there is true evil out there? The Spider and the Wasp are natural enemies in a sense, but will a spider ever judge the wasp for being evil just because it is its nature to attack spiders or vice versa? Does either one feel as if they are on the side of good? No. They are accepting of the reality in which they live, if wasp attacks, spider defends. Wasp sees spider and is hungry, well it might attack. Sometimes spider even catches a wasp with its huge net and gets a yummy snack. This is Life interacting in a pure manner with Life, there is no fight of morality, there is no separation of duality. It is just so.

Now can we as human beings one day perhaps rise out of good and evil, to realize and integrate the polarities of our own nature? Whatever you judge in another as evil is only because you believe yourself to possess none of it. What if instead you could accept the evil in another even though you do not agree with their action, but could understand that given the circumstances that person went through if you went through them yourself you might have discovered the very same thing surface from within you?

If I actually do take on this exercise then slowly I should realize at some point, that whatever I see in another is also to be found within me, even though I might not be aware of it. So as I try to understand the other, I begin to gain actually greater understanding about myself and all the facets hidden within me.

Now I wish to sidestep to the concept of relationships, family, friends and love. All of these are highly beautiful aspects of our life, yet at the same time they can also be our greatest hurdle. For here we need to face Death.

If I believe my life is nothing more but to build up a family, or to find my soulmate/the perfect relationship, I will often end up disappointed when I reach the very end and realize that what I built, I must now let go or am standing at the end not having managed to create these things or have lost them.

I can not take those I love with me nor can I prevent them from leaving me. No matter how strong a bond I forge to another, I will need to break it at some point. Knowing this I would offer perhaps the thought to consider that while we might build strong love, family and friend relationships, their purpose is not the relationship in the end, but more so what each participant gets to learn about their own self from those interactions.

They offer a space in which ideally the other and I are learning to know our own selfs better through the mirror of the other. So that we might find True Love, which is actually the act of falling in love with your own self. The need for commitment, security, safety, all of this comes from our own sense of inadequacy, lacking self-love, doubting our own worth.

So we put each other in cages until life breaks the cage open sooner or later. Either through Drama or Death. Seldom a breaking open in peace. We end up here with the divorced husband and wife who are for the rest of their life at each others throat while raising a kid within their self constructed immature warzone. And we are back at the problem of Good and Evil, which if we understood the first lesson above, we would perhaps learn to separate in peace, instead of in war.

The problem of Good and Evil, seems to be teaching me about my Self. I can only solve it if I integrate both polarities within, instead of holding on to one as who I am, while projecting the other out into the world and others.

The problem of Death points to the same fact, that when I leave, I do so with nothing except with my Self.

So I wish to make an analogy here and perhaps it will make sense to some. You see what if Life was very similar to a Dream? Just as you dream at night and your own person creates a dream world filled with every imaginable character but they are made of you, created in your own mind, pretending to be Other for the purpose of the dream. The entire dream world created just to help you cope or understand the daily stream of things happening.

See Life is already the Dream that you created. Life is the dream of Eternity reflecting upon itself, wishing to understand itself, experience itself. Yet as soon as we come into Life we are so pulled in by the story and narratives, that we suddenly feel like we are in a world where I am me, and everything that is outside of me is different, separate. Loosing sight of the simple fact that every tiny bit and piece manifest in this universe is a part of your own self, reflecting the infinity of your own self back to you. So that you might learn about your own self in all its unlimited facets through the experiences and encounters that you have.

When we wake up to this fact we must realize the experiencing of life is the very act of self-reflection itself, I do not need to mentally self-reflect upon myself, but instead realize that my entire experience is my process of self-reflection. Life itself is the process of self-reflection that each of us is doing/experiencing.

What we do is we use our mind to self-reflect our narratives, creating an identity that is mine alone, having this and that happen to him. And instead of paying attention to the self-reflection that is the actual experience of life, we begin paying attention to the life we have written in our heads as stories about our self.

The deeper I am in my head, the less I am learning about myself, and just feel like a victim of life to whom all sorts of things are hapening without any control. Tweaking and changing my stories, creating new definitions about myself, removing old ones. Basically just picking out of the infinity of ideas within you, a selection of those, a handful to create a shadow of yourself, your egoic identity.

If I finally come out of my head, I will realize that whatever is happening is actually entirely in my own control, in the sense that I am receiving the reflections of myself that I actually need at every given moment in life. Furthermore I will begin to act spontaneously instead of mentally. No longer busy with the process of judging my own actions, in the sense of finding an excuse why I should not act on a certain feeling, or waiting to act until I have found a good reason to do so.

With this understanding I am able to let go of needing to hold on to any one narrative. I can learn to trust in the natural life and death cycles that are brought before me. I can learn to trust in my own self, by no longer fearing a mistake or error. I can finally give free reign to the infinite spontaneity of my own being while not fearing to speak the truth of my heart

Furthermore I will trust greater in the pullings of my soul, I might pay more attention to what attracts me, I might dare venture with more courage towards what I love. Not because I want to hold it forever, but because you no longer have anything to lose nor are you too obsessed because you equally know there is nothing to really gain, except the experience and what it reveals within.

We are complex creatures and have outgrown much of the moral structures that we try to uphold, since they are more like rules you teach children to guide them and eventually make them aware of something deeper, so that one day they hopefully do not need to stick to a blind rule, but instead learn to understand that which needed rules in the first place, and through their understanding finally no longer need the rule.

Once you are fully-aware that life is your process of self-reflection already taking place, purpose becomes self defined. There is nowhere specific any of this is heading except to awaken each on to the truth that life is our own creation.

Instead of being a limited mental egoic identity, becoming a true unlimited individual with character.