1-Preface
QUESTION 6: The purpose of our life
There are two important days in our life,
The day we are born and the day we find out why.
Mark Twain.
Imagine planet earth without human beings. They found another planet with plenty of oil. Because of a lower gravity, everybody lost weight, instantly, without diet and exercise. How can you resist such an opportunity? No more global warming on earth. No pollution in the air. No chemicals in the rivers. No plastic at the bottom of the oceans. No dumps. No wars. No atomic bombs. A real Paradise! The question is:
“Do you think that something would be missing
without the presence of human beings on earth?”
This is not an easy question, but it is important. Each one of us is contributing to the general evolution of the human species. We need to know the general evolution before we can adjust the details for every individual.
It happens to everybody sooner or later. We stop what we are doing and wonder: “What am I doing here? What is the purpose of all this? What is the purpose of my life on earth?”
Some people spend all their energy making money. Some want to be famous. Others spend all their life looking for love or bed partners. We search in books, in religions, in philosophy, in ourselves and in others.
Life would be so much easier if only we knew what we were doing.
We are walking in the fog, conscious only of what is close to us. There must be something else than getting up, going to work, watching TV, going to bed, getting up and repeat, repeat, repeat.
If we could get a clear idea of what is the purpose of our life, everything else would fall into place. We may decide to spend more time with our children rather than climbing the corporate ladder. We would not waste so much time and energy on details. Something we neglected could become important and a lot of stress would evaporate.
There are more than eight billion people wondering what they are doing on planet earth. If so many people have a common question, there must be a common answer independent of race, gender, age and religion that everybody could agree with.
Let’s break some taboos and get some fresh air. To search for the purpose of our life is like solving a puzzle. Every event - big or small - is a piece of the puzzle. In our everyday life, we only see one piece at a time and never get to the overall view.
We are conscious of having a body and a soul. The body belongs to the material domain where everything has a weight, a color, a shape and many things that can be measured. The soul belongs to a domain where nothing has a weight, a color and nothing can be measured. The question is:
Life would be so much easier if only we knew what we were doing.
We are walking in the fog, conscious only of what is close to us. There must be something else than getting up, going to work, watching TV, going to bed, getting up and repeat, repeat, repeat.
If we could get a clear idea of what is the purpose of our life, everything else would fall into place. We may decide to spend more time with our children rather than climbing the corporate ladder. We would not waste so much time and energy on details. Something we neglected could become important and a lot of stress would evaporate.
There are more than eight billion people wondering what they are doing on planet earth.
If so many people have a common question, there must be a common answer
independent of race, gender, age and religion that everybody could agree with.
Let’s break some taboos and get some fresh air. To search for the purpose of our life is like solving a puzzle. Every event - big or small - is a piece of the puzzle. In our everyday life, we only see one piece at a time and never get to the overall view.
We are conscious of having a body and a soul. The body belongs to the material domain where everything has a weight, a color, a shape and many things that can be measured. The soul belongs to a domain where nothing has a weight, a color and nothing can be measured. The question is:
“What could convince a nice soul to get associated
with such a body – even for a short time?”
Nobody can pretend to have all the answers. This is only the first step of a long march, but we can get started.
Let's look inside.
“Who looks outside, dreams.
Who looks inside, awakes”.
Carl Jung
What we find outside, in our environment, is what other people have produced before us. That may not be the best that humanity has to offer. Look at history for instance. You start with generous ideas. They get mixed with human nature and after a few centuries Heaven gets changed into Hell. You start with love and end up with the Spanish Inquisition. What is available today, outside, has been polluted by human nature. Before we blame society, the government and our environment we should have a look inside ourselves. We may have created our environment in our image.
A different way of thinking:
Many things have changed in the past 100 years: The cell phones, TV, satellites, the moon, planes, the internet…. The way we use the human brain could be next. Mother nature makes a tree out of a seed. She can make a human body out of a single cell. She goes from one to many. This is something we still have to learn. It is only later that Nature will use all the resources of the environment to grow the tree and create the human being.
To make a car, we make thousands of parts separately and put them together. We go from many to one. Nature knows better. She does not grow leaves and branches separately before putting them together. We still have to learn from Nature how to go from one to many.
Artificial Intelligence could be a step in the right direction. You ask a simple question, and you get a detailed answer. We may have to change the way we use books. We could start from a simple idea such as “What is the purpose of our life on earth?” From a simple idea, we can go to a small book and from a small book to all the resources of the internet. We can go from one to many, like nature goes from one seed to a tree and from one cell to a human body.