“Hi Shiv. I’ve been thinking about my life purpose lately. I feel like I would like to do something meaningful for a career in a way that benefits others. But I find myself questioning this and wondering if I am being nonsensical. Isn’t meaning just an illusion? Isn’t the purpose of my life just to live? Then why is there a part of me that still wants it to live a meaningful life?”
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Being has no purpose. It’s only purpose, if you can call it that is simply “to be”. In other words, its purpose is already an inherent aspect of its manifestation. This is the wholistic view of reality.
The purpose of being is to be.
The purpose of existence is to exist.
The purpose of awareness is to be aware.
The purpose of life is to live.
When you inhabit the wholistic perspective on reality, two things happen.
First, all questions about meaning, purpose, choice, agency and such become moot. They become nonsensical. There are no whys, hows, whats, wheres or whens. There is just what is.
Second, nothing can be taken personally because nothing that happens is personal. There is no ‘person’ that is separate from the whole. There is only the whole and so everything that happens, happens within, from and to this whole.
However, this wholistic (you can call it non-dualistic) perspective on reality is but one perspective. For, there is the human perspective on reality as well, which is not wholistic.
From the human perspective, purpose and meaning are not implicit and are often revealed through a gradual process of unpacking over a lifetime. As humans, we are not simply being but are perpetually becoming. This perspective is rooted in a sense of separation from the totality that is encoded within our DNA. We are designed to prefer pleasure over pain, to seek freedom instead of suffering and to desire harmony over chaos.
As “human beings”, we are human and we are being. In other words, we inhabit two simultaneous perspectives on reality. The partial and the whole. The personal and the impersonal. The dual and the non-dual.
And to live as a harmonious human being, neither perspectives can be neglected. Both must be honored and held in balance. However, this balance is rarely spoken about and even rarer still, put into practice.
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