Does Life need to have a purpose?
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Most of what I write on is based on teachings of Paramahamsa Nithyananda, my Master. However, the experiences are internalized before they are expressed.
We keep running all the time, yet stay in the same place. If running was the purpose, no matter. When reaching somewhere becomes critical, how can you enjoy the running? Especially when you seem to get nowhere?
A very young terminally-ill girl wrote out a beautiful poem on her hospital bed. It ends with these simple lines:
Life is not a race, do take it slower
Hear the music, before the song is over.
Nithyananda says:
We spend hours recording music instead of listening to it live. We waste time capturing experiences on film, while we should be savouring the experiences. We are forever rushing to be some place, and when we reach there, it is rarely the place we wish to be!
Is there a purpose to life? Is it to gain fame, success, and wealth? Do these acquisitions make us happy?
Look at animals. Animals go through life instinctively and naturally. They hunt when they are hungry, mate when they feel the urge and sleep when they are tired. They exist fully in the present.
Man is not happy with the world around him. He is forever at odds with nature. He would like to change the world to suit his wants, instead of living with nature to fulfil his needs.
We are constantly in a rat race, forgetting that even if we win this rat race we still remain a rat!
But how can one live without goals, you may ask. Let me then ask you this? How many of the goals you set out and achieved have given you true happiness? While working towards these goals did you feel happy or stressed out? After reaching these goals, did you stop to enjoy the result, or did you plod on mindless towards other distant goals?
Why don’t you try instead, for a change, to just enjoy what you are doing, without worrying about the result? Ask any successful and wealthy man who is also happy, and he will tell you that he did what he loved to do, not because it would make him wealthy.
When you enjoy the journey, the destination is always the right one for you. Within you there is awareness of what is right for you. All that you need to do is to let that happen. Do not resist, just accept what life dishes out to you; flow with it in acceptance.
What results is Ananda, bliss! Ananda the attitude, it is the path of ecstasy, rather than the path to ecstasy. Ananda is already there inside you, you only have to recognize it and set it free.
Be Blissful!
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Beautiful !!!
Beautiful !!!
Beautiful #2
I agree, beautifully said. My guru Nisargadatta Maharaj said that the purpose of life is to be conscious and happy, and I agree with him completely. An infant is looking at the world in wonder, seeking nothing, happy just to be. We should be like an infant, not defining ourselves by our stories. The world is always new and fresh when we aren't filtering everything based on whether or not it fits our self-definitions, when we don't hold any expectations about life. Trust, observe, desire not, fear not, be fully and completely present.
http://www.omkaradatta.info
Life does have a purpose
The to the title question, does life need to have a purpose, the answered yes. To exist requires having a purpose but the purpose requires not judging in order to comprehend it.
Look at what is said, all of it is concerned with what man want based on what they like. Nothing in it concerns itself with the willingness to put aside desire for the purpose of comprehending why the opposites exists. Man have defined words in such a way that others feel an ourcast if they accept opposites. An example is the abstract concepts of love and hate. Love boils down to something one likes so much they want not to do without it. Hate, in tern, becomes something one dislikes so much they never want to encounter it. Both are words of personal desire with one desired and the other abhorred.
If we look deep we find they are in the same catagory with half desired and the other rejected. The whole catagory exist so why not embrace the whole? In embracing the whole with objectivity the purpose for it manifests itself to us while our conditioned nature, definitions and likes and dislikes keeps it afar.
Once we embrace both opposite of existence we are able to see eternity which allows us to live always in the present with the knowledge of exactly where we are in our cycle of eternity.
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Elijah "NatureBoy"--If I have caused you to question your beliefs I have accomplished my mission. Now, reason the differences in our concepts and reason that until you have reasoned all pros and cons.
The irony is that the whole
The irony is that the whole notion of purpose results from that exact personal duality creation that you describe and suggest transcending. You like one thing and hate another, and so a tension forms that results in a movement toward one and away from the other. This movement defines a purpose. 'My purpose is to get what I like and avoid what I hate.'
If you embrace both polarities, as you suggest, then the tension is resolved and there is no movement, and therefore no purpose. You would have it that there is some purpose beneath the one defined through our dualistic perception. It's not so because purpose can only happen if we believe there's somewhere to go. As a nature boy, you might look at nature and notice that it's not really going anywhere, it's moving in circles. Even the movement of evolution is not a straight line but a circle and will eventually end where it began, as it has probably done many times.
The reason man is not in harmony with nature is that nature is moving in circles and man wants to move in a straight line because he has defined a purpose. Circles can be self supporting, straight lines must diverge. The difference between man and the rest of nature is that man thinks he needs to get somewhere, and nature is just moving.
If you insist on defining a purpose, then the movement of life is it's own purpose, but nobody has defined it and it is being accomplished in each moment.