Eternal Source of Life
A thought that has haunted many people is: What is the purpose of life?
Many have tried to solve this problem. Many have tried to write on this subject. One of them is Will Durant who put this question to various people all over the world including Mahatma Gandhi. All gave different viewpoints.
Many people are baffled by the purpose of life. This thought occurred quite often to me also, but almost every time after viewing various purposes of life, the thought boiled down to one and only one purpose. Put in different words and in one sentence, it can be expressed as: “Life is lifeless when Life in it is not”.
Any creation, not only in the world but in the whole cosmos, exists because there is some force in it, behind it and surrounding it which, in a general way, can be called life. It can be lifeless life, lifeless in the sense that it may be other than the life known to men as biological life which can be botanical or zoological including the life of man and woman.
Yet, that does not mean that the biological life is the life without which life is lifeless, more so, because the biological life originates from the lifeless life matter – the five elementals in nature – beginning with ultramicroscopic life called DNA, growing unto microscopic and macroscopic life. Thus, even the biological life begins from the lifeless matter which becomes biological matter when the life principle gets linked up with it.
Does it mean that biological life, which begins from lifeless matter, is the right life? Right, from the point of view that it has in it any permanent basis? It has no permanent basis because lifeless matter goes on changing. So also, the biological life goes on changing from time to time, ultimately ending in ends of diverse nature including biological death. This means that the purpose of life is neither the source of any matter – lifeless or with life – nor end of any matter, which is lifeless or alive, because it is not permanent.
So, there must be a deeper basis of life which is permanent, with changing phases between the beginning and end, leading to the beginning again. That basis of life is the Eternal Source within each one including human beings, and is called the soul of the matter, including the matter that is man and woman. All this points to one and only main purpose of life and that is: to live the way of life so that one grows to know one’s own soul and through the soul, ultimately, the Source of the soul that is generally called God.
Read the Full Discourse.