is the ‘purpose of life’ just an assumption borne of fear?

Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering

The same question has been asked and debated for millennia: “What is the purpose of life?” This question is borne of fear and suffering that arise out of the sense of self. Have you ever asked yourself why there is a deep-seated urge to know the purpose of life? Is it possible to look beneath the superficiality of the question and find out how it has arisen? Let’s give it a try…

The idea that life has an innate purpose is an assumption created by the egoic mind, which is the sense of an individual self — who you have been conditioned to take yourself to be. The self is a facade created out of an accretion of thoughts. Collectively, the thoughts form a belief system that we commonly call “me.” The self requires, desires, and stresses out over security. It wants to be secure, fulfilled, happy, and in control. To be this way it feels that it’s necessary to have all the answers to life. Life must have a purpose, the self says, because the “me” is all-important and needs its belief to be reinforced.

fear is of the unknown
Fear arises with the formation of the self, and this fear makes the unknown a treacherous, confusing, scary place. Life is mostly the unknown, so you can see the problem here.

People yearn to know the purpose of life so there will be no sudden changes, unpredictability, meaningless and painful incidents, or fear. The self desires security, stability, and the knowledge that everything will be okay. The absence of this knowledge is part of the suffering.

why do we suffer?
Suffering goes hand-in-hand with the sense of self; and suffering seems to give birth to the idea that life must have a purpose.

The sense of self is the source of all suffering for a good many reasons. Its suffering primarily comes from trying to change what cannot be changed, which is an unpredictable, changing, mysterious existence buffeted by nature, other people, time, space, trauma, thought, and so on. And it cannot change the very nature of life itself, with all of its opposing forces that the Chinese embedded in the yin/yang symbol.

Suffering is a result, the effect, of the self. There is no cause-and-effect relationship between suffering and the purpose of life. Suffering is a fact of life. But a purpose is not a fact of life. If the sense of self were to dissolve then it would be obvious that there is no purpose to life. A purpose suggests that life goes a certain way for each of the billions of people, inanimate objects, phenomena, and life forms. Since life is a singular movement, it does not bend to anyone’s will nor serve each person individually. But the problem is that the self does not recognize this singularity of life; it parses life into fragments to suit its purposes.

consciousness lies beneath the self
Consider (until you can see this of your own accord, as a fact) that life is a whole, dynamic, complex movement that we may call consciousness. Consciousness cannot be understood by the self except intellectually, as a concept. But as a reality, consciousness is beheld only by awareness that does not judge, assume, criticize, or analyze the goings-on, changes, and incomprehensible interrelationships between good and bad, tall and short, ugly and beautiful, peaceful and turbulent, straight and tortuous, and so on. To the self, consciousness appears as confusion and conflict, and this is only because the self has fragmented itself away from the total movement of consciousness.

Consciousness is the totality of all that is, undivided and ever-changing, and the sense of self (that has placed itself at the center of its world) cannot accept this.

All that is happening, sensed, and known is a reflection of consciousness. We look out of this body, through the eye sockets, and what we see is consciousness. Devoid of the self, we are consciousness seeing our own self in all of its expressions and iterations. This can only be known beyond the intellectual, when the self falls silent and you realize that all of what you are experiencing is actually you as consciousness.

removing the idea of a life’s purpose
If you remove this erroneous idea of a purpose to life then you come a little closer to seeing things as they are without any presumptions, concepts, and assumptions — in other words, without the overlay of the egoic self that distorts reality with thought. And this allows you to see the self for what it is so that you can discover what you are and what you are not. And when this occurs you can see that life is only suffering due to the self and the way it has been psychologically conditioned, not only in your lifetime, but also down through history and universally.