Dear Friend,
This question arises in different forms to many of us. Do we understand what is the purpose of being here?
- What is here?
- What is life?
If you are sure that you are here and you are alive, first tell me that what is here and what is life.
What do you mean by life?
You are asking me that what is purpose of life. I am asking you, ‘what is life?’ This eating, walking, sleeping and dying, is this life?
Before you ask that what is purpose of life, you need to understand what is the meaning of being alive. You claim that you are alive. But what is meant by being alive?
- All the activities that we do from morning to evening, a good machine, a sufficiently advanced machine can replicate all of them. A good machine can walk, it can react in particular situation in particular ways, it can talk, it can have all the senses that you have, it can breathe.
- Breath is nothing but the oxygen that goes in.
- What you call as ‘blood’ is nothing but the combination of a particular mixture of chemicals, even that too can be prepared.
What is this ‘being alive’?
Do you understand what is being alive? How do you know that somebody’s alive?
Well, we may say machine will do everything which is programmed but man will not do that always.
A man who is always acting within his programming is not alive, he is a machine. So basically the difference between a man and a machine is that any man who is always acting within his programming is not alive. He is walking, sleeping, laughing, eating, but he is not alive. He is already dead.
To be alive means to go beyond your programming.
Do you go beyond that programming? How many seconds in a day? Rest of the seconds we are dead. For rest of the time, we are dead.
To be within one’s programming is to be dead.
Let's take the examples of a video camera.
That is a machine. The same sound waves that come to you also come to the camera as well. But there is something happening to you which cannot happen to any camera. That intelligence, that ability to understand, that is the characteristic of being alive; the ability to understand. And the one who does not understand is actually dead. He may appear to be laughing, he may appear to be thinking, but these actions are something that a machine can also do. If you do not understand, then you are not alive, you are a walking corpse.
The first question was: what is the purpose of life? First of all we understood that what is life.
Life is intelligence.
See, machines have their purpose but whatever is alive cannot have a purpose. The machine will have a purpose because somebody has designed it to have a purpose.
Intelligence has no purpose, intelligence has not targets, it just understands, it knows. Just knows, complete knowing. To ask for a purpose of life is a self-defeating question because only mechanical systems are programmed for purposes.
Anybody who has a purpose in life is actually not living, because to live is to really live in constant intelligence.
1. All purposes come from the external master:
- To ask for a purpose is to ask for a life of slavery.
- Life has no purpose, machines have their purposes and those purposes of machines are the purposes of their masters.
- All purposes are thoughts, conditioning, they come from outside.
Were you born with a purpose? No.
Were you always thinking the idea of the purpose? No.
That means that the thought of purpose is coming from somebody, it is not your own, just like the purpose of the camera is coming from somebody else.
2. Purpose is always in the future:
To take a purpose in life is to remain a slave, purpose is always in the future, to be obtained, to achieve. Whereas life is right now.
Anybody here who can breathe in the future? You are right now. Life is right now. All purposes are in the future. Whenever you say that there is the goal, the target, the purpose in the future, it means you are condemning yourself.
I am in the present and the life is in the present. Hence to have a purpose is to kill life.
3. Purpose means that there is a full stop right now:
To have a purpose and to achieve that purpose means that there is a full stop right now. So purpose means full stop.
- Do you wonder why you are always bored?
- Why do you always need entertainment?
You are always looking for the entertainment because your mind is always dull and bore, because you have kept a purpose, and you require fun. But these things are a disease because you have kept some targets and goals in mind. You are saying that the real thing will happen some time in future. That is the real event, the fantastic thing which is worth living for.
You do not approach anybody purposelessly. When you go to somebody, you always have a purpose in mind; that this is what I will get from him, that this what I expect from him, and there is the exploitation.
Life is right now. The understanding, the fact that we are awake; this is life.
Life needs no purpose, it is complete.
To understand life and for a deeper clarity, you may read more on my blog Shri Prashant - Words into Silence.
Regards...
This question arises in different forms to many of us. Do we understand what is the purpose of being here?
- What is here?
- What is life?
If you are sure that you are here and you are alive, first tell me that what is here and what is life.
What do you mean by life?
You are asking me that what is purpose of life. I am asking you, ‘what is life?’ This eating, walking, sleeping and dying, is this life?
Before you ask that what is purpose of life, you need to understand what is the meaning of being alive. You claim that you are alive. But what is meant by being alive?
- All the activities that we do from morning to evening, a good machine, a sufficiently advanced machine can replicate all of them. A good machine can walk, it can react in particular situation in particular ways, it can talk, it can have all the senses that you have, it can breathe.
- Breath is nothing but the oxygen that goes in.
- What you call as ‘blood’ is nothing but the combination of a particular mixture of chemicals, even that too can be prepared.
What is this ‘being alive’?
Do you understand what is being alive? How do you know that somebody’s alive?
Well, we may say machine will do everything which is programmed but man will not do that always.
A man who is always acting within his programming is not alive, he is a machine. So basically the difference between a man and a machine is that any man who is always acting within his programming is not alive. He is walking, sleeping, laughing, eating, but he is not alive. He is already dead.
To be alive means to go beyond your programming.
Do you go beyond that programming? How many seconds in a day? Rest of the seconds we are dead. For rest of the time, we are dead.
To be within one’s programming is to be dead.
Let's take the examples of a video camera.
That is a machine. The same sound waves that come to you also come to the camera as well. But there is something happening to you which cannot happen to any camera. That intelligence, that ability to understand, that is the characteristic of being alive; the ability to understand. And the one who does not understand is actually dead. He may appear to be laughing, he may appear to be thinking, but these actions are something that a machine can also do. If you do not understand, then you are not alive, you are a walking corpse.
The first question was: what is the purpose of life? First of all we understood that what is life.
Life is intelligence.
See, machines have their purpose but whatever is alive cannot have a purpose. The machine will have a purpose because somebody has designed it to have a purpose.
Intelligence has no purpose, intelligence has not targets, it just understands, it knows. Just knows, complete knowing. To ask for a purpose of life is a self-defeating question because only mechanical systems are programmed for purposes.
Anybody who has a purpose in life is actually not living, because to live is to really live in constant intelligence.
1. All purposes come from the external master:
- To ask for a purpose is to ask for a life of slavery.
- Life has no purpose, machines have their purposes and those purposes of machines are the purposes of their masters.
- All purposes are thoughts, conditioning, they come from outside.
Were you born with a purpose? No.
Were you always thinking the idea of the purpose? No.
That means that the thought of purpose is coming from somebody, it is not your own, just like the purpose of the camera is coming from somebody else.
2. Purpose is always in the future:
To take a purpose in life is to remain a slave, purpose is always in the future, to be obtained, to achieve. Whereas life is right now.
Anybody here who can breathe in the future? You are right now. Life is right now. All purposes are in the future. Whenever you say that there is the goal, the target, the purpose in the future, it means you are condemning yourself.
I am in the present and the life is in the present. Hence to have a purpose is to kill life.
3. Purpose means that there is a full stop right now:
To have a purpose and to achieve that purpose means that there is a full stop right now. So purpose means full stop.
- Do you wonder why you are always bored?
- Why do you always need entertainment?
You are always looking for the entertainment because your mind is always dull and bore, because you have kept a purpose, and you require fun. But these things are a disease because you have kept some targets and goals in mind. You are saying that the real thing will happen some time in future. That is the real event, the fantastic thing which is worth living for.
You do not approach anybody purposelessly. When you go to somebody, you always have a purpose in mind; that this is what I will get from him, that this what I expect from him, and there is the exploitation.
Life is right now. The understanding, the fact that we are awake; this is life.
Life needs no purpose, it is complete.
To understand life and for a deeper clarity, you may read more on my blog Shri Prashant - Words into Silence.
Regards...
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