Is there a purpose?

Look up.

Billions of stars. And you, asking the oldest question there is:
What's it all for?

But when we ask whether there's a purpose, are we really looking for an answer, or just hoping someone, or something, has one ready for us?

There are two ways to see the world.

The first says everything is matter. Consciousness (your thoughts, your feelings, your sense of being you) is just a side-effect of the brain, like steam coming off a kettle. Mainstream science mostly works from this assumption. It's called Materialism.

The second is much older. Mystics and philosophers have held it for thousands of years. It says consciousness comes first, and matter appears within it, the way a dream appears within a dreamer. It's called Idealism.

If you believe the first, you are steam: brief, accidental, and soon gone. No wonder so many of us live with a quiet fear that we don't matter.

Cartoon: a giant foot hovering over a tiny person

But what if it's the other way round?

What if you are not the steam, but part of the one who is dreaming?

Then you are not a speck in a cold universe. You are a small point of awareness inside something vast, and connected to everything else within it. Part of your Natural Self already knows this. What cuts you off from it is the belief that you're only a machine made of meat.

And here is the surprising part. If consciousness is the ground of everything, there is nothing underneath it. No higher boss, no master plan that it serves.

It's the end of the line.
It simply is.

So if the universe doesn't hand us a purpose, where does purpose come from?

From us.

Viktor Frankl survived the Nazi death camps and went on to write Man's Search for Meaning. He saw that people who turn inward, towards narrow self-interest, fall into what he called an "existential vacuum". Meaning, he found, comes when we reach outward:

Make something or do something. A piece of work, a deed, a cause.
Love something or someone. Nature, art, another human being.
Choose your attitude. Even towards suffering you can't avoid.

So there's no purpose to Life itself. But there can be purpose to your life.

The catch?
You decide.

That isn't a burden. It's freedom, and it has no limit. If consciousness is the ground of everything, it can't be destroyed. What we call death is consciousness moving from one reality to another.

So if you don't crack it this time round…
you may get another go.

Now imagine a universe of endless variety. There would be countless realities where minds explore meanings we can't yet picture, let alone understand.

Somewhere out there, there may be beings whose lives are so rich and so strange that, if we met them, we'd have only one word for them:

Gods.

Next: Is there a God? | How your beliefs shape your life | Back to Mind

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