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Aug 06, 2013, 18:51 IST

The Meaning of Life and Existence

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All life forms go through the same stages, namely, birth, growth, reproduction, decay and death. Man also essentially does the same thing going through the same stages.  The difference lies in the fact that man is endowed with superior intelligence and power of reasoning. On our earth millions of life forms or species had lived and vanished. Millions are still thriving. As per one rough estimate, nearly 100 billion people of the human species, Homo sapiens, had lived on earth and perished. Just like the laws of nature pertaining to gravitation, electromagnetism etc, life forms also emerge and function as per laws of nature. Naturally questions arise as what purpose is served by the emergence and disappearance of such huge number of life forms, what purpose is served by the existence of huge number of galaxies, stars and planets etc that may either support life or not support it and what is the meaning and purpose of it all.

 

One simplistic answer is that this universe and all life forms had been there only to bring you on to existence on this earth and to perhaps make you get a proper understanding of existence itself. Actually the existence of any entity is ultimately established and accepted as such by the mind or consciousness.  Thus it turns out that existence is primarily an attribute of consciousness alone and existence itself is consciousness. In fact it is consciousness that takes convenient avatars in the formats of space, time, matter etc so that the mind can comprehend them in the form of existence.  Independent of consciousness nothing can exist. As such the prerogative to exist can be assigned only to consciousness.

 

The universe does not bring consciousness into picture. It is the consciousness that actually brings the universe into picture. It does not mean that the consciousness and the universe are two different entities. It essentially means that it is consciousness that actually appears and functions as the universe. One can naturally dispute this by arguing that the universe had been in existence for a long time in the past before man with his consciousness came on to the scene. There is a basic fallacy in this argument. When we try to analyse the past when the consciousness did not exist, this analysis is done again by the consciousness only, in the present moment.  In other words, we cannot analyse the past universe without the consciousness. In fact when we analyse the past universe, we are again analysing the past consciousness only as existence is consciousness. The past does not exist in an absolute sense. It exists only with respect to the present. Thus the now or the present alone is truth as time itself is consciousness.  Similarly arguing about the future universe without the mind is untenable and fallacious as  even the question of what can exist in the absence of consciousness or mind can not arise actually in view of the fact that all questions need to be raised by the mind only and also need to be answered by the mind only. Thus it is consciousness that reigns supreme.

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