To Know God is the Purpose of Life

Look at a flower and notice the intricacy of its design. Look at a pine cone, a snowflake, a molecule, a star.

Anywhere in nature you look closely, you’ll see design.

So it is with living beings. Everywhere we look, had we the eyes to see, I think we would see design.

Design implies a designer. God is that designer.

It also implies a formulation of some kind. A geometrical shape has a formulation. Flowers and pine cones have a formulation at their basis, whether we are able to guess at what that formulation is or not. Life itself has natural laws which can be formulated.

What is the chief formulation of life? What is life’s purpose?

As far as I know, and as far as the sages have said, the formulation of life is that life know its Creator, God. The purpose of life is to know God.

Is the reason why so unfathomable? I don’t think so.

The All, being all, could not make of itself a subject. The All could not know Itself. And so it created illusory fragments of Itself which it sent on a journey through an imaginary life, gradually growing in powers of discernment, until at last it reached a point where it could know its own true identity.

At that moment of knowing itself, God meets God. The All, in that sunburst of knowledge, enjoys the experience of knowing Itself.

That was the reason why God created life. For God’s own enjoyment, the ultimate enjoyment being God knowing God in a moment of enlightenment.

If enlightenment is the purpose of life, it is an ongoing purpose.

Enlightenment releases me from one dimension of life, but leaves me in another. Then a deeper enlightenment releases me from that dimension and on I go up Jacob’s ladder of consciousness on my return journey to my Creator.

To me standing here, I may as well say that enlightenment is endless, so vast is the prospect ahead of me. No matter what level of enlightenment I achieve, more will beckon.

At each level, God meets God until at last I awaken to the fact that I am God and “I” disappears.

All of this follows the design of life. All of it is the same for all of us.

There is no escape from the wheel of birth and rebirth except through the means of Self-realization. It is the same for all of us.

Of course the deeper our enlightenment, the deeper our enjoyment of life. It is not as if following the design or flow of life does not carry irresistible rewards. It does.

There is nothing we lose and everything we gain.

The old Vedic masters called life a “leela” or divine play. We go through make-believe births and make-believe deaths, over and over again, on our journey away from and then back to God. None of it is real. Only God is real.

I am a bud waiting for the Sun to rise and cause me to blossom.

I am bait waiting for a Big Fish to swallow.

I am bread being baked in God’s oven for God’s table.

My blossoming, my being swallowed or consumed fulfils the purpose for which I was created.