What are we for?What is life's purpose?

Answer 1

How to discover your life purpose in about 20 minutes

How do you discover your real purpose in life? I’m not talking about your job, your daily responsibilities, or even your long-term goals. I mean the real reason why you’re here at all — the very reason you exist.

Perhaps you’re a rather nihilistic person who doesn’t believe you have a purpose and that life has no meaning. Doesn’t matter. Not believing that you have a purpose won’t prevent you from discovering it, just as a lack of belief in gravity won’t prevent you from tripping. All that a lack of belief will do is make it take longer, so if you’re one of those people, just change the number 20 in the title of this blog entry to 40 (or 60 if you’re really stubborn). Most likely though if you don’t believe you have a purpose, then you probably won’t believe what I’m saying anyway, but even so, what’s the risk of investing an hour just in case?

Here’s a story about Bruce Lee which sets the stage for this little exercise. A master martial artist asked Bruce to teach him everything Bruce knew about martial arts. Bruce held up two cups, both filled with liquid. “The first cup,” said Bruce, “represents all of your knowledge about martial arts. The second cup represents all of my knowledge about martial arts. If you want to fill your cup with my knowledge, you must first empty your cup of your knowledge.”

If you want to discover your true purpose in life, you must first empty your mind of all the false purposes you’ve been taught (including the idea that you may have no purpose at all).

So how to discover your purpose in life? While there are many ways to do this, some of them fairly involved, here is one of the simplest that anyone can do. The more open you are to this process, and the more you expect it to work, the faster it will work for you. But not being open to it or having doubts about it or thinking it’s an entirely idiotic and meaningless waste of time won’t prevent it from working as long as you stick with it — again, it will just take longer to converge.

Here’s what to do:

Take out a blank sheet of paper or open up a word processor where you can type (I prefer the latter because it’s faster).
Write at the top, “What is my true purpose in life?”
Write an answer (any answer) that pops into your head. It doesn’t have to be a complete sentence. A short phrase is fine.
Repeat step 3 until you write the answer that makes you cry. This is your purpose.
That’s it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a counselor or an engineer or a bodybuilder. To some people this exercise will make perfect sense. To others it will seem utterly stupid. Usually it takes 15-20 minutes to clear your head of all the clutter and the social conditioning about what you think your purpose in life is. The false answers will come from your mind and your memories. But when the true answer finally arrives, it will feel like it’s coming to you from a different source entirely.

For those who are very entrenched in low-awareness living, it will take a lot longer to get all the false answers out, possibly more than an hour. But if you persist, after 100 or 200 or maybe even 500 answers, you’ll be struck by the answer that causes you to surge with emotion, the answer that breaks you. If you’ve never done this, it may very well sound silly to you. So let it seem silly, and do it anyway.

As you go through this process, some of your answers will be very similar. You may even re-list previous answers. Then you might head off on a new tangent and generate 10-20 more answers along some other theme. And that’s fine. You can list whatever answer pops into your head as long as you just keep writing.

At some point during the process (typically after about 50-100 answers), you may want to quit and just can’t see it converging. You may feel the urge to get up and make an excuse to do something else. That’s normal. Push past this resistance, and just keep writing. The feeling of resistance will eventually pass.

You may also discover a few answers that seem to give you a mini-surge of emotion, but they don’t quite make you cry — they’re just a bit off. Highlight those answers as you go along, so you can come back to them to generate new permutations. Each reflects a piece of your purpose, but individually they aren’t complete. When you start getting these kinds of answers, it just means you’re getting warm. Keep going.

It’s important to do this alone and with no interruptions. If you’re a nihilist, then feel free to start with the answer, “I don’t have a purpose,” or “Life is meaningless,” and take it from there. If you keep at it, you’ll still eventually converge.

When I did this exercise, it took me about 25 minutes, and I reached my final answer at step 106. Partial pieces of the answer (mini-surges) appeared at steps 17, 39, and 53, and then the bulk of it fell into place and was refined through steps 100-106. I felt the feeling of resistance (wanting to get up and do something else, expecting the process to fail, feeling very impatient and even irritated) around steps 55-60. At step 80 I took a 2-minute break to close my eyes, relax, clear my mind, and to focus on the intention for the answer to come to me — this was helpful as the answers I received after this break began to have greater clarity.

Here was my final answer: to live consciously and courageously, to resonate with love and compassion, to awaken the great spirits within others, and to leave this world in peace.

When you find your own unique answer to the question of why you’re here, you will feel it resonate with you deeply. The words will seem to have a special energy to you, and you will feel that energy whenever you read them.

Discovering your purpose is the easy part. The hard part is keeping it with you on a daily basis and working on yourself to the point where you become that purpose.

If you’re inclined to ask why this little process works, just put that question aside until after you’ve successfully completed it. Once you’ve done that, you’ll probably have your own answer to why it works. Most likely if you ask 10 different people why this works (people who’ve successfully completed it), you’ll get 10 different answers, all filtered through their individual belief systems, and each will contain its own reflection of truth.

Obviously, this process won’t work if you quit before convergence. I’d guesstimate that 80-90% of people should achieve convergence in less than an hour. If you’re really entrenched in your beliefs and resistant to the process, maybe it will take you 5 sessions and 3 hours, but I suspect that such people will simply quit early (like within the first 15 minutes) or won’t even attempt it at all. But if you’re drawn to read this blog (and haven’t been inclined to ban it from your life yet), then it’s doubtful you fall into this group.

Give it a shot! At the very least, you’ll learn one of two things: your true purpose in life -or- that you should unsubscribe from this blog.

Answer 2

The purpose of life is a life of purpose.

Answer 3

Purpose...
Maybe we have to wait a long time to find out, because when you really think about it, there isn't an answer, is there? We get up in the morning, go work, go home, sleep, maybe squeeze in a vacation, and do it all over again until we get old.
For what?
Maybe it's more simple than that, and there is no purpose except to just survive; from the moment we are conceived, it's all about survival of the fittest, to exist, and to procreate another generation of survivors.

Answer 4

I believe we are all things. I believe we as spirits need to experience everything and each lifetime we set out certain experiences that we havent done or didnt accomplish last life.

I also believe that in order to fully evolve, we must understand all situations through experience. I also think we know everything once we die and where we went wrong in life.. then we plan the next life and take another stab at things.. (sorry, we know all things in spirit, but must learn them as humans..)

we must experience happiness.. sadness.. pain.. joy.. everything in EVERY situation. Whether it's HARD to experience any emotion or easy.. all the ways to experience it must be done in order to complete knowledge.

honestly, it's sad, but it's kinda like a RPG in my mind.. and Ive only played a few in my whole life time.. and not even to the end.

God is also the force of all the energies combined to make everything exist.

and i do worship and remain in awe of it's .. being. (not that it's a BEING, but that it's THERE and has so much power just because everything IS and WILL BE..)

also, all the prophets.. ALL of them.. buddah, jesus, mohammed.. were all people enlightened with this knowledge and tried to explain it in the best way humans could understand at that time.. for the culture..

again, does that make sense to anyone but me? can tha's how i feel and it touches many religions.. some more than others.. but it's my own opinions on how things are..

Answer 5

It's late, so thank you for asking a fairly direct question. The purpose of life is to help others. We all do it and it is the one thing which makes us all feel good inside. It is all one family. We are all in the same boat together. This is just the way it is. What one of us does affects all of the rest of us. It takes a lifetime to see it. That is my sense of what Life's purpose is. It is to care for itself and everyone who has it, or, is alive. Now, moving right along, other people give Life different purposes, some of which work and some of which annoy the rest of us. We seem to be for whatever fosters and maintains and cares for life. As I get older, helping other people seems to make me so right inside I think it may be directly connected to what life is really all about. So, from this writer, you will get the answer that life's purpose is to help others in any way I possibly can, from clearing the trash out of the back of their truck and hosing it down for them, leaving it to dry in the sun so they do not have to do it, to holding a man's hand while he dies to feeding a wounded animal to tucking in my daughter so she sleeps without fear. I have never been married, but I know that that would be a good thing to make a part of life's purpose.. tucking in your daughter. Making other people feel safe. Well, you certainly have awakened a lot of inner awareness of the real sense of your question. The next person will bring a totally different spin to it. What a miracle so many people have so many ideas about stuff. The idea is to find out what you truly believe and feel about all of it. Sent to you with a big hug from Chris in South Portland, Maine, U.S.A., who thanks you for posting such a great question. (I am 63 years old.)

Answer 6

This question has a unique answer for each individual based on genetic disposition and environment, we pick up the cards dealt us and hopefully make the best decisions at the time. Situations keep changing, so we have to constantly change with them.
Life is full of Yin and Yang. We feel safe staying in our every day routine, but we get bored easily, so we want to experience new things. But we're afraid to get out of our comfort zone.
We want to do things our own way, but we want to feel a part of something bigger than ourselves.
Life is like playing a game of darts blindfolded. Most of the time we listen to others to tell us where the dartboard is, and they can't see it either in spite of what they tell you.
There! And now you know...

Answer 7

I have come to the conclusion that life has no purpose. The best you can hope for are fleeting moments of happiness in an otherwise miserable existence until hopefully you die an early, quick and painless death. That's only my opinion, I could be wrong, but i doubt it.

Answer 8

We all have our own purposes, some just haven't discovered it yet. Life doesn't really have a purpose, you just have to live with it and deal with it the best you can.

Answer 9

the purpose of life is to just live

Answer 10

Good question.First answer these questions
1)What is the purpose of eyes, nose, ears,hands, legs genital organs
2) What is the purpose of tongue, teeth, stomach, intestines, kidneys, heart, lungs. liver, brain
3)What is the purpose of saliva, the power to taste, the power to digest food , the power to excrete, the power to think. the power to remember, the power to forget, the power of emotions like fear
4)What is the purpose of development of interest in sex when the person attains certain age and why the interest is normaly towards the opposite sex
5)What is the purpose of uterus. and what is the purpose of secreting milk immediately after delivery
Similarly observe the external world and answer why flowers are given honey and beautiful colour. Find out the answers to some of these questions you w ill realise that for your taking birth in this world also there must be some purpose
Man has got superior intelligence and he should not restrict his activities to eating, procreating and dying but use his intelligence to know the purpose for which he took birth in this world

The easiest way to know the purpose is to think over one's duties to the world around him/her, his/her duty to himself/herself. duty to family., duties to the society etc and above all his/her duty to God , his/her creator, the original cause, the father and mother..In Hindu religion , this duty is called dharma and you are required to do your dharma and nothing else...

Answer 11

I don't think that we will ever truely know. As you go through life, you start to figure out a few things, and piece by piece, everything comes together, but even when you're 80, you are still learning. So I don't think that that is a question anyone can answer unless they've seen everything there is to see, learned everything there is to learn, and felt everything that there is to feel.