whats the meaning of life?

Answer 1

The meaning of life is what you make it be.

Answer 2

That depends on who you ask:

An evolutionary biologist speaking at the purely biological level might say that our reason for being here is because our genes have proven to be successful at propagating themselves into successive generations, and our bodies are tools for the further propagation of our genes; our identities based on a biological predisposition ("nature") and environmental conditioning ("nurture").

To Douglas Adams, the answer is "42."

Some philosophies and religions might say that our purpose should be to live a happy and fulfilling life, help people and do good if you can and try not to hurt people. The current Dalai Lama echoes this in "Do good if you can, but at least do no harm."

An evangelical Christian might say that our reason to be here is to give glory to God and to accept Jesus as our personal savior to achieve the ultimate goal of eternal life in heaven. Many other prominent religions have similar tenets.

My personal take is a mixture of the evolutionary biologist (which answers HOW we are here) and the ethical "Do good if you can, but at least do no harm" philospohy (which suggests what we should actually DO with our lives)... With a smattering of Douglas Adams just for fun.

As for what the meaning of life is for you... Well, that's a decision for you to make personally, something that will take years of self reflection to answer, and will probably change subtly or momentously several times throughout your life.

Answer 3

Don't be ridiculous. There is no meaning to life. We are alive purely because of the random and dependent events of the past. Not any great plan.

Any need for you to have a 'meaning' to your life shows a certain amount of mental weakness.
Stop worrying about things. Enjoy yourself, you'll be a long time dead.

Answer 4

I had once pondered over this question too, it only set me into a period of depression. You must realize that there is no one answer that is absolute. It is up to you to find and choose the one that best suits you.

For me, the most unique answer is put forward by Scott's Adam in
his on line article, God's Debris. As suggested, we are all part of the bigger entity. The article is definitely enriching, reasoning our existence, at the same time, explaining all the strange phenomenons in the world and our basic knowledge of the law of physics through a new perspective. Have a go at it.

Answer 5

The meaning of life? To love God.

But, everyone has their own purpose in life.

Just read the book "The Purpose Driven Life" by Rick Warren.

It helps you find your purpose.

Answer 6

I am a Muslim girl and my understanding of life through my experience it means proximity to God is great comfort and gives HE unprecedented and the simple life without the complexity of life on one goal, which points to heaven and life also is a journey we are to go back to their homes, whether fire or heaven, we can in this life, happiness also

Answer 7

There is no meaning to life, it is beautiful and ugly, happy and sad, life is random, that is what makes it so great, dont try to analyze it, just go with it.

Answer 8

Everyone has create some meaning of life. And everyone based on their experience. From my experience I believe to be more happy and have joy, you have to find yourself and then someone who accepts you as you are. But in nowdays its kinda of hard, don't you think?

Answer 9

Don't know if it has a meaning but it has a purpose. To have as much fun as possible in the time allocated. Try it.

Answer 10

Before we can tackle meaning, weve got to know what meaning is. Meaning is an intention, aim, or design. When we say we want to know what life means, we are really saying we want to know what its for. What purpose does it serve? Well, the primary feature of life is intelligence. By intelligence we mean purposeful activity. We make decisions and do things. Parameciums make decisions and do things. Rocks do not make decisions, although they can chip a tooth. If we knew why we have intelligence, we would be a great deal closer to understanding why we do anything, including exist. To understand intelligence, we must understand the mind.

Science has given us many answers, but the one thing that science is still completely silent about is the nature of consciousness. Of course, there is more and more information every day about the connection between consciousness and the brain. Scientists, both mad and sane, are undertaking detailed research on how our minds and behavior are affected when parts of our brain are stimulated, removed, and even added. These things affect our memories, feelings, and our thought processes. However, such research still doesnt answer the question of what consciousness is.

If you built a robot that had no real understanding but did have a vast store of stock responses and some clever rules about building sentences, it might fool many people into thinking it had intelligence. Because you programmed it, however, you would know that there were no "mental images" floating around inside the circuits of that machine. It simply took input, processed it according to specific rules, and generated output. The question is, why do we have these mental images and feelings? Why arent we biological "machines" that simply processes signals and automatically generate responses with no awareness of what going on? Why do we have consciousness, and where did it come from?

Consciousness is something completely different from other characteristics of matter such as mass, charge, structure, etc. While our consciousness seems to depend on the matter in our brains, we cannot detect anything unusual about our brains that would indicate why consciousness is attached to it. If we agree that consciousness is in the brain as a whole, is it in a single neuron? A single atom? A single electron? Assuming that nothing exists except for interacting particles, somehow within every particle there is something that provides the basis for consciousness.

Complex conscious activity may require highly complex structures such as our brains to occur, but the basis of consciousness must be present in matter itself. Our minds are simply one manifestation of a universal phenomena. People are examples of one way to organize the consciousness in matter. Are there other ways? How can we know which types of organizations of matter yield high-level consciousness like ours, and which do not? Are there structures which support levels of consciousness higher than ours? Are doorknobs conscious?

Not only is consciousness a universal property of matter, it is the primary property of matter. In fact, its the other way around, matter is a property of consciousness!

Yes, consciousness is primary. Matter sprang from consciousness. We cant help it if this is starting to sound like Genesis, its just the way it is. In the beginning was the word, and the word was pinging around the inside some sort of Mind, and it generated the physical universe.

So, to summarize, the meaning of life is linked to the workings of the mind from which the universe sprang.

Before the beginning of time, there was a single consciousness. In fact, there may have been a bunch of other stuff, but that's way outside our scope here. That consciousness thought and dreamed an infinity of thoughts, feelings, landscapes, and worlds, an infinity of possible creations. These mental creations thought their own thoughts, and these secondary thoughts also created their own inner worlds. The original consciousness observed and interacted with these inner beings as they interacted with one another, and that original consciousness began to provide the environments required for its creations to grow and develop. All of the entities within the mind of the first longed to exist independently and grow and create as they had been created.

The first consciousness, in order to allow its progeny full freedom of expression, began to imagine the conditions that would be required for the release of these inner worlds into objective existence. As it did so, all of space, time, and matter, including our universe, exploded into being. On the highest level, this physical existence contains an infinite number of dimensions and environments that match the infinite variety of possibilities that had formed in the mind of the original consciousness.

This process continues as the progeny of that first mind grow and create new thoughts and new worlds. We are a result of that process, and our purpose is ultimately the same: to grow, to develop, and to create, in order to express all of the potentialities within ourselves. We are still in contact with the original mind because we are made of it, we sprang from it, and because time has no meaning outside of the physical universe, our past, present, and future exist together as an infinite variety of possibilities within that larger moment.