Why are we here? Do we have a higher purpose? If so, then what?

Answer 1

we are her to help one another. to help the weak and do what ever we can do for another person

Answer 2

Why are we here?
The short answer is because the sperm that contained half your DNA was the fastest. Natural evidence suggests that life has evolved from a simple form over billions of years.

But I guess that answers "how," not "why." Although it seems there is no reason "why" we are here, other than we are the products of natural processes, our large brains, language, and social behavior give us the ability to think more abstractly than other animals. So, we can create our own purpose in the brief time we are alive. It is an individual decision.

Answer 3

Our purpose is like that of all animals (yes, people are animals and if anyone disagrees, feel free to call yourself a plant)-- that purpose is to survive and reproduce. that's it... that's why we are alive, because our ancestors fought for food and safety so they could have kids and so on. People can create excuses or imaginary 'purposes' but if we give up on our innate purpose, we will not survive, just like the rest of the animal world.

Answer 4

To love each other, to love God. What higher purpose do we need?

Answer 5

We are here to glorify God; we are created for God’s glory.

Isaiah 43:67 “I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Do not keep back; bring My sons from far and My daughters from the ends of the earth; everyone who is called by My name; for I have created him for My glory, I have formed him; yea, I have made him.”

1 Corinthians 10:31 “Therefore whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”

Answer 6

The purpose of life is to love and serve God.
Some say the purpose of life is to procreate, but not everyone gets married and has children, including priests and nuns.

Answer 7

We are here for God's pleasure and for His purposes

Answer 8

we are here to know, love, and serve God. We are to accept God's gift of love, concieve it, and bear it forth to others. Our destiny is to divinized and share in Christ's divine sonship in heaven, therefore, the Holy Trinity (God) will be our home and temple for eternity. In heaven, Christ, the bridegroom is united in perfect marital union with his bride, the Church. They will exchange their life and love through their glorified bodies for eternity. God bless!

Answer 9

God created humans for His own glory. Yes we are here to sevre and worship our Creator

Answer 10

We are here to serve God in all His glory, but if that doesn't work for you, eating chocolate works pretty good too.

Answer 11

Why? Simply to know. You have the answer in the very fact that you ask the question: you have this desire to know. It is good that way. An answer to your question that would not come from your direct personal experience would not be satisfactory.

However, we need to explain better that experience of knowing. We are delusional when we think that the act of knowing is superficial. There is nothing superficial in the act of knowing. The body is needed to know the superficial object of the senses, but the act of knowing detached from the object of senses doesn't need a body. Already when we do mathematics we have this notion that knowing may exist without the superficial object of the senses, but it's vague. It is difficult to associate a reality to these vague notions, but we do experience them anyway.

Almost all religions teach us that knowing is more fundamental than material existence. This is why we speak in terms of deities, gods, and ultimately of God. In no way this means that we try to explain away science. We must emphasis that an act of knowing is a very large concept, and it doesn't have to contradict the systematic laws that we discover through science. Nothing that we say here is a replacement for science. Science is the way to understand what is going on. I am just trying to make a connection with our personal experience of an act of knowing.

Awareness, consciousness, potential to know, etc. are different expressions for this ultimate basis behind all acts of knowing. It is about experience, not just philosophy. It is a common experience that in the night we are not always aware of things, but yet some people are more aware in their night than others. For some people, there is always some awareness, even when there is no object of awareness beside this awareness itself.

To make the connection between the notion of awareness and science, we would like to relate this pure awareness with the unified field of physics in its pure state. Of course, in physics only the object aspect of this ultimate reality is considered, not its knower aspect. Fortunately, even physicists admit that thoughts, as everything else, is a manifestation of this unified field. Sure, it is the common experience that before we had a body this awareness was not manifested. We cannot deny this fact, and some atheists will insist on that. Still, we can say that it was there in potential form. So, we can at the least say that there is a reality of awareness in the unified field of physics. This is an association between our awareness and the unified field of physics.

However, this intellectual association of awareness and the unified field of physics is not sufficiently interesting. It is too intellectual, not enough a practical fact. Philosophers could explain it away with the notion of emerging properties. We have presented thus far no useful connection between these two sides of the reality, and let us recall that, until other evidence is presented, it took billions of years for the potential awareness aspect of the unified field of physics to manifest itself into some active awareness. Unless we can present such a practical connection, atheists and skeptics will perhaps suggest that the experience of pure awareness that some have is only a delusional experience not really related to the unified field of physics in a pure state. With a practical connection, the association will become meaningful.

Fortunately, there are many useful connections that provide evidence for this association. Let us begin by the simplest ones. If the unified field of physics is associated with pure awareness, we expect this pure awareness to be something systematic, a source of order, something reliable. At this point, I have to mention transcendental meditation because it is the only well known and studied technique that directly brings the experience of pure awareness. The fact that this experience of pure awareness is a source of order, etc. has been verified scientifically in many ways. Anomalies such as hypertension, anxiety due to bad substances, etc. diminish with this experience. The brain itself enters into a state of global coherence as can easily be seen with many different brain imagery techniques. So, this is some evidence that the experience of pure awareness is something real, practical, as we expect from a contact with the pure awareness of the unified field of physics.

There is another simple evidence. When we do transcendental mediation we do not attempt to have the experience of pure awareness. The technique is such that it happens naturally, by itself. What happens is that the active awareness tends toward its simplest form naturally, and when it happens the entire physiology follows. This suggests that there is some laws embedded in our active awareness. These laws act all the way long in the process and also within the experience of pure awareness itself. This is clearly evidence that this pure awareness is not just delusional but is as systematics as are the laws of nature in the unified field of physics.

Fine, we have established some useful practical connections between our experience of pure awareness and the pure state of the unified field of physics. This is some evidence. However, we do need more evidence for this association to be really justified. The unified field of physics embeds all the laws of nature, not just some laws that act within the brain and the physiology. Unless we can demonstrate that some other laws are activated when we experience pure awareness within us, the association is not really justified.

There are advanced techniques to benefit more systematically from the experience of pure awareness. What is great about transcendental meditation and these advanced techniques is that they are the same everywhere in the world. They are very systematic techniques, yet very simple too. So, we are not talking about phenomena that cannot be systematically repeated and studied by all scientists around the world. As expected, it has been observed that the laws activated within the experience of pure awareness act throughout the entire society, not just within the physiology. The effects are measurable when large groups of people practice the techniques together. These experiences have been repeated several times. People are skeptics. It is perfectly normal. However, they have been published in scientific journals. More publications and more public demonstrations keep coming each year.

Christians and other religious people will have no difficulty to appreciate what is going on. Clearly, there cannot be two ultimate realities. So, the ultimate reality of all the laws of nature, the unified field of physics, must be the same ultimate reality than God. In the case of Christianity, I have seen Christians telling me that Jesus was the embodiment of all the laws of nature. What else could Jesus be? When Jesus came as flesh, the term laws of nature wasn't used. So, He said he was the path. Today, we know that the laws of nature are the path, but we don't appreciate them fully through the current state of science. Religions bring a new light, and transcendental meditation is a practical gift from these laws of nature. It is all and only about the laws of nature.

(Edit) cratertot, I don't think there is much chance that we will give up on that....You should even add love in your list. We are also driven by chemicals to love, not just to copulate, eat, etc. For me, these are the mechanisms that define how our machinery works. Yes, yes, its completely real, like in the animals. The question is why this machinery? Where do we go with it? I still feel the answer is to know, for the beauty of knowing. In particular, what we call love takes its real meaning only if we are fully aware of it. First, pure awareness must be awaken so that the knower has a basis, then the knower can appreciate God in action, and see that it acts from there.