what is the true meaning of life?

Question

what do you think

Answer 1

The philosophical question "What is the meaning of life?" means different things to different people. The vagueness of the query is inherent in the word "meaning", which opens the question to many interpretations, such as: "What is the origin of life?", "What is the nature of life (and of the universe in which we live)?", "What is the significance of life?", "What is valuable in life?", and "What is the purpose of, or in, (one's) life?". These questions have resulted in a wide range of competing answers and arguments, from scientific theories, to philosophical, theological, and spiritual explanations.

These questions are separate from the scientific issue of the boundary between things with life and inanimate objects.
Popular beliefs
"What is the meaning of life?" is a question many people ask themselves at some point during their lives, most in the context "What is the purpose of life?" Here are some of the many potential answers to this perplexing question. The responses are shown to overlap in many ways but may be grouped into the following categories:

Survival and temporal success
...to live every day like it is your last and to do your best at everything that comes before you
...to be always satisfied
...to live, go to school, work, and die
...to participate in natural human evolution, or to contribute to the gene pool of the human race
...to advance technological evolution, or to actively develop the future of intelligent life
...to compete or co-operate with others
...to destroy others who harm you, or to practice nonviolence and nonresistance
...to gain and exercise power
...to leave a legacy, such as a work of art or a book
...to eat
...to prepare for death
...to spend life in the pursuit of happiness, maybe not to obtain it, but to pursue it relentlessly.
...to produce offspring through sexual reproduction (alike to participating in evolution)
...to protect and preserve one's kin, clan, or tribe (akin to participating in evolution)
...to seek freedom, either physically, mentally or financially
...to observe the ultimate fate of humanity to the furthest possible extent
...to seek happiness and flourish, experience pleasure or celebrate
...to survive, including the pursuit of immortality through scientific means
...to attempt to have many sexual conquests (as in Arthur Schopenhauer's will to procreate)
...to find and take over all free space in this "game" called life
...to seek and find beauty
...to kill or be killed
...No point. Since having a point is a condition of living human consciousness. Animals do not need a point to live or exist. It is more of an affliction of consciousness that there are such things as points, a negative side to evolutionary development for lack of better words.

Wisdom and knowledge
...to master and know everything
...to be without questions, or to keep asking questions
...to expand one's perception of the world
...to explore, to expand beyond our frontiers
...to learn from one's own and others' mistakes
...to seek truth, knowledge, understanding, or wisdom
...to understand and be mindful of creation or the cosmos
...to lead the world towards a desired situation
...to satisfy the natural curiosity felt by humans about life

Ethical
...to express compassion
...to follow the "Golden Rule"
...to give and receive love
...to work for justice and freedom
...to live in peace with yourself and each other, and in harmony with our natural environment
...to protect humanity, or more generally the environment
...to serve others, or do good deeds

Religious and spiritual
...to find perfect love and a complete expression of one's humanness in a relationship with God
...to achieve a supernatural connection within the natural context
...to achieve enlightenment and inner peace
...to become like God, or divine
...to glorify God
...to experience personal justice (i.e. to be rewarded for goodness)
...to experience existence from an infinite number of perspectives in order to expand the consciousness of all there is (i.e. to seek objectivity)
...to be a filter of creation between heaven and hell
...to produce useful structure in the universe over and above consumption (see net creativity)
...to reach Heaven in the afterlife
...to seek and acquire virtue, to live a virtuous life
...to turn fear into joy at a constant rate achieving on literal and metaphorical levels: immortality, enlightenment, and atonement
...to understand and follow the "Word of God"
...to discover who you are
...to resolve all problems that one faces, or to ignore them and attempt to fully continue life without them, or to detach oneself from all problems faced

Philosophical
...to give life meaning
...to participate in the chain of events which has led from the creation of the universe until its possible end (either freely chosen or determined, this is a subject widely debated amongst philosophers)
...to know the meaning of life
...to achieve self-actualisation
...all possible meanings have some validity
...life in itself has no meaning, for its purpose is an opportunity to create that meaning, therefore:
...to die
...to simply live until one dies (there is no universal or celestial purpose)
...nature taking its course (the wheel of time keeps on turning)
...whatever you see you see, as in "projection makes perception"
...there is no purpose or meaning whatsoever
...life may actually not exist, or may be illusory )
...to contemplate "the meaning of the end of life"

Other
...to contribute to collective meaning ("we" or "us") without having individual meaning ("I" or "me")
...to find a purpose, a "reason" for living that hopefully raises the quality of one's experience of life, or even life in general
...to participate in the inevitable increase in entropy of the universe
...to make conformists' lives miserable
...to make life as difficult as possible for others (i.e. to compete)

Answer 2

80% of humanity, the religious folks, don't need to ask the meaning of life, the church tells them....the supernatural explanation. But the rest of us can't swallow religious dogma, because there's no evidence. Nobody can prove that there life after death, that people are tortured or rewarded after life or that there's invisible spirits running around.

I've come to two conclusions recently:

1. Life has no meaning
2. Life has a million meanings.

First, there's a certainty that death and annihilation awaits not only you, but the Earth in general. It's an astonomical certainty that our sun will supernova and leave the earth a burnt crisp, not to mention all the other extinction level events around the corner.

Second, the million things that give us meaning are the pleasurable experiences we can conjure up during the short period we are here on the earth, in the form of the relationships we have with our kids and other people, and the 'housekeeping' types of purposes. What i mean by that are the curing disease, ending hunger, improving literacy, reducing crime, preventing war, helping other kinds of things.

So the bottom line is, we only have a temporary meaning to life, to reduce pain and increase pleasure, other than that everything is lost to oblivion.


To be or not to be? "To be" is temporary and "not to be" is inevitable.....

Answer 3

Hello:

Well I would say check out the past logs when this question has been asked.

However here is the short version. Life is pain and you will die...those are two facts. The only thing you can do is starve off pain and the best way to do that is to find meaning in something in life. This takes some doing, however the only way to make life mean something is to make it mean something through any variety of options from family to work to money and power to fame or any combination.

I hope this helps

Rev Phil

Answer 4

The true meaning of life is your the meaning of your passion to you. You can only answer honestly to yourself your meaning of life. Discover who you are? What is your true expression and the meaning of your life. There is a book I read that was sad but true story. Man search for meaning by Victor Frankel deep book but in the end you come into your own answers for your life.

Answer 5

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Answer 6

the true meaning is for us to search for the meaning therefore finding the meaning and then after we find the meaning we no longer have to look for the meaning so therefore life no longe has meaning and we do not need to exist any longer

Answer 7

In my opinion, we are here to explore and learn. It should be fun.

If we remembered that we are all connected and our true selves are "created in God's image", which is an all powerful energy being capable of creating exactly what we want, it would be more fun because we wouldn't take everything so seriously.

Answer 8

Don't worry about what the "true" meaning of life is. Live it to the fullest, be good to others and yourself, and follow your dreams.

Answer 9

"What I think:" To learn to "Love God completely, love colleague as Self, love as Christ Jesus, Truth, loves, and ascend in the Light of God as have Enoch, Elijah, Jesus, and many Saints."

Also, keeping a home for God, being "truly" happily married ( has some good ideas about this), and giving to one's children some or all of the above as example are good, as is learning to earn and taking care of one's body temple.

You might find helpful, "Expecting Adam," Martha Beck, who is wise, witty, and profound; "Climb the Highest Mountain," Mark Prophet; "Watch Your Dreams," Ann Ree Colton; "Man, Master of His Destiny" and "The Yoga of Nutrition," O. M. Aivanhov; "University of Destruction," David Wheaton; "Extraordinary Knowing," Dr. Elizabeth Mayer, "Life before Life," Jim Tucker, M.D., and "The Reincarnation of Edgar Cayce?", Free and Wilcock, http://www.divinecosmos.com

cordially,

j.

Answer 10

our purpose is to have an effect on one and other. and it doesn't matter what you do in life you will achieve that goal. it doesn't matter if your an astronaut inspiring young people or a tele-marketer interrupting every one's dinner, you have an effect on people, and thats why your here.

Answer 11

It's whatever it means to you. Nothing more, nothing less, and what anyone else thinks, including me, doesn't matter.