The answer is that there is no meaning or purpose. This is not an easy thing to accept however: this is the real problem. The reason why we can't accept it is that we have large amounts of energy to expend, and many desires to satisfy so that while our bodies are poised ready to floor the accelerator in pursuit of some goal, our minds discover with a little investigation that "goals" are not so one sided. An example is that of war. I watched again with pleasure "The Guns of Navarone" yesterday. The pursuit of that goal, and the licence that goal gives the protagonists to floor-the-accelerator (argued out between Peck and Niven many times), rouses the passions and the energy and gives us a view of the Noble Quest that goes back to the Age of Chivalry and probably beyond. I note, as an aside, Peck remarks about his "stupid Anglo-Saxon decency" (while talking to A. Quayle on the boat) and indeed I am beginning to realise this concept that underpins the British concept of the Gentleman is quite unique in the world - it may have existed in India in the concept of the Aryan (as discussed in this blog) but I'm beginning to see that it is all but lost everywhere.
Now the heart and the body rejoice in having all this excitement and useful application, but the mind quickly sees through it. For starters what is a celebration of a goal well done in the film is actually not even the start of the mission to over throw the Nazi occupation of the islands which the men on board the battle cruisers will have to under take. All could still fail! The other more obvious problem in the narrative (and argued at length in this blog) is that the Nazi are trying to do exactly the same against the Allies. A successful story for them is where lots of allies are killed and strategic land gained. It is simply that the narrative puts us on a particular side that the story can be a fulfilling ending; told from the Nazi side, exactly the same story is a crushing blow and very frustrating. The mind who can see both sides thus challenges the body which only wants to see one side. So challenged the mind sees that the body can never be satisfied except through wilful ignorance. This is the state of war, and of much human activity in general.
Another example that comes to mind is the saving of people's lives. We may give someone an extra 10 years, 20years or more through saving them, but the mind realises that death is not something we can run from for ever, it is integral to being alive - you can't have one without the other. So saving a life is only a matter of quantity not of quality, and one might argue that really facing death is a better approach than trying to escape it.
So the mind always leads the body back to the cross-roads of indecision and inaction. This all seems very depressing and frustrating, and that is what has hampered by progress in the question. What is obvious then is the next question what is the meaning of the question? I don't mean how do we understand the question, but rather why should it matter that there is no answer? Why do we struggle with the realisation that struggle never achieved anything!
So eventually the dawning realisation that what seems so catastrophic and depressing about life actually applies to the very depression and pointlessness itself and cancels it out. When the struggle for "something" has evaporated then there is simply stillness. No longer is there even the struggle to find that something, or even the desire to have a something at all. Is this what Buddha means by the "nothing".
Standing at the centre, which is where we always appear to be even after a long journey, then we are free to gaze out on the never changing world; all movements never shift us from the centre so nothing ever does anything or amounts to anything... and even that struggle we once had to measure the changes caused by our actions, or the movement and significance of our lives, or to find a direction in which to travel with full energy and haste, that struggle ends.
What is the Sanskrit for "struggle" it seems quite important. Dukkha might be the frustration at things never being quite right, but what of the struggle that we embark on the end dukkha through our ignorance of the Dharma (Law of reality, Word or Logos)? Does this suggest I have it wrong, or simply not read things right?
So the meaning of life is found when we stop struggling. It is that old parable (told by P. Coelho in the Alchemist) that the gold of our lives lies at home, at the start of the journey that we will return back to with wisdom. That parable shows that the very search for " a meaning to life" actually equips us with the wisdom that we had lost and which began the journey, the wisdom that tells us to look at "home", or the centre, from where we shifted in ignorance in the first place. The Mount Kilash from which Shiva almost never stirs. Home as notes in the Blog and known to me long before I started writing this is the issue that lies in all human hearts. I first wrote that in an analysis of caving where caving was seen as an allegory for the return home (caves having been amongst the first homes used by man). Where we mostly end up in family homes, this itself is an allegory for the final stage of finding the family and the home within ourselves.
Once we are at home, then what? What is the working day like for the person who really comes home to his soul, and not just his wife and his bed, at the end of the day? This is what I cannot quite grasp. I have a glimpse in writing the above that while a doctor may be mostly wasting his time creating more years for the ageing, if he spends his time instead leading people toward wisdom and their own souls, and gives them those extra years in order to do that, then his day is well spent. It is the cloud of materialism that blinds the sun which is often the problem. A problem is reduced to a material series of facts and equations and thus "solved". An ill person is mended and then discharged. Yet the real illness probably still continues both in the doctor and the patient, that the point here wasn't the dying, but rather the fear of death. In 30 years time the patient may return and this time there is nothing the doctor can do; neither person can run from the reality this time and then death must be faced. This is not to say that people shouldn't seek to live, that is an absurd thought since we do live already so why change it, it is that it is better to die in touch with our soul than to live in fear of it. I write this as much for myself as anyone who reads it. The doctors priority is really to bring the patient to accept the nature of their body and life rather than gloss over it with science, medical technology and miracle cures.
So it is not that being at spiritual home is an opportunity to be indecisive and do nothing, rather it is the source from which we can see what we do from the right perspective. It gives what we do the added bonus of being true and with good foundation. That said it is more important to get to spiritual home, than to do what we do - I think that is the main shift in approach here. Even if we do nothing if we get back to spiritual home we have lived the full life already. However we may do a very great many thing but if we never taste our own soul then we have a house without foundations.
Husband is jailed for ordering machete murder | UK news | The Guardian
Women are choosy - look who they choose. This hit the papers today, several hours after I posted my headline. Can you understand my bemusement/bewilderment/bi