What is the Purpose of Life? | Steve Beckow

Allow me to celebrate Patrick's opening of Voyages of Light with a discussion of a question that has plagued probably everyone from time to time, down through the centuries.

Is there a purpose to life? As Time Magazine in 1996 put it:

"Why does life exist at all? Is it simply that, if enough cosmic elements slop together for enough eons, eventually a molecule will form somewhere, or many somewheres, that can replicate itself over and over until it evolves into a creature that can scratch its head? Or did an all-powerful God set in motion an unfathomable process in order to give warmth and meaning to a universe that would otherwise be cold and meaningless?” (1)

No, it actually turns out that life does indeed have a purpose. And it does considered from God's perspective and from ours.

I can speak to this because of a vision experience I had in 1987 that showed me the purpose of life. I don't plan to go into the vision itself. I've described it here. (2)

But what the vision showed me conclusively was that the purpose of our lives - of life itself - is enlightenment - the purpose is to know who we are and who we are turns out to be God.

But we cannot know the answer simply as intellectual knowledge nor simply as experiential knowledge. We have to know it as realized knowledge. Not an easy task - ordinarily, as I'll discuss below.

The purpose of life for God - the reason God created life - was to raise up individual consciousnesses to himself which, in a moment of enlightenment, would realize who they are. At that moment, God realizes God. God tastes God's own Bliss. For that meeting was all of this created.

Knowing that, is it any surprise that so many of us go around talking about getting to know ourselves, wondering who we are, "working on" ourselves, etc.? We're simply doing unconsciously what life wants us to do consciously - discover our true identity.

From this sacred purpose that life has, everything else flows. All the accoutrements of the material plane are simply fixtures in a school for gods and goddesses in training, so to speak.

We graduate when we answer with loving conviction that extends to every cell of our bodies the one and only question in life: Who am I?

No amount of crimping, no amount of image management, no amount of fakery can get us past the sphinx who guards the inner temple. We either know without doubt who we are or we remain in school.

Or so it went for the last 13,000 years. Fortunately for us, school is about to end and we're about to graduate. A special once in 13 millennia event. (3)

When we do, all of us will know the answer to that question. And the realization of it will leave us bathed in love and bliss.

All of us, everyone - tall, short, black, white, Jew, Muslim - is God incarnate.

That too has consequences. But that's another story.

Footnotes

(1) Time, August 19, 1996, 40.

(2) "Ch. 13 Epilogue," at http://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/16244-2/the-purpose-of-life-is-enlightenment/ch-13-epilogue/.

For the full story, see The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment, at http://gaog.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Purpose-of-Life-is-Enlightenment.pdf

(3) An index of articles on the gradual-and-sudden event known as Ascension can be found here:

"On Ascension to the Fifth" at http://goldenageofgaia.com/ascension-to-the-fifth/