What Was Your Purpose in Being Born?
At first glance, it is unclear why we were even born in the first place. We see no true beginning or end. We perceive ourselves only on the animal level, i.e., our body is born, it suffers, enjoys a little, and then it dies. This is how most people live and die, without ever lifting their heads above this fleeting existence.
If we cannot rise above this view, then we simply cannot understand the meaning of life. Our entire history becomes one flat and repetitive cycle: birth, suffering, death, again and again, generation after generation.
However, if we desire and manage to rise higher, then everything changes. We then stop living by the physical body’s instincts and desires, detaching from them and rising above them. Only then do we start feeling what our soul demands from us.
Then, the formula of “birth, suffering, and death” transforms to become “birth” as the beginning of a process to rise above egoism; “suffering” as the fuel for that transformation, i.e., the pain of separation from our inborn self-serving desires, which urges us to climb. We begin to perceive reality not through reception, as we do in our physical body, but through bestowal, as we do in spirituality. That is, through love, bestowal, and positive connection to others, through mutual responsibility, we discover the true, eternal, and perfect life that is hidden behind what we now call “life.”
On one hand, however, it is bitter to realize that our earthly formula is just “birth, suffering, then death.” But on the other hand, without this painful and limited path, we would never come to discover another one. Without experiencing the harsh and bleak reality we are currently in, we would never yearn for something higher. We would never seek, never awaken, and never change ourselves. Nature gave us this path not to punish us, but to guide us by giving us something to rise above.
This has been going on for millennia. Our history is filled with volumes upon volumes of suffering and striving. But in the end, what are all those records? They are nothing compared to the fact that underlying this history we perceive with our bodily senses, there are souls evolving. Each life, struggle, and question is another step toward the awakening of the soul to develop similarity and closeness with the laws of nature that created and sustain us.
We are born to live nothing less than an eternal and perfect existence. That is our purpose. Not to crawl through a short existence and disappear, but to rise to an eternal spiritual state, consciously, willingly, and through our own effort.