Is there any Purpose or Meaning in our lives?The purpose of life is to find God and nothing else

 

 Vedanta teaches that we need to turn to our own innermost self to find the meaning of life. No words can describe this better than these lines from Tagore: “One day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded./ Only now and again a sadness fell upon me and I started up from my dream and felt a sweet trace of a strange fragrance in the south wind./ That  vague sweetness made my head ache with longing and it seemed to me that it was the eager breath of the summer seeking for its completion./ I knew  not then that it was so near, that it was mine, and that this perfect sweetness had blossomed in the depth of my own heart.”  Sri Ramakrishna said once: The purpose of life is to find God, nothing else…Please share life lessons on how to make our lives meaningful. What do you see as the true purpose of our lives? Your wisdom will enrich all of us.

Pic re shared courtesy: tunesoftheflute.blogspot.com, Rabindra Nath Tagore:’Gitanjali: v.50)

Is there any Purpose or Meaning in our lives? Attitudinal Heroism

 No discussion on the meaning of life is complete without turning to Dr. Viktor Frankl. A distinguished psychiatrist by profession, he spent three  horrendous years  at the  Auschwitz concentration camp in Germany during World War II. Name, fame, wealth, social status, education, family background etc fell into a dust heap at Auschwitz. A prisoner was just a ‘number’ in rags surviving on watery soup and a piece of stale bread. A bag of bones shackled to dehumanizing work until the inmate was too weak to be useful at which point he was sent to the gas chambers. Is there any meaning or purpose in such a wretched existence? Is there any virtue in ‘getting through’ such suffering? Frankl says there is, because unavoidable suffering is ‘attitudinal heroism.’ A condemned man trapped in terrible circumstances can turn his suffering into an achievement by refusing to compromise on  his dignity, decency and compassion. A man who refuses to be brutalized by circumstances is a hero. What we become when faced with suffering is an inner decision. We can either sink to the level of animals or rise above our situation to grow spiritually and give a deeper meaning to our lives.

(Pic re shared courtesy: www.wherenow.com,

Viktor E. Frankl; ‘Man’s search for Meaning’)

Is there any Purpose or Meaning in our lives? What will come of what I’m doing today or shall do tomorrow?

Stanley Kubrick gave an interview in 1968 which has become a classic: “If man really sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space? ” Vedanta answers these questions by asserting that none of us is a dust mote. We are all part of one indivisible, eternal life.  We redeem ourselves through self transcendence that is by our connection with others.

Source: www.brainpickings.com,

Artist: Nino Chakvetadze

Pic re shared courtesy: Art & Painting, www.facebook,com