Have you settled on a meaning of your life when, all along, it had already been predetermined? Are you still searching for the predetermined meaning of your life while, all along, it has been hidden in plain sight? If you were to discover it, could you be assured that you have it right?
These questions came back to me for the umpteenth time on a recent train trip. As I gazed out the window, I couldn’t help overhearing a conversation coming from the seats just behind me.
She began by saying, “Guess what! I just discovered the meaning of life. All along, it had been hiding in plain sight!” He said, “Knock yourself out!” She replied, “No! Hear me out.” Silence.
She began, “We, and everyone and everything else in existence, were created by a self-creating, all-knowing and timeless being. Its purpose must be the purpose of the lives it created. Because it created us, it must want us. If follows that its purpose for us is that we want it. Because it is timeless, that is eternal, its purpose for us must be that we become at one with it for eternity.”
He interjected, “Whoa! This is quickly beginning to sound like, “Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so.”
Ignoring him, she continued. “To give us the choice whether to want it, it gave us free will. To help us freely decide whether we want it, it revealed itself to us a little at a time – as much as we could internalize at the time.”
He couldn’t contain himself. “Now you’re going to tell me that your creator talks to you. Do you speak in tongues as well? If my creator wanted me to want it, why wouldn’t it talk to me as well?”
She replied, “No, it doesn’t talk to me. If it talked to us, we would be overwhelmed by its magnificence, leaving us without a choice whether to respond to it. Instead, it puts what it wants to reveal to us directly into our minds. It leaves it up to us to decide whether to search our minds for its revelation.”
“So, you believe that everything you discover in your mind is your creator’s revelation to you?”
“Of course not! I can associate most things in my mind with what I experience – people I’ve talked to, things I’ve read, something I see on television or the internet or things that happen to me. However, I cannot connect some things in my mind with anything I experience. Where else could they have come from? It seems our creator knew, long before we discovered, that we learn more from doing and thinking than from being told or shown.”
“So, you have decided that the meaning of life is to achieve your creator’s purpose in creating you – that you choose to pursue the knowledge of your creator that you need to become at one with it for eternity. That’s your story, and you’re sticking with it?”
What do you think of the conversation they’d been having? Could she have been on to something? If so, she was a lot closer to discovering life’s meaning than her seatmate. Might she have been simply moving too fast for her seat mate? Was she moving a bit too fast for you as well? Does their conversation tempt you to watch how this subject is dealt with in the Meaning of Life Video Series?
Del H. Smith conducts research into life’s meaning and is the award-winning author of the AMAZON Best Seller, Discovering Life’s Purpose.