The Meaning of Life
"You ask yourself: where are those dreams of yours? You shake your head and say: how the years go by! And again you ask yourself: what have you done with your life? Where have you buried your best years? Have you lived or not? More years will pass, bringing dismal loneliness with them, and then shivering old age will come leaning on a crutch, and after that just misery and bleakness. Your phantom world will grow dim, your dreams will wither and fall like dead yellow leaves."
-- Dostoyevsky. White Nights
On a beautiful Monday morning not too long ago, I was having a chat with my fellow coder. At one point, he said:
“I wake up every day with this question: What’s the point?”
“What’s the point of everything and anything we do? The age-old question of finding meaning to life”, I thought to myself. And I struggled to answer.
“I don’t know either”, I wanted to say. But something else came out:
“Maybe the point is to do good for others and enjoy the deed itself.”
“Work without expectation of results?” He smiled.
“Yes. Our hands to work and our minds to God? Maybe?” I repeated what I had read in one of the essays by Vivekananda.
“That is there, but still …”
He was not satisfied with my answer. I could see. Well, somewhere inside, I was not satisfied with my own answer either.
“What’s the point of it all?”
Now it was me who started to dwell on the question. This work. The family. The house. Money. More money. Fame. And the list goes on …
Every day we wake up. We hurry to get ready for work. Spend the day at work — pretending to be busy and doing something useful. We complain. We whine. Browse things online: some unnecessary news, and consume social media. And tomorrow — some more of the same stuff.
For me, it’s the Tuesdays — the trash day. The familiar sound of that trash truck around 7 in the morning.
“It’s another Tuesday”, I think to myself while I roll the trash container. How many Tuesdays have come and gone? Some more and then some more. And there will be a final Tuesday?
Where’s the end to this cycle?
“The only difference between me and you is that I am awake”, said Buddha. Are we all sleep-walking zombies then? I am as awake as possible, we might think. But to understand what Buddha said, we need to dig a little bit deeper into our own minds. And then we might learn some things about ourselves. We just know we are going somewhere, doing the same thing that everyone else is doing — but not really sure — for what.
I remember the day I saw the house again. I had lived for many years here. My mother had wanted a house, and we built one. I was so proud we were able to do that for my mother. You should see the pride in a mother’s eye for her son’s accomplishment! I sometimes look back and think this was the best reward of my life — that pride of a mother. But now that she is gone, this house somehow does not have the same meaning to me anymore. It was just a big empty house, which had lost its soul. The feeling and attachment to the house had gone. It had lost all the point.
It’s like everything makes sense for a moment, and when that moment is gone — it’s gone. A bubble arises in water and then disappears. What’s the point? A leaf falls from a tree and is swept away by the wind. What’s the point?
In some way, yes the question does not make any sense and has no apparent explanation. It seems in the end, there is no point in anything we do.
An article I read in Scientific American started thus:
“When the majority of stars reach the end of their life, they make their own funeral pyre, throwing off most of their remaining gas in a glorious last display of their immense power and leaving behind a dense, cinder like core known as a white dwarf. But what becomes of any planets orbiting such a star?”
There’s an “I” in each one of us, including all these stars, this earth, and the moon. Everything is floating in the lap of this time-machine. Looking at the world, and beyond this world, the Sun, the stars, the galaxy we are in, and the galaxies far away, the black hole that sucks everything up, this Universe and maybe more Universes — and then we look at ourselves and think what are we? A dust particle? Yes, hard to swallow — as insignificant as that.
We ask ourselves what’s the point. By doing so the mind is just throwing a problem at ourselves, and then we spend the life thinking about it. Thoughts are the middlemen, and our mind is full of these middlemen. We could never have a direct transaction.
Driving all the way home, I was thinking about all this. And then at home, I watched a documentary called Being 97. It was about a 97-year old philosopher, who wrote a book about Death. He says he wrote that book some 20 years ago and in it, he wrote:
“There’s nothing to be afraid of death. Because once you die, you do not suffer.”
But now, much older, much closer to death — he says he sees the things a bit differently. It is a foolish question, he concludes.
In what sense is this question foolish, I wondered. It is one thing to ponder at something philosophically, and then it is another thing to endure it yourself.
“The quality of life was not there” Sometimes I hear this justification that it was OK for such and such person to go. But what does the man who has to go, think? How much value does his life have for him?
“Where was it”, Raskolnikov thought as he walked on, “where was it that I read of how a condemned man, just an hour before his death, said or thought that if he had to live on some high crag, on a ledge so small that there was no more than the room, for his two feet — with all about him in the abyss, the ocean, eternal solitude, and eternal storms — and he would remain there, on that narrow strip of ground for all his life, for a thousand years, throughout all eternity — it would be better to go on living thus than to die once! Only to live, to live on! No matter how — only to live! — How true! Lord, how true! How low man is! — And he who calls him low is low himself!” he added, a minute later."
— Dostoyevsky. Crime & Punishment
How true!
The 97-year-old philosopher looks out of the window and says, “I have been looking at this tree for so many years, but only now I realize how beautiful this tree is.”
It’s a sad moment. Why do we all realize this truth only in the end?
In the book, Top 5 Regrets of the Dying, the list goes something like this:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me,
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard,
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings,
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends,
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Do we even wake up in the end? We listen, but we are not really listening. We pray, but our minds are wandering. We look at someone, but we are not really looking. The mind seems to be busy in its own fantasy. The mind is looking for things to do to cover up reality, looking for happiness. We have friends, TV, internet, parties and sports to entertain us. Something to keep our minds engaged and feel that we are happy. But happiness is like a drug that makes us lull, making us unable to see things as they are. And inside there is some hidden dissatisfaction, unexplainable suffering that we are not ready to face. This is the classic face your samkharas or hide behind your ignorance moment.
So what is this suffering? Not the physical suffering, but the mysterious suffering that cannot be explained. No matter who you are — king or the beggar — it is there, lying in the deep layers of the subconscious mind. Could this be the root of the question we asked in the first place: what’s the point?
“All conditioned things are impermanent” — when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering. This is the path to purification.
“All conditioned things are unsatisfactory” — when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering. This is the path to purification.
“All things are not-self” — when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering. This is the path to purification.— Dhammapada (277, 278, 279)
To understand Dukkha (suffering), Anicca (impermanence) and Anatta (no-self) — the three pali words that summarize Buddha’s teaching is good. But to see as Buddha saw, we have to get rid of the junk that we have accumulated in our minds. Otherwise, just like Buddha said, we will be like that cowherd who just counts others’ cows.
Only after reading Buddha’s teachings, again and again, I feel I have got a hint of the answer. It’s just a hint, but that’s fine.
The problem is we are trying to find a resolution to this question within the boundaries of our thoughts, understanding and mind.
Buddha did not talk about God. He did not promise heaven. But he did talk about a state of mind that is called no-mind, which is beyond the boundaries of thoughts. This is the state where the question itself becomes meaningless. To work towards this state, as shown by Buddha, and other great teachers may be the point. Once you get to that state, the question has to disappear and an answer will not be required.
At least, that’s how I reached my conclusion. Now, how to get to that state?
Buddha said:
“Meditate, O Monk! Don’t just lament crying ‘suffering, suffering’. Work hard for your salvation!”
The question is: are we willing to put the effort needed to walk the path of Dhamma to get what we want? I believe that it is an individual journey for each of us to take.