Take My Life and Let it .... Be

For as long as I consider myself to have graduated from thinking like a child, I have been perplexed by the purposelessness of life. It seemed to me that being born, growing up, marrying, reproducing, raising children, having them grow up, marry, reproduce, and so on until the day you die is a bit of a waste of time. When all is said and done, it amounts to nothing more than what we started with – life is as life never was. A lot of people apply the life-after-death beliefs to add purpose to their lives, or they give a cold shoulder to the concept of death to extract purpose from their lives, or they say there’s purpose in their relationships. Even with all of those, with death, life is purposeless.

I came to realize that there is no purpose to what we call life because we have mis-defined life. If I were to ask you to tell me about your life, what would you say? Probably something about what you do for work, or what you’re studying, something about your family, your friends, your religion, where you live, your car, your house… your life! Most of us define our lives (and ourselves) by our interaction to and relation with the world of objects. The purpose is missing because the world of objects is passing, is non-concrete, is ending. I think there are very few people – very few – who would define their life in terms of non-matter, of non-relation to other things. And I suspect these people, who have found another way to define their lives and themselves, are much happier than the rest of us.

The busy world of matter, where we live and out of which we are created, is so engaging and distracting. It’s difficult to get an outside view of it, especially a lasting one. The mind, the part of us that relates to the world of matter, is so busy sensing the world, reacting to the world, engaging the world, and defining itself by the world, that it creates a sort of glaze over our true eyes, the eyes of our hearts. It’s an unconscious way of living that most of us spend our entire lives under. It’s so sad to see that everything we define ourselves by, and everything we obtain our worth from, and the entire novel describing ‘my life’ is a complete and utter myth. We live a lie, and it’s destructive.

It’s clear then why Jesus said, “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” over and over again (Matt. 10:39, 16:25, Mark 8:35, Luke 9:24, 17:33, John 12:25). We had always thought this was a special word for those who’d be martyrs for him, but Jesus, the one who brought salvation, was talking about stepping out of the life that is a complete figment of the imagination, and to step into real life – to ‘find it’. He whose project was to make us whole again was telling us to stop living the false life, and in so doing, find true life.

The truth of the matter is that ‘my life’ has nothing to do with the world of matter; ‘my life’ is something that is flawed even in the way we give the concept language. There is nothing to call ‘my life’, as if it’s something I possess, rather than something I am. Our true definition and purpose comes from being alive, which has nothing to do with possession, but with being awake. Jesus, who lived as the perfect example, said “I am the life”, which is true compared to “I have a life”. Again, our identity comes up – I am. I just am. I don’t have life, I am life. This is such a fundamental truth. So simple, yet so hidden behind the relentlessly busy mind.

Thank God: the knowledge of illusion is the end of illusion.