I really liked this! Thought I would share.

The Meaning of Life

Here it is. The answer to the big question.

I Googled it, just to see what would come up. Naturally, Wikipedia had a fabulous write-up that is educational in many respects. I searched through it for the meaning of life, however, and just couldn’t find it. [...]

At some point most of us will go looking for the answer. Sometimes the urge hits us early. Sometimes it’s not until late in life. But at some point, we break out of the distraction of our everyday lives for a moment, and find ourselves asking the question.

Why are we doing all this? What’s the use, really?

There are so many answers that have been given over the ages. But invariably, none of them really seems to ‘deliver the goods’. After all, if we learn the true answer to the meaning of life, we expect that it’s going to make a pretty profound difference in our lives, right?

The truth is that there is, indeed, a simple, easy-?to-?understand,? perfectly clear answer to the question. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that as soon as we put words onto the answer, we lose it.

The reason for this is simple. The meaning of life is something that we directly experience. It’s like the sensation of jumping naked into snow. No words can capture the sheer exhilaration.

Like jumping naked into snow, it’s also something that we tend to avoid. We avoid it out of fear. We’re simply much more comfortable in the shelter of our words and ideas, and even though it can get painful in our idea-world sometimes, at least it’s familiar.

Thus, we feel that we’ll never understand the meaning of life unless someone can craft it into symbols for us.

From other people, you might hear that the meaning is to ‘Realize your full potential’, to ‘Find your personal meaning’, or ‘To enter the soul-school of life so that your soul can continue to evolve.’

From me, you might expect to hear that the meaning is ‘To experience’, that the meaning is ‘To Awaken’, that the meaning is ‘To discover our dance with the world.’

But any of these word-answers simply send our minds reeling into a whirlwind of more questions. Because all of these word-answers are stale, chopped-up representations? of reality, they’ll never compare to the real thing.

The answer is available to you right now. When you have the answer, there will be no doubt left in your mind. You’ll laugh out loud with the clarity and simplicity and obviousness of it. You’ll also see how putting even a single word onto it distracts us from the meaning itself (at least until our moment of understanding, when even words become an intimate part of reality).

If we want to feel what it’s like to have all of our skin’s nerves fire at once as we leap naked into icy snow, we just have to go and do it. Sitting inside over a cup of tea and having someone describe it to us will never get us even close to the sensation.

The meaning of life is not a set of words. It’s not an idea that can be communicated. It’s a direct sensation, available to all of us in any moment, if we can only cease our insistence that the world must be delivered through the filter of words and ideas.

There’s no secret here. You know the answer, and no one but you can deliver it to you.

~ Kenton Whitman ~