1.7.: The meaning of life: answer to the question of meaning

As far as the question of the meaning of human existence is concerned, a comparison with that of animals is revealing.

The meaning of an animal’s life consists of its existence, its material being. It consists of hunting for sustenance, feeding, resting and reproducing. They cannot break out of this program: For them, the meaning of their existence is this existence.

In contrast to this, the existence of humans is about giving their being a meaning that goes beyond mere existence: the creation story in Genesis 1 describes how God breathed “his breath” into the “clay lump” – i.e. the purely material human being – not just any breath, but his breath, which we know as conscience, gut feeling, inner voice, intuition, etc.. Then it depends on whether man makes use of this spirit, i.e. gives his existence a meaning beyond that of the animal. Genesis calls this “building” – like that of a house – i.e. constructing, developing, perfecting and then “preserving” (Gen. 2:15).

However, building cannot only consist of “building” healthcare or wind turbines in the North Sea. Jesus clearly defines building in concrete terms:

“You shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect!” (Mt. 5, 48)

The point is to “build” contents of consciousness that overcome the fact that people continue to lie and cheat, hate and fight each other and “eat each other up”. Because switching to electric cars and heat pumps won’t help.

It’s about “returning to paradise”, “seeing with the heart” (Saint-Exupéry), reaching perfection through “union with the Eternal” (Gita XVIII, 50), whatever you want to call entering spiritual consciousness, the “kingdom of God”:

“Behold, the kingdom of God is within you!” (Lk. 17:21)

The instrument for perfection is the practice of love, namely that level that goes beyond the earthly preliminary stages of Eros and Philia, into spiritual indiscriminate love – which the animals do not know – into love for everything, into the understanding of suffering as an impulse of maturity, into the “love” of evil as the realization of its powerlessness,

“Love your enemies …!” (Mt 5:44)

This love for the hand in the glove is both a lever and a consequence of the increasing ‘union with the eternal.’ This love is the opposite of the human understanding of love, which Leo Tolstoy describes caustically as follows:

‘But what is true love understood to be? …
Everyone knows what love is. … It is very simple:
Love is the exclusive preference of one or one above all others.’
(Kreutzer Sonata. Chapter 2)

Indiscriminate love, on the other hand, expresses itself as decreasing preferential love, i.e. ‘loving your neighbour and hating your enemy’ (Mt 5:43). It is their crucifixion. And it leads to increasing progress in the impersonal, all-seeing love of all. This in turn is brought about by meditation, which leads to spiritual dialogue and which should be realised in the corresponding spiritually guided everyday life with looking through.

It is about the development of unity with the eternal, specifically as a spiritual way of life within the material world as the meaning and goal of human life (Luke 23:43; Revelation 2:7). The path to this recovery of the “kingdom of God” leads through the sacrifice of self-centeredness and devotion to others. To demonstrate this was the sole purpose of the lives of such spiritual giants as Krishna, Jesus, Buddha, Bahai’ullah, Mohammed, Mahavira, Lao Tse, Nanak and others.

The reconnection (“re-ligio”) now also includes preservation (see above). It excludes mutual exploitation and overexploitation of the basis of life, as has always been the case and is currently particularly critical. This does not only mean pollution and rapid consumption of the earth’s resources, but also the poisoning of social coexistence, in extreme cases through war.

The meaning of striving for “unity with the eternal” lies in the fact that it is the truth of all life. The confusing diversity of the surface belies the unity with the Eternal and creates the false and deadly image of separation from him and thus of “enemies”. The image of separation from one another is the basis of the “war of all against all.” The separation is based on the awareness that “man is a wolf to man” (Thomas Hobbes: De cive). Although two people cannot become a single body (exception: fusion of sperm and egg), they can very well create this unity in the consciousness of hindsight (see chapter 2); this type of unity is spiritual and therefore goes far beyond the material ideal of the French Revolution of “fraternité”. This is why Christianity has the spiritual ideal of the aforementioned love of Samaritans, strangers and enemies, a realization of the oneness of all being in consciousness and in the real processes of life.

Man remains stuck on the material level and generally understands perfection to mean social and technological perfection, in which he wants to recognize the salvation of the planet. He has no idea of the salvation of man from man; he knows the Sermon on the Mount, but does not follow it. All endeavors with “technological openness” and similar visions of the future only obstruct the path to salvation.

If man refuses to build, complete and protect what has been given and entrusted to him, i.e. if he does not give his existence the meaning of building and preserving, but instead shifts the meaning back into the animalistic existence of self-preservation, this leads to destruction and annihilation, which is currently the case to a particularly high degree and is highly visible. When it comes to the meaning of their lives, the majority of people focus on fun, joy and happiness, all of which are material and existential. In animals, this fixation on pure existence is their destiny; they have to adapt to their environment, whereas humans are able to adapt to their environment due to their more developed intellect. This is why they can continue to develop, “build” and “preserve” their existence. However, this does not only refer to the rainforest, but first and foremost to the controlling consciousness of man himself, who was placed in this garden. The instrument for this creation of meaning is love.

However, this refers not only to erotic (eros) and sympathetic (philia) love, to which people limit their love behavior, but above all to indiscriminate love (agape). The first two self-centered forms of love are those for one’s own well-being in a partnership, for one’s own children, for one’s parents, for one’s friends, for one’s own profit, for one’s own aversion to everything foreign, for one’s own preservation at all costs, for one’s own convictions, etc. It cannot be this Eros-Philia love, because it makes distinctions between good and evil, destroys the climate on earth through this division and ultimately all peace, even in almost every marriage. It destroys the preservation of all others and ultimately that of the planet. This kind of love is felt by far more than 90% of all people. For them, the goal of human existence is their existence. It is as if, for the pupils in a class, the aim of being in their class is to stay in that class.

The answer to the question of meaning is to go beyond the necessary basis of the survival instinct and to ensure the preservation of all (!) others as well. Christianity uses the term “love of neighbor” for this, which means everything other than love for the individuals around us, such as partners, children, parents, friends, etc. Most animals also have such a love of neighbor, at least for a time, in broods, packs, herds, etc. Rather, “love of neighbor” means love for all people, as described in the parable of the Good Samaritan. This is why the Gospel contains the phrase “Love your neighbor as yourself” and, more to the point, “Love your enemies.”

(Of course, this kind of love – see 6.2. below – is something completely different from what people emotionally understand by love (Eros and Philia), because it is purely understanding and has nothing to do with impulses of attraction and repulsion).

If people followed this admonition, they would treat neighbors, competitors, opponents, refugees, etc. as they treat themselves. This means that others would treat them in the same way if they themselves were these adversaries or refugees. That is the golden rule. Then, in the blink of an eye, our world would return to the original state of paradise without fear, worry, hatred, deception, theft, robbery, rape, murder, massacre and war.

The animalistic goal of existence, that the goal of being is being, has been refined in the course of development, in the direction of an existence that is as bearable as possible, in an ever more pleasant form. People do not want to see that it does not work, neither in marriage nor at work, neither in the school class nor in the village, neither in the city nor between generations nor in the coexistence of peoples. It is simply the “war of all against all”, as Thomas Hobbes put it. And nothing has changed in the last 12,000 years. The idea that the goal of existence could not be to exist as animals do, but that it has a higher meaning, as the Bible, Gita, Koran, Pali canon or Tao Te King point out – and certainly not which one – plays no role in the lives of the 90% in question, hardly in their consciousness and certainly not in practice.

All wisdom teachings unequivocally contain the answer to the pernicious understanding of the meaning of being as this very being. Rather, in contrast to the sense of being as being, they emphasize the sense of becoming, of maturing with regard to the expansion and higher development of love. They teach the further development of preferential love (expanded ego) into the completed indiscriminate love of all and of others (see chapter 6), which no longer divides creation into good and bad.

The concept of the meaning of life as the meaning of being has been expressed for thousands of years as unconditional self-preservation, as the ego. It leads to disruption and increasing decay in all areas of life; we are all its witnesses and its victims. Throughout human history, we can see how friendships and almost all marriages break down or at least become desolate and how violence, crisis, catastrophe, war and death have always been and are even more so today.

In order to reverse this reversal of meaning and to complete the animalistic existential program of unconditional self-preservation with the meaning of higher development in the form of love for others, the founders of religion stepped onto the stage of history. As already mentioned, they have made it clear that the aim is to reverse the direction of the meaning of bare existence and to grow beyond it towards the purpose of perfection (Mt 5:48). On the one hand, this means turning towards the preservation of all other people and, at the same time, expanding the purely material consciousness to the spiritual level, both commonly called true love. This contains the awareness of the spiritual dimension of being.

Of course, there are always strong aspirations, especially among the youth, to “make the world (!) a little better”, whereby they don’t get the idea that this has never worked, because despite all the social legislation and car electrification, people continue to lie, hate and cheat. Above all, however, they fail to see that this world is not only material, but above all spiritual.
Anyone who looks back at the human past in general will see that there has been considerable and fundamental progress and harmonization of human life over the course of history, from the invention of the wheel to flying, from female genital mutilation to the MeToo movement, from slavery to democracy. However, he fails to recognize that all these growth processes have remained limited to the material level and have not changed the “war of all against all”. This applies, among other things, to the invariable pursuit of retribution – people speak of “justice” in order to avoid the word revenge. But they are also concerned with the prosperity of some at the expense of others and also with the love of their own and resentment of others. (The exceptions are the spiritual growth processes since the appearances of the religious founders, but these few percentages of spiritual maturity have not changed much in the generally disastrous state of coexistence). As I said, people want revenge and they want egoistic self-realization, which they call freedom, and they want unconditional self-attitude and also openly say that “ultimately everyone is his own neighbor.” They do not recognize the unity of the fingers on the hand. The principle of overcoming self-preservation through devotion to the most distant “neighbor” has been demonstrated clearly enough by such beacons as Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Father Kolbe, Janusz Korczak, Mother Teresa and many others, but hatred of migrants of all kinds, dislike of other ethnic groups within our own population and, of course, hostility even towards the evil neighbor have not changed since the beginning of our history.

The great spiritual teachers have basically only conveyed one single principle for rising out of suffering, which the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible of Hindu wisdom, emphasizes as follows: “Sacrifice is the law of the All!” Christian wisdom calls this principle “crucifixion”, the sacrifice of egocentric self-preservation. The meaning of life is precisely that man lives not only for himself, but indiscriminately and sacrificially for all people. Only in this way can true self-preservationbe achieved.

But people do not want to admit this and therefore march in lockstep with increasing speed into equally increasing suffering.

(translation by software)