The meaning of life

Why am I here? What's my purpose in life?

It’s a tough call to explain the meaning of life in a nutshell  but here's a short explanation before pointing you to the resources that give more information.

We are fragments of God experiencing Itself from all angles

Many different teachers say that before our planet was created, there was just God, Source, The Divine (whatever you choose to call It), an all-loving and all-powerful being. Although It knew It was an all-powerful creator, It wanted to experience what It could create and achieve, after all it’s one thing to know and assume your own greatness, but it’s an entirely different thing to experience that ability and see what you can achieve. Think of it this way: You can read a book to understand how to swim, but to get real wisdom you need to put the knowledge into practice and learn from the ups and downs. God also wanted to continually evolve and expand. So although It is a being that is completely loving, positive, and only of the highest vibration, It needed to create the opposite of that, to experience the contrast against which to measure Its greatness. Imagine if we are happy all the time, we can’t appreciate it fully without knowing what it is to be unhappy. 

So once It created the lowest vibrations, the contrast, the opposite of love, joy, etc., God also separated Itself off into little fragments of Itself, into a multitude of individual souls (us), and a planet of contrast and choice (Earth, and other planets in the universe), so that It (and we) could observe, create and experience from many different perspectives. We are souls that incarnate, experience, and seek to expand ourselves and the collective of souls that we are all a part of. Then we return to God at the end of our lives, review what we’ve learned, plan what we want to learn in our next life and do it all again to learn more. 

We keep returning to learn and evolve

Each time we incarnate, our memory of being part of God, part of the collective of souls, and our past lives is deliberately forgotten for maximum learning opportunities, although the wisdom we obtained in our past lives is retained so we don’t go back to ground zero. We gradually evolve in wisdom, love and tolerance of others until there is nothing further we can learn from our experiences on Earth and we cease to reincarnate here.

There's no such thing as 'good' and 'bad

God created the negative things as well as the positive things, because the negative things are crucial to understanding who we are, and how powerful we can be. We are meant to encounter a negative experience, observe our reaction to it and use it to learn how to create a more positive experience and increase our creative power. God loves the so called 'bad' and 'good' equally. There is no judgement from God, no ‘right or wrong’ decisions, just observation and expansion. We shouldn't berate ourselves for doing something we judge to be bad, we should value the opportunity to choose differently and evolve.

We are the players in our own computer game

You will often hear spiritual teachers referring to life on Earth as a 'computer game'. Our soul is the gamer, directing our minds around like we are avatars, working out what we like and don't like experiencing, and getting more skilled as we move up through layers of experience. When we can detach our minds from what we're feeling as if we are an outside observer, evaluating what we're doing and deciding on a different course of action, that's us getting in touch with our soul. Many spiritual teachers say that life on Earth is a quantum simulation that we can manipulate if we can learn to manifest and move between the 'levels' of experience. That's where the law of attraction and manifestation teachings come in, so read the other information on this site to learn more about that.

What do the spiritual gurus say about purpose? 

Jonathan Robinson is a psychotherapist and author of 14 books. He has interviewed over 100 spiritual leaders such as The Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa. He asked the leaders what is our purpose in life, then stopped asking them after the first 50 or so because astonishingly they all gave the same answer. 1: to find peace and love inside yourself to the best extent you can. 2: Then go out and help other people and help the world.

Darryl Anka channelling Bashar describes five steps like a toolkit, an operating manual for getting the best out of life; living life to your fullest potential. 

1. Act on your passion

2. Do it as fully as you can for as long as you can until you can do it no further

3. To act on it with absolutely zero assumption or zero insistence on what the outcome should be

4. Stay in a positive state no matter what happens because you can get a benefit out of it that way

5. Allow yourself to really examine your belief systems to see why you believe what you believe, because very often we just do it out of habit.

Those five things allow people to gain control over their lives when they’re applying them precisely. Then our lives become more synchronistic, it gives us a driving energy to move forward, it releases resistance in our lives, it automatically connects us to the help we need and life becomes magical.

So in summary...

The meaning of life, therefore, is to do three things:

1. Learn. Constantly learn more about ourselves, our preferences, develop as a person without judging ourselves or others.

2. Love. Love ourselves and others, helping our fellow souls on their journey.

3. Enjoy. We are meant to be having a great time, creating a life we love. We can learn how to manifest the best life possible using our powerful god-like abilities.

A word about love

Love can be a misunderstood term, because you may come across teachers who tell us we should be getting to a stage where we have love for everything, but this is not an instruction to feel under pressure to love something disastrous that is happening to you, or to love someone who wishes you harm. Love can be demonstrated in many ways such as appreciation, respect, acceptance, or allowing something to be just as it is without fighting against it. Recognising and appreciating a difficult experience for what we are learning along the way can be enormously empowering, freeing us to pass through the experience with less tension. 

Demonstrating love in everyday life could include such things as enjoyment, contentment, friendship, and delight - anything that shows appreciation for things as they are.

How can this help me? 

The concept of reincarnation can help you relax into your life experience, because even if life doesn't turn out the way you want, you haven't screwed up your one chance to get things 'right' . It teaches that you are a magnificent expression of God, that there is no judgement of you, nothing happens by accident and there is something valuable to learn even in the bad experiences. Life is meant to be enjoyed and we are here to consciously create a wonderful life. No experience is wasted and we are not failing, just learning.

Recommended resources 

TIP: If you wish to explore the subjects below before buying the book, a quick search on YouTube often brings up interviews with the author that explain their key messages. 

YOUTUBE  Pre-Birth Experience, Life Before Incarnation & Why We Come to Earth with Christian Sundberg

This interview is an astonishing perspective, hosted by Alex Ferrari on his excellent Next Level Soul channel. It is Christian Sundberg’s story of how he can remember his pre-birth experience; why his soul decided to incarnate on earth, the process of how he arrived, and the amazing insights that he can offer with the considerable knowledge he has retained during this incarnation about spirit guides and the soul’s existence when it is not incarnated on Earth.

BOOK Journey of Souls  by Michael Newton PhD.

Michael Newton is the founder of an institute that trains hypnotherapists in his pioneering techniques of taking people into the exploration of their past lives, so that they can be freed from what is holding them back in their present life. This book captures graphic details from 29 people placed in a ‘superconscious’ stage of awareness, where they describe how it feels to die, what happens between lives, when and where you learn to recognise soulmates on Earth, different levels of soul, what happens to ‘disturbed’ souls and other amazing insights.

BOOK The Complete Conversations With God  by Neale Donald Walshe.

If you want to hear answers to the key questions of ‘why are we here?’, ‘why do bad things happen?’, ‘do I have any control over my fate?’ ‘what is my purpose?’ etc, this book can help as they are addressed directly. This is a collection of three volumes of channelled conversations that the author had with God. He had a Christian upbringing, and the book takes the form of questions that include those the author has about the Christian religion; shedding light on why we were created, clarifying the puzzling and potentially contradictory aspects of Christianity, and how to use the power we have been given to manifest our reality. He reveals a God who is loving, believable, understanding of our weaknesses, and, most importantly, easy to talk to. It’s a large book so you might like to buy volume 1 first as they are available separately.

PODCAST Oprah Super Soul: Living the Life Your Soul Intended  with Ainslie MacLeod.

Author and psychic Ainslie MacLeod explains how he came to liaise with his spirit guides, and how they instructed him in how we can better understand our souls and our purpose. He explains how we can determine how old our individual souls are depending on how many times we have incarnated. We can ascertain what overall mission our souls have chosen for this lifetime so that we can understand our own personal preferences, skills and destiny. TIP: He has a website where you can take a questionnaire to determine your soul purpose.

BOOK The Instruction: Living the Life Your Soul Intended  by Ainslie MacLeod.

This is the book referring to the above podcast. Ainslie MacLeod refused to acknowledge his psychic abilities until an epiphany with his spirit guides propelled him into a new life-changing career path. He has written the knowledge passed on to him into an instruction book that explains our soul age, how we can explore what our life plan was when we were born, and how we can unlock our soul’s purpose to live a more fulfilled life. It illuminates why people act from different perspectives, have phobias, and what emotional baggage we carry from former lives that we can cleanse. A truly eye-opening read.

BOOK Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to Healing  by Anita Moorjani.

Anita Moorjani relates how, at the moment of death from cancer she had an incredible near death experience. When she awakened her cancer disappeared miraculously and her experience set her on a wonderful and joyous new path that changed her life and her career. This fascinating story will give you insights into what can happen at the point of death and reassurance about the journey of loved ones who have transitioned. The lessons she learned can enrich the lives we are all living now.

YOUTUBE Various videos  by The Other Side NDE.

If you are fascinated by the stories of people who have had near death experiences (NDEs) then this YouTube channel is a collection of people’s experiences. You’ll hear contributions from people who identified as atheists, people who had a strong religious faith before their NDE, some who committed suicide before having their experience, and others who had a medical emergency. It’s interesting to see common themes and also unusual visits to The Other Side too.