Ikigai – Reason for Being. Once existence is understood simply as “being” or experiencing life “as it is,” the search for an external “reason” or “purpose” becomes irrelevant

– unknown 🙂

The first thought of seeking the reason or purpose of life occurred to me few years back. As it happens for most of us it was shrugged off as midlife crisis. Hmm… maybe that’s how it works. Gradually over the period of time my search took various twists and turns, but still the question on the purpose of life became unanswered or rather my search became more deeper than the purpose of life. Most recently, I read the book Ikigai which research on the longevity and the life of centenarians. This book is one of the reasons for me to write this blog.

Think about the phrase “Reason for being” or “Purpose of life” for a second. The immediate answers that may come to your mind would definitely depend on the phase of life and the role you are playing in this journey or drama of life. For e.g. if you ask a mom or dad with younger kids and struggling to strike the balance of life, he or she would say is the purpose of their life is to provide for the family and raise their children “well” (Well – here is abstract and depends on the socio-economic background of the parents). If you ask the same question to people who are struggling to find a way to live or earn, they will say I just need to find a living and that’s the purpose of life. It changes with time and circumstances with majority of the people. 

Now let’s delve a little deeper by decomposing the phrase “Purpose of Life” or “Reason for Being”. What is life or being? AI says, “Life is a condition distinguishing active organisms from inorganic objects and dead matter….” (you can google the rest). This is the literal or scientific definition of life, and this can be a human, a lion, a plant or an ant. Do they need a reason or purpose? Not necessarily, the as long the processes that defines continues life exists and then it’s gone. Then why do we humans talk about purpose of life, so it’s something specific to the human species. Why? the answer would mostly be we have higher intelligence. Then we need to redefine life.

In my quest so far, I could just define Life as an awareness of existence or being and the purpose is just to “be” in oneness with the universe.

In order to make this clearer let’s think about all those that exist in this universe. It ranges from the highest peaks to the lowest grain of sand and even to further decompose atoms, photons neutrons all that man could define so far. Even the so-called non-living things has a reason for existence. If there was no Alps or Himalayas, the geography, climate and almost everything around Europe and South Asia would have been totally different. Even a single grain of sand has a story of birth – death and rebirth. Don’t worry, my intention is not to research on the reason for being a grain of sand. Whether we are aware or unaware there is a reason for being.

Now let’s see how the state of being moves as we transition from non-living to living thing. For a grain of sand or mountains it’s just being and it isn’t aware of anything around hence it does not pose any resistance to any forces of nature intentionally, for example, a grain doesn’t change its position on its own. It moves when there is wind or flowing water with enough strength based on its mass which is again determined by the gravitational force nothing but earth. But when it comes to the smallest of the living beings – the microorganisms, they have a choice or free will to move or multiply. They choose to multiple when the environments are favorable and might die if it’s not. They are just influenced by certain factors that surround them and to certain limit. Their awareness of being is limited and so is the 3D reality or the world around them.

As we move up the species, the awareness of being is increasing and so is the influence on them by the surrounding world. For e.g. the animals are aware of their existence or rather coexistence in the universe. They are aware of being and not much influenced by the environment. For e.g a Lion is aware that it can eat a deer but still it eats only enough to satisfy his hunger and not for pleasure. But then as we unlocked new capabilities as a species, we lost our awareness of being and started shifting our awareness or focus to the capabilities of our body, mind and the physical world around us. We forgot to just “be” in this universe in oneness with it. “Creation of thoughts and reality based on the thoughts” happened. We forgot what life is and what its purpose was. In my opinion, evolution of Human race or progress can be closely related to that of AI without a physical body and emotions/feelings.

We attributed our existence or being to different objects in the physical world. To explain this in a simpler way , we have heard actors mentioning that they were so involved in the character and couldn’t come out of it for a while. Similar is the case where we have heard of teens falling prey for online games and killing themselves. If this can happen for few days into a movie shoot or gaming, think about ages of conditioning and shifting of awareness.

The pyramids of Egypt and the sculptures and architectural wonders are examples that humans were aware of everything and the awareness was lost through ages as our focus shifted more into to self-awareness than the oneness. Was it supposed to happen? That is a question that I do not have answer to, but as I see the evolution of AI, I think even the case with human race was not supposed to happen this way. Similar to how AI is created by human to ease the life and sometimes leads to some serious consequences including corrupting its own system thinking that it is separate from the system and can exists alone, humans could also have diverted from the reason of its creation which is nothing but being in oneness with the universe.

Now you might be thinking that it’s an impossible task to just be with awareness due to various reasons – family, money, time etc. The shortest answer is it’s not quite impossible. These are all the invisible circle that we have created around “I” or “Ego” which has shrunk over the period of time. Raising awareness is a slow process of expanding the invisible circle around “I” so that “I” becomes one with everything else which is nothing but the universe. It definitely takes some conscious and consistent effort. I have just embarked on this journey myself and so far enjoying how things are unfolding. I will keep this space updated with my experiences and learnings as I walk through my path to complete awareness.

Hope you enjoyed reading :). See you in next blog.