The Purpose of Life
What Can Actually Be Known
I can know the body, because I can touch it. I can know the mind too, there’s proof of its presence in every thought that arises. But a thought itself isn’t tangible. It’s more like thin air. And yet it’s powerful enough to keep us from recognizing what’s actually here.
Most of the time, we’re living in thought: remembering the past, imagining the future, rehearsing conversations that haven’t happened yet. The mind keeps playing, handing us something to hold onto, and somewhere in all that playing, it also hands us the sense that there’s a “me” who needs a purpose, separate from the body, separate from this moment, waiting to be given a reason to exist. That sense feels solid while you’re inside it. But like every other thought, it doesn’t hold up to a direct look.
Not the Fruit, the Action
I don’t think “the purpose of life” is a thought to dismiss the way I first assumed. Svadharma is real guidance: live your own path wholeheartedly, act without needing to know what it will yield, stay steady whether it goes well or badly, and let the living itself be what wakes you up to who you are.
What I no longer do is treat “purpose” as a fruit to be collected before I’m willing to act. Asking “what is my purpose” before you’ve lived is asking for the fruit while you’re still standing in the field. I’ve only ever heard the question itself from other people, books, teachers, conversations in passing. It never arose in me on its own. What did arise on its own was the wanting, the reaching for a fruit before I’d done anything to grow one. This is also the thread that runs through Things You Might Be Doing Wrong In Meditation, the thing to let go of usually isn’t the moment itself. It’s the demand for a result before you’re willing to live it.
Life Is Happening Now
There is nowhere else you can live. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Only here. We spend so much time moving towards the next moment that we forget the one we’re already in.
We work for the weekend.
We wait for the next holiday.
We wait for the next relationship.
We wait for more money.
We wait for the next achievement.
And when that moment comes, we start waiting for another one. Meanwhile, this moment passes.
I don’t mean we should stop planning for the future. We may need plans. We may need goals. We may need to act. But while moving toward something, it’s worth asking: where am I, right now, while I’m busy getting there? Is this moment getting my attention, or just my movement through it?
Self-Inquiry: Who Is Asking?
I’d known of Ramana Maharshi’s teaching on self-inquiry, the question “who am I?”, for years before it became anything more than an idea I’d read about. While I was living this out, day by day, doing what was mine to do, not comparing, staying with what was in front of me, that same question began to arise on its own, not as something I was trying to remember, but simply arriving: who is asking this question?
Is it the body? The body doesn’t ask anything on its own, it eats, breathes, ages, and eventually stops. Is it the mind? Thoughts arise and ask, but a thought isn’t solid enough to be the one asking, it’s closer to weather passing through than to something that could pose a question. So who, then? Not the body. Not the mind. Something that notices both without being either, the one who is witnessing the body live and the mind think.
I don’t think this is a question that resolves once and stays resolved. It keeps returning, and each time, the witnessing seems to go a little further. I’m still in this process, still asking, still watching whatever realisation arises without holding onto it as final. I don’t think everyone arrives at this question the same way, or even needs to arrive at it at all. For some, it comes after years of practice. For others, it may never come, and that’s fine too. This isn’t a finish line. It’s just where my own inquiry has led, so far.
This is the question where every other answer seems to fade, not because I found a bigger one to replace them, but because there’s nothing left underneath it to ask. Perhaps the one asking and the one who would answer were never two separate people to begin with. If that’s true, question and answer might not need to meet somewhere else, they’d simply dissolve into the same act of looking. That’s still just a thought to me right now, not something I’ve actually realised. But it’s the direction this has been pointing.
Right now, that’s as far as I’ve gotten. Tomorrow, it might look different. For today, this is enough: I don’t need to know where this is going. I just need to keep watching.
