Ruminating on the Point of LIfe.

I was walking up the grotto that is The Hollow yesterday, mildly entranced as usual by the high, steep embankments on either side crowned by mature trees. (They include one magnificently venerable old oak, and three younger trees growing close together which look magical to me, although I have no idea why.)

And as I walked I asked the question I have asked myself many times: ‘What is life all about? What is the point of being alive?’ The answer came quick as a flash:

The point of being alive is simply to live, nothing more. The act of living consists of doing and feeling, be it climbing a mountain, vacuuming the carpet, being driven to despair, or reading a newspaper. There is no need to look further than that because there’s nothing more to see.

I felt a little nonplussed. I was even disappointed because I’ve spent my life searching for the big answer to the big question of life, the universe, and everything. I remember having an epiphany once – or so it seemed at the time – that the purpose of life is to achieve oblivion as an individualised entity.

But today it occurred to me that the point of life and the purpose of life are not quite the same thing. It all comes back to my favoured suspicion that an individual’s consciousness is a fragment of the universal consciousness which created material reality – including life – in order to experience itself.

So doesn’t this suggest most strongly that the point of life as stated above and my favoured view of the big picture are actually one and the same? I think it probably does. And it leaves my epiphany wholly untouched because where else should we be heading than to be re-subsumed into the universal consciousness?

I wonder why it took me this long to get here. Whether I’m right or not I probably shan’t know for a very long time yet.