Basic Purpose of Life

Life has innumerable forms on our earth, and each one has its meaning differing from each other. These differences are due to their different levels of evolution caused by their different circumstances. Each form of life seems to be pursuing a different goal from most others. So, these goals do not represent true meaning of life being imports of various circumstances of life. In order to search for real meaning of life, we will have to concentrate on what is common in all forms of life on the earth.

The first goal of life, which comes to mind, is desire to survive under all circumstances because every creature struggles hard to overcome obstacles in its remaining alive. It is a well-respected and reality-based notion that the world exists for an individual for his life-time only. Diseases are the greatest stumbling blocks of life. A disease-free life is called a healthy life. This takes to a point where we can say that healthy living is the first meaning of life.

Second goal of life is growth to maturity and then decay to perish. For growth, food is necessary and after maturity, food is needed to compensate for decays due to aging effect. This goal of life may be summarized as completing a life cycle – from birth to death. So this the second meaning of life.

A third intuitive desire in every creature is to produce off-springs in order to keep continuity of life even after death. Every creature on earth craves for a sex mate to perform his duty to keep the stream of life flowing for ever. Ignorant humans have attached a false purpose to this intuitive desire – to have an old-age support. This is falsified by the fact that in many species, the parents do not recognize their off-springs once the latter come to stand on their own footing for feeding themselves.

Now, we can combine all the three goals mentioned above to a single one – to keep continuing species’ life on earth through healthy living and reproducing. And this becomes our second meaning of life.

Fundamental ingredients to life are – solid minerals from the earth representing ’strength’, the omnipotent water providing fluidity with ‘continuity’, gases forming voids in solid bodies making ‘motions’ possible, heat from interactions born out of ‘energy’ and reproducing it, and the vibrations which mainly come from sounds and other ‘activities’. Thus, the five elements of life come out to be – strength, continuity, motion, energy and activity. All these five elements represent an onward movement which means that the life is for enhancing its movement in the direction it is moving.

So, healthy living and reproducing are not the ends of life, these must also be promoted. This leads us to a fact that population of all the creatures must go on increasing continuously, as far as life itself is concerned. Nature’s functioning is outside the purview of life which usually works to keep a balance.

As regards to humanity, it has developed a civilization so goal or meaning of life becomes taking the civilization to higher levels continuously. Also, if the humanity is seeker of happiness, it must be enhanced continuously through continuity of life on earth. This conclusion presents us a theory - if some aspect of life somehow starts moving, it will continue to move in the same direction with ever-increasing impetus - whether it is towards higher levels or lower levels.