The Essence of Life

By S. Pavlina

What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? Is there a God or isn’t there, and if there is a God, what is its nature? How shall we live? What shall we live for, if anything? How we can decide right from wrong? Is there any reasonable way to answer these questions that doesn’t require us to fall back on blind faith? Are we primarily physical beings or spiritual beings?

People have struggled for millennia to tackle these questions. Wars have been fought over them.The way we answer these questions will provide the ultimate context for everything we do with our lives.

-Tackle issues that are deep and complex yet easy to comprehend and relate to.

-Explore a practical and philosophical solution to answering these questions and learn how to translate them into a personal purpose that is actually achievable.

-Improve your human awareness and help more people see the benefits and navigate the obstacles in pursuing their own conscious growth.

-Dive into the notion that we are genetically or divinely encoded with a built-in purpose and find out if introspection can help bring it to the surface.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spectrum Ebooks
• Release date: Jan 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310250477

Book preview

The Essence of Life

Tackling some of life’s oldest and most intriguing questions

Original Work Copyrights 2014 Jeff Mathews

Author Steve Pavlina

Published at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

So Many Questions

Walking in my Shoes

What Will you Live for?

A Pre-Encoded Purpose or Much More?

Finding the Way

Conscious Evolution

What is the Solution?

So Many Questions

What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? Is there a God or isn’t there, and if there is a God, what is its nature? Of all the world’s religions, which one is the most correct? Is there an afterlife? Are we primarily physical beings or spiritual beings?

People have struggled for millennia to tackle these questions. Wars have been fought over them. But as much as these questions cause people to lose their heads (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally), the bottom line is that these are very practical questions.

The way we answer these questions will provide the ultimate context for everything else we do with our lives. If we place any value on our lives at all, we must give some consideration to these questions.

Let’s say you have your life organized around goals, projects, and actions. You set a goal like starting a new Internet business. You break it down into projects like writing a business plan and launching your web site. And then you break those projects down into actions like going to the bank to open a business account and registering your domain name. Fair enough.

But why start the business in the first place? What’s the point? Why pick this goal vs. any other goal? Why even set goals at all?

What determines the goals you set (or don’t set) is your context. Your context is your collection of beliefs and values. So if the values of money and freedom are part of your context, you might be inclined to set a goal to start a new business. But with different kinds of values — a different context — you may be disinclined to set goals at all.

The most significant part of your context is your collection of beliefs about the nature of reality, which includes your religious, spiritual, and philosophical beliefs. Your overall beliefs about the universe will largely determine your results. Context dictates goals. Goals dictate projects. Projects dictate actions. Actions dictate results.

Within a certain context, it will be virtually impossible for you to achieve certain results because you’ll never set the required goals that will lead to those results.

This is because your context works like a filter. When you are inside a particular context, you lose access to the potential goals, projects, and actions that lie outside that context. For example, if your context includes the belief that criminal behavior is very bad, then you aren’t likely to work towards becoming a future leader in organized crime.

Walking in my shoes

This is a long personal story, but I think you’ll find it interesting. I want you to notice how my beliefs (my context) shifted over time and how dramatically they changed my results.

For half of my life, I’ve been searching for the context that would give me the best possible life. Of course, this is a strange pursuit because it requires searching for a context while at the same time always being stuck inside of one. In other words, the definition of best possible life is also part of any context, so I have to find a context that both defines that term AND provides a means to fulfill it. This pursuit began almost accidentally for me, but eventually I began pursuing it consciously.

For the first half of my life, until the age of 17, I was Catholic/Christian, baptized and confirmed. I went through eight years of Catholic grammar school followed by four years of Catholic high school. I was a boy scout for several years and earned the Ad Altare Dei award. I prayed every day and accepted all that I was taught as true. I went to Church every Sunday with my family. All of my friends and family were Christian, so I knew nothing of other belief systems. My father was an altar boy when he was young, and his brother (my uncle) is a Catholic priest. One of my cousins is a member of Campus Crusade for Christ. In high school I went to optional religious retreats and did community service, both at a convalescent home and at a preschool for children with disabilities. I expected to be Catholic for life.

Blasphemous Rumors

But near the end of my junior year of high school, I went through an experience that I’d have to describe as an awakening. It was as if a new part of my brain suddenly switched on, popping me into a higher state of awareness. Perhaps it was just a side effect of the maturation process. I began to openly question the beliefs that had been conditioned into me since childhood. Blind acceptance of what I was taught wasn’t enough for me anymore. I wanted to go behind the scenes, uproot any incongruence, and see if these beliefs actually made sense to me. I started raising a lot of questions but found few people would honestly discuss them. Most simply dismissed me or became defensive. But I was intensely curious, not hostile about it. My family was closed to discussing the whole thing, but I did find a few open-minded teachers. My high school was a Jesuit school, and the Jesuits are very liberal as far as