The Whole Purpose Of Life

I just wrote on reconnecting with the source of life, and the true meaning of religion. Let’s quickly discuss a very similar topic — the purpose of life.

Quite frankly, almost every single one of us is clueless as to the purpose of life. We are so obsessed with worldly issues that we completely block our mind from finding an overarching, real purpose to this brief life we are living, and to the much longer life experiences of a soul trapped in physical and mental bodies.

To put it briefly, “The whole purpose of life is to make God a reality.”

That’s another quote from Hazrat Inayat Khan that puts it about as succinctly and directly as possible.

As many saints whose words I have read for ages say: we will not know the purpose of this world, of life in this world, until we reconnect with God, reach God again… but at that point we won’t care. When we reach God, we will no longer care about this question “Why are we here?” — we will only be content to be back with Him.

Here’s more on this from a different perspective:

“As to the religion and the moral of the mystic, the mystic has one moral and that is love. And he has one aim in his religion and that is to make a God a reality. Therefore, his God becomes a greater God than the God of millions of people who only imagine that there is a God somewhere. To him God is a reality.”

And more:

“The work of the inner life is to make God a reality, so that He is no more an imagination; that this relationship that man has with God may seem more real than any other relationship in the world; and when this happens, then all relationships, however near and dear, become less binding. But at the same time, a person does not thus become cold; he becomes more loving. It is the godless man who is cold, impressed by the selfishness and lovelessness of the world, because he partakes of those conditions in which he lives. But the one who is in love with God, the one who has established his relationship with God, his love becomes living …”

The problem many of us make in this brief life is that we complacently assume we have reached the top when we have hardly started the climb. We assume that we have reached life’s purpose by coming to some religion, by believing in God, or even by being initiated by a Perfect Master. But none of that is the end goal — that is the starting point.

We must make God a reality by focusing solely on that one goal. This life is short, and we can fill it with many excuses for putting off that one goal. But in the end, if we do that, we will just see that we were deceived by the mind and missed out on pursuing the whole purpose of life.

Here’s one final quote from Hazrat Inayat Khan on this:

“Among millions of believers in God, there is hardly one who makes God a reality, to so many He is an imagination, to many He is in a mosque, a church, or a temple. Many wonder if God is really. Many others think God is goodness, He is a personality separate from us, He is most high, most pure, most beautiful, but He is separate and difficult to reach. Many think that as it takes so long to reach this planet or that, God must be further away still. The purpose of one’s whole life is to make God a reality.”