Soren Kierkegaard once said, "Life is understood backward; it is lived forward". To acquire a meaning from life is to have lived a life full of meaning, a life in which the agency of time serves to fulfill the purposes which you set forth to attain.

Thus, the meaning of life is always the acceptance of the burden of a material body by means of subsistence for the sake of an opportunity. In light of this, it becomes then certain that the opportunity must itself be of such a value as to merit the worth of all burdens accepted on its behalf. We must ask whether the opportunity chosen by us can be satisfied, or whether, our goals and concerns are only with deficiencies which reflect an ever-open non-security, as is imposed upon us by the force of time. In this regard, it becomes most important that we appreciate those opportunities which are actually capable of satisfaction, lest we run about for the whole of our lives, like asses chasing a carrot on a stick, never finding satisfaction to our desires, but always only finding our means and ends deficient in increasingly elusive manners, and thus, finding our lives to be a prolonged and sadly useless goose-chase.

The great now, or the constant, present moment of our temporary being, is a total state of deficiency, in terms of the world of external, material pursuits. It is an incompleteness, a yet to be finished, a still unwhole state of existence. It leaves us with opportunities yet to be realized, and gives us the conditions for a certain kind of potential to be satisfied, our future lives unto the point of death. But there is yet a hidden trick to all this: the potential that our future holds for us, if it is to be satisfied fully, must reach beyond the merely temporal and into the eternal, the transcendent, a manner of being unconditioned by time.

Despite what existentialism and post-modernism go to great lengths to inform us of in terms of the meaninglessness of life, and the futility of pursuing a transcendental purpose, they are themselves starkly deficient in showing the necessity of this. That is mostly due to the fact that they, like so many other western social movements, are merely reactionary in the way they deal with the questions of life. They say, "we are not Christian or that kind, so we must become atheistic." In reacting in this way, they overlook the vast theological wisdom increasingly available to us in from the ancient and mature traditions of South Asia, in the case of

• 1
• 2
• next page >>

---

Add your voice

Know something about Why we exist?
We want to hear your view. Write now!