THE VEXED QUESTION

The thought “why do we live?” evokes no real answer. The religious texts proclaim that life is a game being played by God. Period. Science can only go into technicalities like heartbeat, brain programme and oxygen in the blood stream to explain how the body actually works but cannot answer the question about the purpose of our living. It looks that the answer will continue to elude humans because it is beyond our functional capability to address this issue. In management there is a concept in MIS where information sharing is done on the basis of ‘need to know’. It seems that we humans do not need to know the answer to this vexed question while continuing with daily living. In a funny sort of way it confirms that there is intelligence beyond our comprehension which some of us chose to call God.

To my understanding we only live to survive. While this does not tackle the question ‘why do we live’ in any sort of way, it clarifies the situation of continuation of some life form or the other on this planet since millions of years. There have been various kinds of periods on Earth, we had the pre ice age and the post ice age, we had the pre dinosaur age, the dinosaur age and the post dinosaur age, we had the apes and then the humans descending from apes, and then finally we had the humans from Africa migrating to various corners of the planet.  Such a long history makes the tales of Ram and Krishna sound very recent and our own personal lives less than insignificant, doesn’t it? The point is that life in some form or the other continued to exist on Earth. While some new species came into existence, some became extinct, while some evolved new capabilities to be able to survive under water or to fly, some others were killed to the last number like the Dodo bird for sport or food. But irrespective of whether the life form was moving or non-moving like the plants and trees, life continued to exist on Earth. Therefore I have arrived at the conclusion that we live only to survive.

To survive on Earth any life form has to accomplish only two activities – eat and reproduce. In fact these two activities have been programmed into every life form in such a way that even if some other activities are not fully enabled due to a malfunctioning body or mind, eating and partaking in sex is always on auto-pilot. Definitely we do have accidents happening when some people have digestion issues while some have deformed sex organs but they form a miniscule minority. Most life forms on Earth, with the sole exceptions of the humans who indulge in various other creative acts, only do these two activities and nothing else.  The middle portion of the body consisting of the food processing (digestive) system and the sex organ is the engine of the body. Eating food enables the body to survive today while reproducing enable the specie to survive tomorrow. In fact the first and primary obstacle that Saints and every spiritual aspirant have to overcome is the overwhelming power of the desires of the tongue and the sex organ before they can merge their mind with the universal energy. The Saints add a whole new dimension to the subject matter on hand when they say that the only objective of living is to work towards escaping and interrupting the regular cycle of death and birth.