OUR ULTIMATE GOAL
What is the ultimate goal of life? Are we just meant to live and die? Why did we come to earth? Why were we given this human birth? Most people just exist. They don't ask such existential questions. Thus, they never realize the truth. They do not find the true meaning and purpose of life.
Others blindly believe that the goal of life is to be happy. All through life, they chase happiness, but happiness is like a shadow. The more you chase it, the further it goes away. They believe that success is happiness and they zoom from womb to tomb seeking achievement. Some of them succeed, some don't. After all, everybody cannot achieve success. But happiness remains elusive even to the achievers because even the multimillionaires of the world suffer. The most successful people still experience the pain of the body, misery of the mind, and they experience agony because of the ego.
The ultimate goal of life liberates us from all suffering. It blesses us with everlasting joy and eternal peace. It liberates us from the cycle of death and rebirth. It is achieved when we realize the true purpose of life. When we find meaning and answers about who we truly are and why we are here, we attain bliss and peace, just as we overcome all sorrow. How do we achieve this ultimate goal?
Who is it that suffers? Who wants to be happy? Who wants to be successful? It is 'me'! It is 'I'. 'I' seek, 'I' desire, 'I' crave and thus 'I' become disappointed and miserable. Why? Because we are ignorant about who we truly are. We don't realize that the ego makes us suffer. Along with the Mind, the Ego becomes ME and accumulates Karma and is born again and again. Everybody who is born must suffer. The cycle of death and rebirth goes on. Our goal is to escape from this cycle. Such an escape liberates us from all suffering and gives us the ultimate Ananda or bliss. This is our ultimate goal - to realize we are not the body, mind, or ego. We are the Divine Soul! All through life, we live as the ego, and we suffer out of ignorance. The ego stops us from self-realization and God-realization. Our goal is to let go of the ego. The moment we do, dark clouds are cleared and we see the beautiful blue sky and the sunshine. Dropping the ego, therefore, will make us realize God. Then, we are face to face with the Divine, we are liberated and are ready to unite with the Divine.
Because we live as the ego, we are unable to attain God. We may pray to a God in a temple, mosque or church. But it is the ego that stops our search for the eternal truth. We are nothing. We are just the five elements that come together when the Divine Soul makes us come alive. At death, when the Soul departs, we return to the 5 elements – earth, water, air, fire, and space. Because of our ignorance, we are unable to realize the ultimate goal of our life. We are unable to go from Realization to Liberation and ultimately to Unification. Because of the ego, there is no purification and there is no illumination of the truth. It is the ego that stops us from Enlightenment and Ultimate Unification with the Divine.
The ego stops our realization by constantly projecting 'I'. Because it keeps on saying 'me' and 'mine', it doesn't realize the truth that we are not this body, not this mind – Neti Neti, Tat Tvam Asi – not this, not this, Thou art that. This is the ultimate truth, but the ego stops us from realizing this. Unless we let go of the ego, we will not realize who we truly are.
The truth is that we are just effects. God is the cause. Just like gold is the cause and the bangle, the ring, the bracelet, and the chain are the effects. Mud is the cause, manifesting as the statue, the pot, and the plate. So also, God is the cause. You and I are just manifestations of the Divine. Because the ego appears, God disappears! We can either be the ego or realize we are manifestations of God.
Our ultimate goal is to realize the truth – 'I am not! Alone God is!' We can achieve this goal by just letting go of the ego. But there is a big problem. The ego doesn't want to let go. Along with the mind, it keeps saying 'ME' and the Mind and Ego together, stop us from achieving our ultimate goal.
Most of humanity just lives and dies. Some are fortunate. They realize that they are not the body that dies. They discover the Law of Karma and live a life of good morals and ethics. Their ultimate goal is different. It is to accumulate good Karma so that they can be born in fortunate circumstances. They spend their entire life doing good actions, so that they can carve out a destiny of joy and bliss. While these people are far better off than the rest of the world, they will still be born again and again, to experience their good Karma. They will also suffer, as nobody born can escape from disease, decay, and death. Their Karmic cycle continues, but they do not realize the ultimate goal of life. A rare minority of the human race, less than 1% goes in quest of the truth. Of this 1%, a tiny fraction realizes the truth. But they too, miss the ultimate goal. The ego and the mind pull them back in Samsara, and they lose the battle, just short of the ultimate goal!
Only those who are blessed with the grace of the Divine and are lucky to experience the guidance of a Guru, escape the tentacles of this alluring world and its attractions. They transcend the mind and its distractions. They let go of their ego. They are the fortunate ones who find God. They realize God within themselves by realizing they are nothing. God is everything! They realize that they are not this gross physical body that will return to dust. At death, when the fire leaves, the air escapes, the water evaporates, and the space we occupy shrinks, they realize the truth – 'From dust, we come and to dust we go.' We are just a God particle, nothing else, such a powerful particle that gives life to our 30 trillion cells in a flash. They realize we are the Divine Energy, the Soul, the Spirit, the Atman. The Atman is nothing but the Paramatma, the Divine Energy is nothing but God.
As long as the wave doesn't realize it is not the wave, it is the ocean itself, it will keep splashing as a wave. So it is with the ego. As long as we don't realize we are not the ego, we will never find God. We will not realize we are just like a wave that comes from the Divine ocean and goes back into Divinity. It is our ego, that causes this ignorance and imprisons us in this ignorance throughout life, holding us back from our ultimate goal.
For centuries, science and spirituality were at loggerheads. Science always asked for proof and considered the body to be nothing but pure physical matter. Spirituality, on the other side, always believed that we are energy – Divine spiritual energy. Thousands of years ago, the Upanishads stated – Neti Neti, Tat Tvam Asi – we are not the body that we appear to be. Even the mind that dominates us is not me. We are that – the Divine energy, the Spirit, the Soul, or the Atman. Science did not agree with all this. Today, it does. Science, through its experiments, has come around to believe that a man, who is said to be made up of over 30 trillion cells and appears to be you and me, is actually nothing but energy. It all started in the early part of the 20th century with scientists like Max Planck and Albert Einstein. Together, they started experimenting in what is known as quantum theory or quantum physics and went on to coin the term 'Wave-Particle Duality'. Scientists, under a sophisticated microscope, made certain scientific observations that completely transformed the way the world had believed in matter and energy. The smallest particle of a human cell, much smaller than electrons, neutrons, protons – a quark, that was being observed under such a microscope suddenly disappeared and became an energy wave. As they continued to observe, the scientists were flabbergasted to see the particle of mass being formed again. They inferred that mass was becoming energy and then, returning back to mass. They coined this as ‘Wave- Particle Duality’.
This was what the world knew as E=MC2. Einstein had discovered that all mass had an equal amount of energy and vice versa. Therefore, the total energy would remain constant. 'Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be transformed from one form to another.' This became a popular law. Somehow, while there has been so much discussion on this, it has taken the world a century to come to terms with it.
If one studies ancient philosophers, right from 500 BC, they believed in the spiritual truth that the universe is composed of 4 elements, earth, water, air, and fire, which occupied space. None of these perish, but these elements experience a continual rearrangement. Philosophers like Epicurus, Empedocles, and Thales of Miletus had a fair idea. But only very recently have modern scientists performed experiments that have proved this theory to be true.
In 2012, scientists at CERN, the European centre for Nuclear Research, Geneva, announced that they had almost nabbed the Higgs boson, and dubbed it as the 'God Particle'. This was theorized 48 years ago by Peter Higgs and now, practically validated at the Large Hadron Collider. The discovery of this particle explains why everything in this universe has mass. To explain it in common terms, atoms are not just made up of neutrons, electrons, protons, and the tiniest of them - quarks, but rather, everything is energy. You and I may look like a mass of molecules, but in reality, we are essentially energy. This is what Higgs boson or God particle does. It is a fie