The meaning of life (spoiler alert).
Macaroni and mistakes.
One of the reasons there’s so much confusion about the actual meaning of life is that there are many ways to articulate it.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said the purpose of life is “the expansion of happiness.”
If it was that simple, everyone would have cracked it.
So how do we expand happiness?
The Game of Life
Consciousness, in its purest form, is an indivisible whole.
When you’re omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, there’s no one to talk to—because when everything is you, there’s no one else at all.
It’s blissfully boring.
In order to have some fun, consciousness likes to temporarily forget its status as the Absolute and express itself as many individual relative selves—souls, so to speak.
As individuated souls, relating with others becomes possible. This is what’s meant by relative, as compared with Absolute.
Everything’s pretty easy when you’re a soul—time is a flat circle, physical distance means very little, and you don’t have to go to work, like, ever. There’s also not much opportunity for learning, because there are few challenges.
So souls incarnate into bodies, in order to have human experiences.
Relatively speaking, life on Earth can be pretty challenging. There’s these pesky laws of nature for one, like gravity, which limit our physical repertoire of capabilities by a lot. There’s war, and taxes, and laundry, and all manner of stressed out people behaving in stressed out ways.
That’s because life on Earth is basically a training ground. We come here and take up bodies in order to have experiences that force us to learn valuable lessons we wouldn’t be able to otherwise. And to eat food, of course. Souls can’t experience macaroni and cheese.
I used to have tremendous anxiety around my misconception that life was so short, and I was running out of time to do what I felt I should do, and then it would be over, and that would be it.
Once I understood the Vedic perspective—that we’ve each lived around 8.3 million lives as fungi and insects and fish, and dogs and horses and monkeys, before even earning the privilege of taking up our first human body (of many)—I felt a huge wave of relief.
This body life is not all we’ve got. It’s just the latest level in the videogame of “life” we play, lifetime after lifetime, until we finally beat the game by completing all the missions and learning everything we need to.
It’s not that this life is not incredibly valuable and should therefore be taken for granted—but that the point isn’t to do it perfectly.
If we already knew how to do everything, we wouldn’t be here in the training ground.
The point is to learn. And eat.
And the only way to learn is to make mistakes.
“Mistakes light the way”
—Rick Rubin
The Fixed vs. Growth Mindset
As a recovering perfectionist, I used to get really upset at myself for perceived shortcomings.
The extent to which I have been able to shift that mindset from “I messed up” to “I just learned something” is directly correlated to how much my experience of life has improved.
The path to happiness through learning is three-pronged:
First, by shifting that mindset, we can avoid a whole lot of unnecessary stress created by fretting over perceived mistakes. When I fall short, of course there is some brief, fleeting disappointment, but it almost immediately turns to gratitude for the learning experience. This makes me a happier person in the immediate term.
Secondly, by virtue of making mistakes and learning lessons, we get better every day. The better we get at life, the more agency we have over the design of our life experiences, which makes us much happier in the longer term.
Finally, learning the requisite lessons is the only path toward ultimately graduating from this Earthen training ground once and for all, and going back to free-floating with friends and family for all of eternity, which is basically infinite happiness minus macaroni and cheese. You do miss that.
Macaroni & Cheese And The Meaning of Life
So eat the macaroni and embrace the mistakes.
They are the path to happiness and liberation from the meat suit.
Next time you catch yourself falling short, note the lesson, give thanks for it, and make your best effort to apply it next time.
In doing so, you’ll find happiness expanding day by day, until it becomes your permanent state of Being.
If you find yourself making the same mistakes over and over and seemingly not learning, I recommend the practice of Vedic Meditation for clearing the mind of stress and increasing awareness through the activation of total mental potential.
thanks for the reminder about the growth mindset. Love Carol Dweck's work! JGD.