The previous four presentations laid out a set of guidelines that are the fundamental laws that govern our passage through the 4th, the Human Kingdom. Appreciating the significance of those seven laws does not give us the answer to the meaning of life, but it does indicate the major driving forces behind life itself. I wish now to turn to precisely that question. What is the Meaning of Life?
Meaning of Life
If one is going to talk about the meaning of life, it is good to have a perspective of your being in relation to what is around you. Let’s start with our Solar System. It is massive. Here we are only talking about three lowest planes of matter on Plane 49. If you took into account the Cosmic Causal Body of the Solar Logos, our Solar System would stretch halfway to the nearest star. Back to our planet. If it were a peppercorn, the solar system would be a mile across by comparison. When we get to comparing the size of our Solar System to that of our Milky Way Galaxy, the galaxy is simply enormous. For comparisons, if the Solar System were a mere pinhead, the Milky Way would be 10,000 miles across. Then we come to the Universe; well that is practically infinite. There may be 500 billion galaxies, each containing an equally large number of stars. What does all this tell us? We inhabit a minute rock in the practically endless Universe. We share our little rock with nearly eight billion other incarnate souls. We are dwarfed by the infinity of time and space. Taking all of this into account, it is not unreasonable to ask the question, how can we be of any significance?
To begin to start to answer the question, what exactly is the ‘meaning of life’, we have to define ourselves within a space? Albert Einstein said: “A human is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part of limited time and space. He experiences himself, in his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion if a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affections for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison, by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of Nature in its beauty”. Very wise words from a very wise man.
Let’s now look at the Meaning of Life from a Hylozoic perspective. How else would you expect me to look at it? I have said this before several times in passing, but now this concept gets a whole presentation to itself. The goal of life is to attain omnipotence and omnipresence on the highest Cosmic Plane; Plane-1. The meaning of life is to actively work towards this goal. Simple really. We can all go home now. If you have the courage to stay, I would go on to say that all life is potential perfection and life’s experiences enable that potential to become a reality. It may seem a very grandiose statement, but the whole Universe only exists so that we can realise our potential. I will qualify the ‘Royal We’ to include every monad in the Universe. We are all of the same origins, coming from the Anti-Verse and we all are working towards the same goal.
If we look now at the Human race, it can be said that our aim is to evolve from ignorance to omniscience. In the process, we move from a state of bondage to one of freedom. We start our journey as a human, impotent and we strive to gain omnipotence. Our eventual goal is to move from a herd mentality, through individuality and finally towards unity. Looks like a fairly easy process when you break it down into a few sentences.
The reality on Earth is that most people have no interest in the Meaning of Life until they reach a transition point. This point exists between the 2. Community phase and the 3. Cultured phase. During this time, the monad is focused in its 48:1 permanent atom. During the Community phase, it is objectively conscious only in the lowest molecular sub-levels of the Emotional Body. Once the focus shifts, after naturally passing through the (i1), the first of the monad’s initiations, its consciousness rises higher in the Emotional Body. The monad is now deemed to be a Cultured soul. This increased awareness, that there may be a point to one’s life, is just the start of the monad’s search for a higher meaning to its existence. A tipping point is reached when the monad comes to know the difference between the meaning of life and actively trying to achieve that meaning. When does that occur?
As a general rule, people do not start to work towards realising the meaning of their lives when they are in the 3. Cultured phase. They start to actively develop their consciousness when they transition from the 3. Cultured phase to the 4. Compassionate phase. This is a bigger shift in consciousness. The monad has moved its focus from the 48:1 permanent atom in the Emotional Body to the 47:4 permanent molecule in its Lower Mental Body. This is another initiation step, the (i2) and has major ramifications in the monads conscious evolution. For the first time, the monad begins to rule its life, starting from a mental perspective. Up until now, it has either been ruled by impulses emanating from its Physical-Etheric envelope, or desires, from its Emotional envelope.
The Meaning of Life is an evolution of our consciousness. This has to be more than just a phrase or concept. It has to become a way of life. When this occurs, the monad is alive to make the most of every opportunity that life provides it. We take these opportunities to facilitate the development of our consciousness. How is this done? It is done by activating levels of consciousness above that found when we refocus in our 47:4 permanent molecule. Once residing here, our focus shifts to reuniting our lower and higher mental bodies. We strive to become one with our ‘soul’. This happens when we move our consciousness once again and focus in our 47:1 permanent atom at the centre of our causal lotus. Remember, this structure is a body of 13 solar devas, the 13th of which is our guardian angel. Becoming your ‘soul’ is a Gnostic concept and to keep with this theme, the next step is to become our ‘Spirit’ in the 5th Kingdom. Where does this ‘spirit’ reside? It is found in the 45:1 permanent atom that resides on the 3rd Triad. This is another structure that is loaned to us by a deva. This time the deva is called a Protogonos, also known as the First Born.
We have climbed so far from the 1st Triad and focused in our 47:1 permanent atom on the 2nd Triad. We have then moved from this triad to the 3rd Triad and refocused in our 45:1 permanent atom. Where next? We are now the ‘Spirit’. Is there more? Well, you remember the mantra of the Gnostics, “Father, Son and Mother”? You probably know it better as “Father, Son and Holy Spirit”. We are heading towards the Father, becoming the Father, becoming God. Where do we reside to wear this illustrious crown? In our 43:1 permanent atom, the home of our Monad. Reaching the dizzying heights of the 43:1 atom may be the endpoint of evolution through the Cosmic Physical Kingdom, but it is just the start of our Cosmic adventures. The fact that we are omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient on all the planes of the Solar System, does make us gods of this realm. To become gods of the Cosmos, we have to repeat the same trick on the remaining six cosmic planes of matter.
To evolve, we have to achieve higher levels of consciousness. In the process, we alight on higher vibrating planes of matter. This is not feasible if we remain attached to lower levels of matter. Clinging to dense, material reality does not further our evolution. It is a natural outcome that the more we evolve, the less we are attracted to the wants and needs of most of Humanity. For people at the younger stages of evolution, they can not imagine giving up their material priorities. What older souls come to realise, is that they do not have to sacrifice anything to give up material concerns and possession. They simply grow out of them progressively. The net outcome of spiritual evolution is that we have less and less interest in going through life in a physically numbed state. We are also clear of emotionally induced fantasies. As we pull away from these distractions, the more fully lucid and in control of our destinies we become.
We all know the phrase, “you are born with nothing and you take nothing with you when you die”. So what do we take with us? Our consciousness is the answer you are supposed to give. We know now from our studies that you do take more than your consciousness, as consciousness is attached to matter. This means that you have to take some kind of matter aspect with you. What is that matter aspect? It is your traits and habits that you tuck away in your permanent atoms, 49:1 and 48:1 and your permanent molecule, 47:4. You also return activated causal matter to your Higher Mental Body. But let’s stick with the notion that all we can take is our consciousness. Presuming this to be the case, then the only thing worth acquiring is consciousness. Now to be accurate, it is consciousness stored in matter.
So, let’s agree that the mundane things in life are not our primary goal, they are all secondary factors. Because they are secondary factors, they are not in a position to contribute to our primary goal, which is the development of our consciousness. This all seems to sound very logical so what is the problem. Why are we not all striving to realise the primary goal of our existence? The problem lies in how the average person perceives themselves to be. They believe that their persona is their ‘self’. We know, however, that our self incorporates the whole of our 1st triad, as well as our Causal Body on the 2nd Triad. Our persona is just 5% of our total causal matter that happens to be surrounding our three lowest envelopes of incarnation. This misunderstanding of who we exactly are means that a person lives to satisfy their persona’s desires. The net result is that they make little progress in developing their soul. Let’s give these young souls a motto. It could be “you only live once and there is no meaning to life”.
This all seems pretty hopeless, but fear not, all is not lost. We eventually get tired of this merry-go-round and start to look for more meaning in our lives. This is when the persona begins to start asking the big questions about life and the thorny issue of the meaning of life begins to surface. It is all well and good saying to yourself, there must be some meaning to life. How are you going to find this meaning? What do you have to achieve and how do you then go about achieving it? The first thing a persona must actively do is set a goal. This is the beginning of real progress in the monad’s evolution.
You are on safe ground if you state that each individual has a unique character with a unique set of life experiences. By now you, personally, know that these unique experiences do not just involve events in this lifetime, but events in thousands of previous ones as well. Add to this the disposition of a monad’s ray configurations and you really have a mass of variables that affect you. Having acknowledged all this, for most people, the simple mission they have in life is to gain more experience. What that experience is, may not be so important at the earlier stages of their passage through the Human Kingdom. The net outcomes of all this experience gained, is that the monad gets to take what experience is gained back to its Higher Causal Body. This gives the soul more options to configure into the next persona that is constructed. This persona is hopefully also a more refined product of all the past experiences gained.
So what is life all about? It is just a sequence of scenarios and situations, which our consciousness can use for its development? This development comes in two forms. There is Qualitative Development, which is the refining of consciousness towards emotional, intellectual, moral and spiritual perfection. There is also Quantitative Development. This involves increasing the quality and power of refined consciousness. Because we are talking about power in Quantitative Development, it is essential that you increase the qualities of your emotions, intellectual capacity, etc, before you increase the power at your disposal. Failing to do it this way round is liable to corrupt your persona. It is wise to avoid too much power to tap into before the monad is sufficiently developed to handle it.
We are now beginning to get a feel for what we need to do in our lives to give them meaning. The first objective is to make the most of any opportunity that confronts you. These opportunities are there for a purpose and that purpose has one basic goal, that of developing our consciousness further. It goes without saying, that we should not squander these opportunities or waste our lives in meaningless activities, like playing golf. It is also highly advisable not to get caught up in the emotionality of life. Easier said than done but you know the drill. Try to focus out of your mental body, don’t think with your emotions.
Think of life as a long series of ‘present’ moments that can only be experienced in the ‘now’. This is all sounding very ‘Zen’, but you know what I am getting at. You just don’t need to sit on a yoga mat to achieve this desired state. If you accept that your ‘present’ is where you should be, then don’t waste your ‘present’ moments agonising over your ‘past’ moments. Carry this logic further and you can see that it is also pointless to worry about what you might experience in ‘future’ moments. You can begin to see now why life is cyclic. We need to experience a lot of repetition because we are slow learners.
Even though we may have incarnated 100,000 times to date, we are never going to experience two lives that are the same. It should be your fervent hope that each life will be a slight improvement on the last one, drawing on lessons learnt. This model can be applied to all of existence. Each manifestation is slightly more ordered and less chaotic than the one that preceded it. Remember, the ultimate goal for all monads is to achieve omniscience, omnipotence and liberation.
In this endeavour, there will be monads that serge ahead of the pack and then there are those that lag behind. It should, however, be remember that no path is better or worse. All paths lead to the same goal and all monads are destined to achieve that goal. Remember, the Law of Development. While we are all evolving, none of us is capable of independent existence. We all must rely on the ABSOLUTE. It is this great monad that brought us into the universe we dwell in, into existence as we know it.
So we are faced with a choice and this is at the heart of the dilemma that is the Meaning of Life. Do we, as a species, want to continue along a materialistic path or do we want to develop into true Human Beings? If we, collectively, choose the wrong path, we could find ourselves beings seriously knocked back, as we have done so in the past. What is the solution to avoiding this fate again? It is that we need to work towards uniting Humanity. The other road is not for us.
In the remaining few prevention of the Adventures of the Monad, I wish to focus on our Personal Development.