It seems to me that there is only one purpose to life, and that is to learn to love. Everything else is just window dressing. We can build empires, collect experiences and money and relationships and whatever, but without love it all feels dry.
Another way of saying the same thing is that the purpose of life is to wake up.
Why are they the same thing?
Because waking up means precisely that you realize at the deepest level that you don't exist. That the whole person-concept thing is empty. And when that happens, you realize that the only thing that exists is the infinite.
Do you want to meet the infinite? Look in front of you. Look around you. Look in the mirror. Look at your closest friend. Look at your bitterest enemy. Look at the world. Look at the universe. It's all the same thing, all the same organism, all the same substance. Nothing is left out of the infinite; how could it be? And the infinite is everywhere; where else could it be?
And the infinite is in love with itself. When the human circuitry wakes up to the truth that the whole personal doer, the whole separate somebody simply doesn't exist, then you could say that the infinite wakes up to the truth that it's always experiencing nothing but itself. Through the human circuitry, the vastness suddenly is able to appreciate itself as itself through itself. The imaginary somebody is gone—indeed, was never there—but now the infinite looks out at itself and is in love.
And the love of the ungraspable is never addressed. How could it be? It's always itself; how could it prefer one part of itself over another part? It's not possible. No matter where it turns, no matter on what the eyes fall, it's in love. Not with this or that particular person or thing, but with everything, that is, with itself.
The infinite undulates through itself as itself appreciating itself. This party is going on all the time, and we have only to wake up to it by realizing deeply that we don't exist as a separate somebody, we never did exist as a separate somebody, and that the whole notion of being some kind of personal choice-maker is completely empty.
The ungraspable is all there is, and it's always been doing everything. It's breathing you now and beating your heart now and swaying the trees now and swaying the galaxies now and living your life and my life.
The infinite has never waited for us to realize that it's doing everything for it to be doing everything. Consequently, when we realize that we're not the doer, doing goes on just as before. Because the doing never depended in the first place on us realizing that.
So there's driving, but no driver. There's walking, but no walker. There's thinking, but no thinker. That is, thoughts occur, but there's nothing personal about them, they just appear and then disappear, so there's no attaching to them as if they mean something.
And when there's no attachment to the contents of our minds, what's left is love, which is just another word for the infinite. There's only love then, and it no longer matters what you're doing or where it's going or how it's going to turn out because it already did. The non-locatable doesn't need to get anywhere or be somebody or accomplish something—yet doing goes on as before.
Waking up to one's own non-existence is waking up to a love that doesn't want anything, that doesn't judge, that just wants everything and everybody to be just what they already are. And since they already are that, there's nothing left to do but just love. And yet doing keeps happening in the midst of that unbearable love.
—jim sloman, 12/31/00 for Dec 31
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