K Quote

Meaning of Life   Meeting life Ó KFT

What is life all about? What is it all for? We are born and we die, and during those years of pain and sorrow, joy and pleasure, there is the everlasting struggle and effort, going to the office or the factory for forty or fifty years, trying to climb the ladder of success, accumulating money, pleasure, experience, knowledge, and at the end death. Some scientists say that through knowledge comes the ascent of man. Is that so? We have an infinite amount of knowledge about many things - biological, archaeological, historical and so on - but apparently knowledge has not changed man radically, deeply; the same conflict, struggle, pain, pleasure, the everlasting battle for existence goes on.

Seeing all that continuing in every country and in every climate, what is it all about? It's very easy to reply with an emotional, romantic, neurotic explanation, or with an intellectual, rational explanation. But if you put all these aside as obviously being rather superficial, however intellectual, I think this is a very important question to ask - important to ask and to find an answer for oneself, not depending on some priest, some guru, or some philosophical concept, not asserting anything, not believing in anything, not having any ideal, but merely observing very deeply. Otherwise we lead a very mechanistic life. Our brains have become used to a mechanical way of life; part of this brain must be mechanical, necessarily so, in the acquisition of knowledge and the skilful use of that knowledge in every way of life, in every action outwardly, technologically. But this knowledge that one has acquired - and we can pile up knowledge more and more - does not answer the fundamental question: What is the meaning, the depth of our life?

Religions have tried to offer the meaning of life - that is, organised, propagandistic, ritualistic religions. But, in spite of 2,000 or 10,000years, man has merely asserted certain principles, certain ideals, certain conclusions, all verbal, superficial, non-realistic. So I think it becomes very important to discover a meaning for oneself, if one at all serious - and one must be serious, otherwise one does not really live at all, which doesn't mean one never laugh or smiles - serious in the sense of a total commitment to the whole issue of life. So when we ask what is the meaning of life, we are faced with the fact that our brain is caught in a groove, caught in habit, in tradition, in the conditioning of our education, cultivating only knowledge, information, and so making it more and more mechanical.

If we are to inquire into this very deeply, there must be great doubt. Doubt, scepticism are essential, because they bring a certain quality of freedom of mind through negation of everything that man has put together - his religions, rituals, dogmas, beliefs which are all the movements of thought. Thought is a material process as even the scientists accept. But thought has not solved our problems, it has not been able to delve deeply into itself; it has merely, being itself a fragment, broken up all existence into fragments. So there is this quality of the brain which is mechanistic, and necessarily so in certain areas, but inwardly, in the psychological structure of the human mind, there is no freedom. It is conditioned, it is bound by belief, by so-called ideals, by faith. So when one doubts all that, sets all that aside - not theoretically but factually, meticulously - then what is left? One is afraid to do that because one says to oneself, "If I deny everything that thought has put together what is left?" When you realise the nature of thought - which is a mechanical process of time, measure, the response to memory, a process which brings more and more suffering, agony, anxiety and fear to mankind - and go beyond, negate it, then what is there?