Michael Laitman on the Times of Israel: “Why Should We Question the Meaning of Life?”

We do not choose to question the meaning of life. It is rather the emergence of a desire beyond our corporeal desires for food, sex, family, money, honor, control and knowledge, and more and more people are awakening with such questions in our times.

When we question the meaning of life, we start connecting with people who wish to expand the scope of their knowledge to discover the answers to life’s most fundamental questions: What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? Where are we from? Where are we now? Where are we headed?

These questions urge us to expand our feelings, to consider the world we are in, whether there is anything above our world, controlling it, a certain mechanism setting the world in motion, its cause and effect and its goals. When we ask these questions and cannot find their answers, we then start our spiritual search.

I remember when the question about the meaning of life first arose in me. I was only around five or six years old, yet I felt old, internally dissatisfied and detached from everyone. Other children were running around in the yard and playing, and I was thinking: “Why is all this happening? What is the point of it all?”

Of course, life goes on and you take interest in some hobbies, maybe some sports, hormones develop and you become interested in relationships. However, somewhere deep down, the question about the meaning of life still dwells and does not let us go. We pass through the motions of life as if mechanically and feel how meaningless it becomes.

We could attend symphonies, exhibitions and museums, trying to somehow cling to this world, to know and taste what people consider special. But why? We could look at a painting and think: “Someone took a couple of months to paint it. They painted it beautifully, but then what? What’s the point?”

I remember a teacher at school saying, “The meaning of life is to eat delicious food, relax, go to the cinema, read an interesting book,” and so on. It turned out, as the sages say, that you live not according to your own will, you get a little pleasure, calm down and forget about a higher meaning. Otherwise, life would seem like hell.

But what if we cannot silence the questions? Today, there are millions of people around the world who cannot stop asking about the meaning of life. These questions make us start to expand the field of our feelings.
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