What is the Purpose of Life?

Question

What is the purpose of our lives? Whether marriage and having kids taking care and paying bills or EMI are the only important aspects of our lives or being single and being peaceful and positive is more important. Sometimes I feel life is like a bondage of attachment, likes or dislikes. How to free ourselves?

—sunil wadhwa, India

Answer

Simply put, the purpose of our lives is to find God. There is no other purpose to life. And in finding God, we find everything we have been looking for during all our countless lifetimes. But it does take us many lifetimes to come to this realization. Without this purpose to our lives, life is simply, as you have stated, “a bondage of attachments, likes and dislikes.”

How do we free ourselves? This is what the masters, saints, and spiritual teachers come to help us to understand. At Ananda we follow the path of Self-realization, which is based on the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda. Our spiritual teacher, Swami Kriyananda, was a direct disciple of Yogananda’s.

This path of Self-realization is based on the science of yoga, and specifically the path of Kriya Yoga. Since you live in India, I will also say that it is the Kriya Yoga of Lahiri Mahasaya of Benares. It is a wonderful path that provides very helpful meditation techniques as well as techniques for working with the energy in the body. The practice of meditation in particular speeds up the process of actually experiencing our soul’s true reality: that it is a part of the Divine Light and that its destiny is to merge once again into that Light.

The path of Kriya Yoga is a practical one, also offering ways to deal with all the areas of our lives such as marriage and family life, business life, education for children, and others.

If you would like to learn more about what we offer, I suggest you take a look at the Ananda India website – www.anandaindia.org . It has a lot to offer, and you may find that there is even an Ananda center near you.