Advaita / non-duality

Mooji: What is the Meaning of Life?

30032015_Mooji portraits058Excellence Reporter: Mooji, what is the meaning of life?

Mooji: This is perhaps one of the most seemingly profound questions within the human kingdom. Yet at closer scrutiny it is revealed as one of the most elusive in as far as coming to any one satisfactory answer.

Let’s imagine there is a world cup football match being played. The match can only be what it is and goes how it does. However, if there happen to be one hundred commentators giving commentaries on the game, the listeners will only hear each commentator’s interpretation and each one will be different. Now, which commentator has given the most accurate account of the match? Each one will speak from his or her preference, temperament, conditioning and perspective. It will be a subjective view only and not the complete picture, which is impossible to convey. We could go further and imagine that we, ourselves, are at the match—live. Nevertheless, our view will still be biased and based on whichever team we support, as would be the view of each and every supporter. So, with an attendance of one thousand spectators, there will be a thousand unique views. Perhaps, if any view could be accepted as being most universally objective and genuine, it will come from someone who understands and enjoys the game but is inwardly neutral in terms of the game’s final outcome or score.

It is the same with the question about the meaning of life.

We can use this simple analogy or metaphor and see that it will be the same in the case of the lawyer, the mother, the doctor, the thief, the politician and the religious man. We each perceive what we consciously or unconsciously conceive. Each will perceive and experience life according to his conditioning and the role that he identifies with, but each person will only comprehend and reflect a limited perspective of the whole, shaped by the fearful and unavoidably self-opinionated mind.

Amongst the various types of beings, I feel that a sage is the one who has really grasped life in an all-encompassing and holistic way and this is so because, as an awakened being, his personal mind has merged in his universal consciousness—his source being. Such a one looks from the harmony and vastness of unconditioned consciousness, without personal interpretation or judgment. He feels at one with life in all its varied expressions and even beyond this. His enormous compassion and wisdom arises out of his effortless and natural understanding of the laws of nature, the universal play of existence as time and change and the unbroken recognition of his true Self as the core perceiver of the manifest and functioning world. His mind, free of conditioning, is not caught in the bubble of ego-identity and thus he becomes the true friend of all living beings. Seeing himself within all and all within himself, he lives the complete life. The sage alone opens the door to the Divine.

***

~Mooji (Anthony Paul Moo-Young) is a spiritual teacher originally from Jamaica. Mooji is a disciple of Sri HWL Poonja, or Papaji, a devotee of the great advaita master Sri Ramana Maharshi.
www.mooji.org

Excellence Reporter 2016
Copyright © 2016 Mooji Media Ltd.

9 replies »

  1. More important is who will you hear the answer as. As a person, no answer will satisfy you. As Presence, all answers will be acceptable and yet meaningless at the same time 🙂

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  2. “The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two “hungers”. There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning…
    There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning.
    There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you’re happy or unhappy. You are content – you are not alone in your Spirit – you belong.”

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  3. No doubt about what Mooji is saying. But in the end, the question still remains: “What is the meaning of Life?” – Maybe there is no meaning at all but a never-ending flow of whatever happens/doesn’t happen here and now. When questioning ends I may stay fulfilled with whatever is, I may really be in This Eternal Flow of Life with no real meaning at all.

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  4. It always amazes me that this is considered a deep spiritual question. As a child I thought the answer was obvious. As each person is unique, so each person gives their life its own meaning. Your world cup example backs that up. I think what is different about the sage is that he is more likely to be aware of how many different meanings there are, but his meaning is still his alone for the first rule of the divine is free will.

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