The Meaningful Principle

What is the meaning of life?

There is no definitive answer to that question.

If you are a Christian the meaning of life should be Love as the Christ teaching professes.

If you are a Buddhist the meaning of life should be enlightenment.

If you are not very spiritual the meaning of life would be success.

But all of these answers are not very practical they do not tell you what you should do, how should you live your life.

Let’s look at some real people and what the meaning their life had.

Mother Theresa. Her life meaning was helping the poor.

Gandhi, his name is synonymous with non-violence. He dedicated his life to freedom.

Einstein dedicated his life to finding the laws of time and space

Mozart, music, Michelangelo, art Hillary politics, Warren Buffet, money and so on and so forth.

We define the meaning our lives by the things we do, by the aspirations we have.

We may not have very high expectations, maybe we are just trying to give our kids a good education or planning to travel and explore the world. We may want to better ourselves through spiritual practice or by reading and learning constantly new things.

Whatever we do gives meaning to our life.

We do not spend much time thinking about the meaning of our lives.

We are almost on an automatic pilot. Going to work, paying the bills, doing what is necessary to survive.

But life should be more than that. We should strive to make a difference to live a mark in this world.

Besides surviving we should all have a dream.

Well. Some of us do and most of the time that dream becomes a frustrating thing in our life.

We would like to live the dream but the reality is forcing us to do otherwise.

We are constantly in a time or money crisis, not to mention the other problems life throws in our paths.

So how do we deal with that, how do we keep focused on the dream?

One method I found out it works for me is the “Meaning” principle.

The meaning principle states that if you do meaningful things, your life will automatically have meaning.

If you do things that have no meaning your existence is meaningless.

How does it work?

Whenever you are ready to start something, or whenever you are doing or not doing something you have to stop and ask a simple question: What is the meaning of my action?

Let’s say you are playing a game on your computer – I choose this example because I found myself quite often in the situation J

You have to stop and ask yourself: What is the meaning of my action? What is the purpose of playing this game?

Of course playing a game has no purpose and therefore no meaning, it is simply a waste of time.

You will hate doing this kind of enquiring into your actions but eventually, you will come to the realization that you can achieve your dreams only by doing meaningful actions.

And if you keep on looking for meaning in every moment of your life, your actions will focus on the path of accomplishing your dreams.

Go ahead give it a try and let me know how it works for you.