From ancient times to the present, there are countless people who are struggling to find the answer to this question?
But unfortunately, until now no one has been able to come up with a precise definition, and the more you think about this aspect, the more confused you will feel.
You may even feel that your whole life is like a dream, empty and illusory.
The great greek philosopher Socrates once asked three questions from the depths of the soul: Who am I? Where am I from? Where am I going?
These three questions may sound very childish at first, but in fact, in these three questions, they actually contain the meaning and truth of life.
How do I know who I am?
If you put aside the philosophical point of view, in real life, when someone asks you, who are you? Your first instinct is definitely to tell the other person your name and identity.
But have you ever thought about it? What is included in these two messages? It is actually your pursuits and desires, or the pursuits and desires given to you by your parents and the world.
First of all, people's names are given by your parents, which carries their expectations and blessings for you, that is, what kind of person you hope you can become and what kind of life you want to live in the future.
The identity you have now is a result of your own and the world's run-in, representing your current pursuit and future, and the goal you want to achieve.
What you are pursuing today and what your parents expect of you may coincide, may not coincide, but it doesn't matter, what matters is that the essence of the two is the same.
Here, some people may say that the identity I have now is not what I want at all.
So it does not represent my pursuit at all, so at this time please think from a more essential point of view, the identity you are talking about is just a role you play in this world.
Everyone in the world is simply pursuing their desires in different identities and in different forms.
Just as Zhuangzi said in the getaway, the Roc, which is more than a few thousand miles long, spreads its wings like a cloud hanging in the sky, and needs to fly tens of thousands of miles in the air to reach the far away it wants to go. Sparrows living in the forest only need to flap their wings twice and fly from this treetop to that branch to meet their own needs.
Dapeng and Sparrow, although the physical differences are very huge, but in the final analysis, they actually have the same identity, that is, the suitors of desire, which is the inner essence of every person in the world, seemingly very different, but in fact, they are in the same vein.
So the question we are facing now is not that we should consider what we should pursue, but why do we have this pursuit?
In this way, then, the second question posed by Socrates is involved:
Where am I from?
Where am I from?
In fact, on this subject, I think instead of asking me where I came from?
Rather, we should ask where our desires come from?
Because from a biological point of view, man was conceived by his parents, and man evolved from a natural species.
But in this process of natural evolution and nurturing, there has always been an instinct called desire that is driving all this to happen.
The reason why human beings have been able to evolve to this extent in natural evolution is because there is a desire to survive in our genes.
So we want to find out where we're coming from
We should first understand where this desire to survive comes from.
Many people may not be able to give an answer to this question, because we really only know what it is, but we don't know why it is so.
Even Lao Tzu only told the world in the Tao Te Ching that the Tao sheng was born in one life, two, two, three, three, and all things, but he did not say, why does the Tao give birth to one, and why does the first give birth to two?
Therefore, in the end, we can only come to the conclusion that dao fa nature.
That is to say, including human desires and everything in the world, they come from nature and then return to nature, but what is the so-called nature?
Where did everything in the world return to nature?
If we want to understand this question, then we must continue to explore Socrates' third question:
Where am I going?
Where am I going?
Whenever I am asked this question, I can't help but think of this sentence in the Tao Te Ching:
Husbands and wives, each returning to its roots;
In the final analysis, it is quiet, and it is quiet and restored.
The meaning of this sentence is that everything in the world will eventually return to a state of stillness, and this stillness can be understood as a relative equilibrium.
At the same time, it can be understood as absolute stillness, in short, a state in which there is no change.
This is what Lao Tzu understood, that the ultimate destination of all things, that is, all the changes in the world, is to achieve an unchanging state.
Change is only a process in the middle, eternal stillness is the final result, this description is actually very similar to our life, before a person is born, he is completely static and nothing for the world.
And when he came into this world, he began to change with all kinds of things in the world.
However, when these processes of change are over, everything about him will slowly move towards stillness, until it is completely returned to nothingness, leaving no trace.
This is the whole process of coming from nature to nature, so from this point of view, nature itself is a state of nothingness and stillness.
And everything in the world is like a wave after a wave stirred up in a still nothingness, and our existence is the process of this wave from being stirred up to falling.
And the traces we leave for this world are like the ripples on the surface of the water after a wave falls.
end
As one of the thousands of waves, you and I, although we do not know the reason why this wave is stirred, even if in the end everything will be without a trace.
But we still have to cross our own trajectory in the still void, swinging layer after layer of ripples.
Because in the eternal still nothingness, the possibility of a stirred wave is already a miracle within a miracle.
What reason do we have to live up to this period of time and space that belongs to us? Therefore, we don't have to seek any illusory meaning, because at the moment when you think about the meaning of life, your life already has its own meaning.