What is life? What’s it all about? What a question. There are a few differing definitions, to say the least. Life is love! Feeling gives life meaning. Life is the universe expressing itself. And of course, if you’re a geek like me then the meaning of life is 42. You’re going to get a different answer depending who you ask.

Life is pain and pleasure

If you ask me, and you kind of are right now, life is paaaain. Sounds dramatic doesn’t it? Well yes, this is my dramatic opening statement, but bear with me, it gets better. On the most part life is about experiencing experiences, and through pain we grow, learn, and have better experiences. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger – pain is the flip side to pleasure, and through first experiencing pain we later experience more pleasure than we were capable of experiencing before. Otherwise, a pleasurable experience is just normal, and we take it for granted, so it loses its meaning. The more pain we experience, the more pleasure we can appreciate. Not always though. Only if we choose to, as happiness is a choice.

Life is Heaven and Hell

Pain is heavy maaan, literally, it’s a denser lower vibrational energy than pleasure, and it literally sucks us down. Physical, mental, or emotional, pain sucks us down into our own personal hell, and life on Earth is then lived out as if we were in Hell – which essentially we are. Most people live in ‘Hell’, as this world is setup for humans to do so, it keeps people under control, a cruel but clever management technique. People in hell work hard to try to find their way out of it, and in this society we think that money brings us pleasure. Sometimes it can, and sometimes it traps us in a hellish mindset where money becomes more important than love, and we forget what real pleasure is actually about. We numb ourselves to life through work, over thinking, TV, sex, food, drink or drugs, addictions of all sorts, anything to make us feel a little better, in the moment.

Humans are kept working hard to buy things they don’t really need, so they can feel temporarily happy. True happiness awaits us at retirement when we are often too old to fully enjoy life, especially if working has damaged our mind, body and soul. Humans are kept working hard to increase their country’s GDP, too tired to become a problem, and too numb to remember what life should really be about.

Who do you know is truly happy rather than content, or struggling on through life? What’s the ratio to unhappy people you know? Usually we don’t have enough time, we don’t have enough money, we don’t have a good enough partner, we don’t have enough friends, we don’t have the perfect face or body, we don’t have the perfect home or family, we don’t have enough stuff, etc. Capitalism and marketing provides us a drip feed feeling of emotional lack and pain, which keeps us in an emotional state of ‘Hell’.

Life is like Star Wars

Pain leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering – emotional, physical and spiritual. Just as religious texts teach it, so does spirituality, and so does Star Wars. The force is energy, the light side is ‘good’, the dark side is ‘evil’, Star Wars is a modern day storytelling of ‘the father, son and holy spirit’ for audiences who have lost their connection to spirit, but feel okay to call it an imaginary force because that’s not religious. It’s all the same thing. Watch it again – see how morals become corrupted, and an empire and relationships once in ‘Heaven’ descends to ‘Hell’ through pain, anger, revenge, and passed down karma to repay.

Ever notice how the Star Wars films are three cycles of trilogies, all repeating similar themes from a different perspective or with different characters? This is the cycle of life we also live in, the number 3 is very important. What goes around comes around, and you can’t escape from your past. Instead, face your fears, you must – this is the path of the Jedi!

Life is about Karma

So life is kinda like Star Wars, and some appreciate that more than others. Life is also joy, if we choose to work through our own dark side and choose to embody the light side within us – that’s where we find our pleasure. Some of us are lucky enough to be born into an environment with a support system which leads us to live relatively easy, joyful lives. That usually happens because we’ve worked off a lot of karma in our last lives. We are born, reincarnated with karma / sin, into a tricky astrological setup to make peace with, or born into poverty or a country having a hard time, etc.

If not, we just have parents, and every parent gives their child something to work out later on in life, as parents pass on their karma to their kin. Or we have no parents we know of, and additional issues to work out from that. We inherit both our ancestral karma from our family lineage, and our own past life Karma. We’re all karma karma karma karma karma chameleons. It binds us together and dominates our life experiences until we work our way through it. Some people say they have none, that karma doesn’t carry across over reincarnations – well, maybe they don’t, perhaps they’re playing a different game of life to the one i’m familiar with, but this theory fits perfectly for me.

Through this karmic challenge we inherit, we attract appropriate life situations and people to reflect our karma back to us, and if we make good intuitive decisions which feels right for us, we learn to pay back that karma and experience more joy in our lives. Alternatively, we stay suffering. If we do, we’ve likely made others suffer in this, or our past lives, and we need to understand what it feels like to be on the receiving end of that, so we stop doing it. Life isn’t necessarily fair – on a single life basis. Often the karmic life lessons we get are worse than what we feel we deserve – often this is a lesson to smack us in the face and jolt us out of our dark side behaviour if we’re not listening to the universe’s subtler messages. Over multiple lives though, life is perfectly balanced.

Life is about improving ourselves

Essentially life is about making ourselves better in some way – the human spirit strives to improve itself – because we all begin our lives as karma-ridden kids unless this is our very first incarnation on earth. We are first incarnated into simple organisms, and learn how to live as them. When we reincarnate, we come back as a slightly more advanced life form if we deserve it, if we mastered the last one’s lessons. After a few simple lives, we turn into creatures with emotions, and then those creatures attack each other usually, out of necessity to survive. The animal kingdom is cruel, and we become so in order to live, it’s dog eat dog out there without civilisation to give us rules to abide to. No matter how saintly we think we are as humans living in the modern age with our etiquette and pleasantries, we have all lived past lives full of stuff like murder, rape, torture, cheating, lying, warfare – everything. We’ve either been on the receiving end of it or dished it out, but we all have bad memories to or repay by experiencing something similar. If not as humans, then as animals at least. Every. Single. Human. We can’t be saints without first have been a sinner.

Once we get to the human stage, we have, in theory, developed the capacity to determine ‘right from wrong’. We have moral compasses, culture to conform to, and the ability to empathise with other’s pain. When we’re at this stage, we’re meant to stop acting like savages and evolve. Some of us do, and some of us keep acting like animals. For the latter, they get to be an animal in their next life, as they’ve shown they’re not ready for being a decent human yet. Humans are animals too. We live a lot of lives, as males, females, and a variety of species. We do it all. It’s just that each time we start again we mentally forget, while we instinctively remember, and repeat our patterns.

Life is about experiencing life

We’re all God’s children, the religious will say. The universe wants to experience itself, the spiritual will say. Same thing.

Whatever we call it, spirit doesn’t have a body, but it has consciousness it shares with us. Imagine you were a spirit without form – what would you do? You would likely want to enjoy yourself, basically. See what you can do with a body. You’d want to explore, learn, travel, love, fight, feel, make something more of yourself – you would want to live. Our souls feel this way too, because our souls are spirit. We’re unhappy when we’re out of alignment our soul’s purpose. If we do what the universe would rather we didn’t, we don’t have a good time.

Life is about finding our soul’s purpose

We all have a soul’s purpose, or destiny, or something we always felt we wanted to do. Something we were meant for. What would you do if money was no object, if you had the material possessions you wanted, and were single and happy with that? If you wanted for nothing, what would you do? That’s your soul’s purpose. It might be working! That’s fine, lucky you if so. More often than not, it’s not, and not many of us get to do what we feel we were born to do, because we have to earn money to survive. Life on Earth is about trying to find a way back to our soul’s purpose, because that’s what will bring us joy. That’s our Heaven on Earth. To get there we’ve got to work through our pain / karma.

Life is what you make of it

There is another essential aspect to consider; life is what we make of it. Destiny may be fixed, but there’s no fate but what we make. We may have a general inescapable theme to our lives set in our soul contracts / astrology setup, but the way in which we go about it, how, where, and who we do that with are all subject to change, and what we attract along the way. We make our own luck, we’re in charge of our own life, dreams can come true, we are the magic makers, the dreamers of dreams, what we focus on we attract. What do these common phrases mean?

We are what we eat, we are what we think, but mostly we are what we feel. What we feel becomes an energy we carry around with us. This energy then attracts both equal, and opposing energies towards it, like a magnet; our ‘magnetic personalities’. Broadly speaking, an empath will attract another empath, and a narcissist. A hateful person attracts other hateful people and a forgiving person. Opposites can both repel and attract each other, because we are energetically instinctively drawn to certain people whose energies match ours, both in a mix of similar, and opposing energies.

Life is love

We attract both our light side and our dark side mirrors. It’s a mixture of attracting what we need for our soul’s purpose, and it’s always a blend of energies that both repel and attract in various different amounts… relationships stay together if they remain more positive than negative over time. Someone needs to provide the positivity – if it’s just one, then that energy is drained over time until both feel negatively about themselves, each other and the relationship, then break up or stick it out for the sake of the kids/marriage. Once we have gained enough positive energy back, we give it another try, having learnt whatever lessons we needed to learn. Periods of time alone in-between relationships helps, if we don’t want to go straight into another similar situation on the rebound. We can’t solve our problems when we bounce from one relationship to the other, we simply project our problems onto our partner instead. We can think and feel our way out of these repeating patterns.

Soul mates, be them family, friends, acquaintances or lovers, are our karmic lessons, we attract each other to show us aspects of our personalities that we don’t want to see; our shadow sides. When we throw shade or blame at our karmic partner, or strongly deny that we aren’t like X or Y, this is our shadow speaking. Your partner will likely think the opposite – it takes one to know one! How we emotionally handle this determines whether we grow from it, stay stuck with it, or make it worse. If we keep attracting the same type of people, we are the problem in a way we still can’t see. We need to learn from them, rather than blame them for everything. We can rarely change anyone. We can change and better ourselves – our own energy – and then our partners either raise their level to meet us, or we split and later attract people with similar, healed energy. We have a slightly better life with them, learn more lessons, and evolve. If we both evolve together, we are much more likely to stay together. Relationships are quite simple when we get down to the nuts and bolts of it. Is our energy either higher, or lower than theirs? Will we bring each other down to Hell, split up, or raise each other up to Heaven?

Life is about learning lessons

In learning our lessons from each other, we can grow from them. This repays our karma. The religious viewpoint of repenting from your sins is pretty over the top in my opinion, it’s simply about making good life choices, that feel in line with our soul’s purpose. Go with your gut – rather than self-flagellation.

Life is about experiencing things and people, messing up, learning what we did wrong, and doing better. On repeat, over and over again. This is how we become happy, find joy, experience more pleasure. Once we break out of a hell mindset, joy enters our lives. Once it does, if we expect to attract more joy, we do. Vicious cycles are broken, and life becomes a snowball of incremental happiness (mixed in with any difficult lessons necessary for growth along the way). There’s a formula to life, how to fit within and go along with its flow, how life cycles work, what to expect in your life at certain ages and astrological events, etc.

Life can become a lot easier and enjoyable if we pay attention to what’s happening beneath our automatic, instinctive emotional reactions. This allows us to see our dark, shadow side, and work our way out of it. When we learn to love life, then life loves us back 😊

Life is about appreciating life

So in summary, what is the meaning of life? It feels arrogant of me to provide an answer to that, but because I am 42 right now, I’m giving it a go. Life is to experience experiences, both enjoyable and unenjoyable. To feel, rather than to numb ourselves through it. Without the bad, there can be no good. Life is to love; ourselves and each other. To attract people and situations to allow us to see both our own light and shadow side behaviour, so we can understand, accept, and grow from it, in order to attain a more pleasurable life afterwards. Just like a flower or tree or a mythical Jedi, we start off in a dark place and grow towards the light. Life is beautiful, and so are you. Someone out there thinks so, you’re the way you are for a reason, and the energetic mirror to someone else to help them grow too.

So appreciate life, every day if you can, all the difficulties and the pleasures, because if you’re reading this, whatever is going on in your life you have the means to read the internet, likely a roof over your head, food in your belly, and you’re educated enough to read – and learn – and you’re growing. You’re doing OK at life. Give yourself a pat on the back, and say thanks to whatever and whoever you feel gave you this life, and it will get a little better, every single day 😁 Whether you’re an internet stranger or friend or family, thankyou for reading this and therefore energetically being a part of my life, I am very grateful 🙏