Encyclopedia of Spiritual Knowledge

The question of the meaning of life gets inevitably raised before any person who matures in his or her development, moving up from the instinctive-reflexive stage to the really human one, at which the intellect begins to dominate in choosing one’s way of living and conduct.

Many philosophers racked their brains over this question. But the majority of them were not able to comprehend the true God’s philosophy. As a result the question about the meaning of human life was “declared” by many philosophers to be a “pseudo-question”, i.e. it cannot be answered due to its own nature. This atheistic concept assumed, in fact, that man is not dramatically different from animals and the objective meaning of man’s existence on the Earth is just… reproduction, ensuring the survival of the human race and creation of material values for the descendants.

But the truth is that there is a meaning of human life.

In order to understand it, one has to understand first the essence of the Evolution of consciousness.

The Evolution of the Universal Consciousness goes on by means of incarnation of particles of Its Energy into material bodies and through further development of these particles in the bodies.

The process of growth of every such energy particle begins on lattices of minerals and then proceeds sequentially in vegetal, animal, and human bodies.

At the human stage of development — after many successful incarnations into human bodies — every such energy unit (unit of consciousness, soul), which represents a "lump" of self-aware and intelligent energy, receives an opportunity to merge with the Creator and thus to enrich Him with itself.

Therefore, the meaning of human life consists in conscious development of oneself (as a consciousness, soul) in the qualitative and quantitative aspects, with the goal of attaining Divinity and merging with the Creator.

Qualitative and Quantitative Aspects of the Evolution of Consciousness

Positive evolution of individual consciousnesses has two main aspects: qualitative and quantitative.

The quantitative aspect is represented by direct growth of the “lump” of the individual soul’s energy — from small to cosmic sizes.

One can say that the development of man on the Path to Mergence with God consists in growth of the consciousness expanding from the anahata chakra. Development of oneself as a spiritual heart is the only way of approaching the Creator, cognizing Him, and merging with Him.

It is not difficult to do this if one has the necessary knowledge and knows the methods of this kind of work (including meditations at special places of power, as well as other techniques). But it is much more difficult to ensure the qualitative development of the soul.

The qualitative development of the soul includes three components: ethical and intellectual ones, and refinement.

The ethical component implies a compassionate and caring attitude toward all forms of life.

Ethical self-correction implies also total elimination of all qualities of the soul that are incompatible with the principle of Love: i.e. various forms of anger, violence, arrogance, self-admiration, egoistic sexuality, and other manifestations of human egocentrism. It is done by means of conscious repentance and self-control.

The ethical component of the development of man also implies cultivation of love for the Creator and devotion to Him, also gradual replacement of self-centeredness with God-centeredness.

Intellectual development also has three components: enrichment of erudition, a creative component, and the ability to discriminate between false and true views. For acquiring these qualities it is helpful to receive education, to participate in various social activities on helping other people in everything good, to study religious experience of many schools, and to have personal religious experience.

The third component of the qualitative aspect of soul’s development consists in refinement (increasing the level of subtlety) of the consciousness. It is by the level of their subtlety (or coarseness) that spatial dimensions of the multidimensional Absolute differ between themselves. They are like discreet radio frequency ranges. The subtlest layer of the Universal Consciousness is the Creator. On the opposite end there is the abode of devils and demons; this is hell.

An individual consciousness after the death of the body, finds itself in that spatial dimension to which state it has habituated itself during life in the body.

Therefore, we should hurry to eliminate all coarse emotional states in ourselves and by all means cultivate the subtlest ones — because the death of the physical body is nearing every day.

The mastering of volitional regulation of one’s own emotions is called the art of psychical self-regulation.