What is the purpose of life?
On a day when you are bursting with happiness, did you ask this question? No. Only when life gets a little sedate and depressing you ask. You need a purpose to life only when being alive is not sufficient. Right now, the biggest thing in your life is that you are alive. The stock market going up or down is not the biggest thing, you being alive right now is. Everything else is secondary. But most people are not aware of it. Something did not happen or did happen, these are the biggest issues for them.
The mind is always looking for a purpose because people have not experienced life in full. If your experience of life becomes deeper, your question will disappear. When the process of life becomes absolutely exuberant, it needs no purpose.
You go to work, your purpose may be to make this much money or to take care of this or that. But if you go to a party, what is the purpose? No purpose. You just like to be there. If life became like one big party you would not wonder what the hell its purpose is. You just like to be there.
Life does not need a purpose; it is a purpose unto itself. It need not lead you on to something else. Just being exuberantly alive is sufficient unto itself. Life does not need a purpose of reaching somewhere. That is the beauty of Creation.
Right now, you have a keyhole vision of life through your sense organs. The sensory perception of different creatures is working in different ways as it is necessary for survival. After some time you wonder what the purpose of life is because you do not see anything in full; this is the nature of sense perception.
If I show you this side of my hand, you cannot see the other side of it. This is so about everything. You always see everything in parts. Even if you look at a grain of sand you will look at only one part of it.
All the information that is in your head right now has entered through the five sense organs in bits and pieces. It cannot perceive even a grain of sand in its totality. It perceives everything in parts. If you add the bits you will not get a whole. You will only have bits. No matter how many bits you gather they will never become a whole.
This is why Shiva has always been represented as one with three eyes. When we say "the third eye", we are not talking about your forehead opening up. It is about seeing beyond the sensory eyes. It means that the ability to see has transcended the limitations of sense perception.
Sense perception is such that if i just cover these eyes with my hands, they cannot see beyond them. And in the physical world, there is always something or the other which is blocking perception. So when we say "third eye", it means knowing life in its full depth and dimension.
Though life is made in such a way that it does not need a purpose, to encourage people to explore life a little more, we can say that the purpose of life is to know it in its full depth and dimension; otherwise, you will not understand that life does not need a purpose. Once you grasp that you don't need a purpose, just to be alive is great
