Purpose or lack of purpose is something that exists in the human plane. To escape suffering that is caused by war, famine, climate change, a person risks his life with the purpose of reaching a better place. Purposes relate to cause and effect; to agency. A subject acts and an object receives the action. By virtue of our lived experience, we interpret the universe in terms of separation; we see causes and effects and we look for purpose. If we find it, we decide that there is meaning to our lives, to the universe. If we do not find it, we may decide to believe in a supernatural or an unknowable purpose: “mysterious are the ways of God…” Or contrarily, we decide that there is no purpose, neither meaning. It’s all a blank.
This is all from our human point of view, the perspective of individual subjects existing in a universe of objects. You can say that indeed this is all that matters: whether our experience of reality is valid or not, we are stuck in it. This is what we know and perhaps all that we will ever know. We suffer, we struggle to find meaning, we search for a purpose to our lives.
And yet it is still important to understand the limitation of our manner of looking at the world, and to admit that there is another way of seeing reality, even if this is not currently accessible to us. In this other reality, there are no subjects or objects, because there is no one to stand “outside” or “apart” from the universe and observe it. There is just an all encompassing unity in which every particle of the cosmos is a full expression of the whole, in which everything is in perfect sync. Because it is all one, there is no agency: there is nothing separate to be acted upon. So, indeed, there is no “purpose” and no “meaning” that exist independently of the whole. There is no consciousness that is separate from existence.
The purpose, if you will, is therefore intrinsic.
I am stuck in an inflatable dinghy on the open sea. The craft is losing air and taking on water. I have no life jacket, and am unable to swim. My dreams of a better life, or any kind of life, have ended in failure and will soon end in death. Shall I be thankful for the short time I was able to spend with my mother and siblings? Shall I die with feelings of immense bitterness at the broken promises, the greedy smuggler who betrayed me, the foolishness of my venture, the loss of everything I hoped for, the cruelty of my fate? Shall I look from the dark ocean to the sea of stars, and think that I am one of them; that they are my brothers. That I am somehow a vessel for this cosmic radiance that comes to me across the aeons, and will continue to shine far into the future; a continuum of life. Shall I come to terms with mortality and immortality, perfection, beauty, frailty and power?