"What is the sense and significance of life on the earth and in particular of human life?"
Our lives are not our own.
"Why do you take such care of your sheep and cows; is it because you want their lives to be happy and successful; or is it because you want their meat and wool and hides? Don't you see that it may be the same with you? Why shouldn't there be some superhuman farmer who feeds you and takes care of you because he needs something from you?"
I was always sure that we must exist to serve some purpose. The mutton and wool doctrine means that the higher powers are not so much interested in our lives as in our deaths. A sheep becomes a saleable asset when it has been slaughtered. He went on to suggest that wars occur on earth when more human deaths are required.
Our lives must serve some better purpose than the satisfaction of our personal desires and ambitions. The idea that the aim of life is the 'pursuit of happiness' has got the world into its present trouble. But this does not mean that human life on earth need be as meaningless and frustrating as most lives are today.
Man is not merely a domestic animal serving the needs of the higher powers. He has a very high destiny, but he can attain it only if he earns it.
We see around us suffering and injustice. Virtue is not rewarded, wickedness is not punished. We see mankind helplessly drifting towards a wretched state of overpopulation, depletion of resources and wholesale pollution of our Mother Earth. There is real danger of total disaster by way of an atomic war. A new horror is on the horizon in the shape of new diseases to plants, animals and man. An era of fresh plagues that chemotherapy will be powerless to cure has been predicted. Altogether, the prospects for the next fifty years are pretty terrifying.
True happiness is the aim of all life; but happiness is not achieved by pursuing it. Real happiness is spontaneous and comes when one is living according to one's nature. The trouble is that few people know their own nature or what real happiness is.
Real happiness comes from the secure feeling that one is doing the right thing in the right way. People crave for security and do not see that there is no security unless one is doing the right thing.
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