The Road of Life
The article: Mental Prisons
Chapter 13
The meaning of life
Since the law of life, the conditions for the experience of the perfect life or true happiness, can be manifested or promoted only through "giving rather than taking", it is a foregone conclusion that a being who "takes rather than gives" and who practises this as a way of life cannot reach true happiness or the absolutely perfect form of the experience of life.
He will meet obstacles to the satisfaction of his desire and in them see "injustice".
In many situations he is thus forced "to give rather than take".
"Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's" means that the eternal principle of life or the law of life – "rather to give than to take" – must sooner or later be observed.
No one therefore can evade this law.
Everything one has taken in a selfish way from one's neighbours must sooner or later be paid back.
If this does not happen voluntarily life itself will bring it about by force.
And it is this manifestation on the part of life towards the ignorant egoist that is viewed as "injustice".
This, life's own claiming back from the individual the many possessions, mental as well as physical, appropriated in an egoistic way occurs in a corresponding degree as a mental or physical failure or breakdown.
Unfortunate occurrences arise here and there.
Apparently nothing is sacred.
And in many situations the results reached do not seem to be commensurate with the struggles or difficulties they have cost.
That such a being is in a cosmic prison and not in cosmic freedom is here self-evident.
That this prison can be of a rather gruesome character and can seem insurmountable is demonstrated by the fact that many such unhappy people resort to suicide and believe that by this means they will have helped themselves into a total annihilation of life, an annihilation that they think is infinitely preferable to this apparently hopeless existence.
Further down in the darkness, more tied and bound and thereby removed from his original divine, sovereign state, a living being cannot come.
Is it not clear to the thinking human being that such a fate cannot be the true meaning of life?
Is it not evident that we are here confronted with a fate that has failed?
Such fates are, however, the exception.
The usual case is that even if the fates are not perfect or entirely happy, they are nevertheless on a higher plane than those mentioned above, just as there are also fates that are almost totally perfect and whose source already appears totally free or cosmically sovereign.
It is a matter of course that it must be this latter kind of fate or experience of life that is the meaning of life and not that which chains the individual to cosmic slavery or bondage.