Questioner: I would like to ask you: What is the purpose of life? Is there a purpose at all? Or it is a wrong question?

Balasooriya: It is a time old question. Isn’t it? How do I know whether there is a purpose?

Q: At times one feels a desperate sense of purposelessness in life. It is form of suffering.

B: When do you feel it?

Q: For instance when the whole day is spent doing nothing, achieving nothing.

B: Achieving is always according to a purpose. Your achievement is not my achievement. This means that the purpose is a mind construct according to one’s desires, expectations.

Q: Do you mean that there is no purpose of life?

B: Let’s be patient.

Life is two dimensional and therefore we have two lives to live. One is the Life with which we are born, the Original life.

The other is the individual life, which we have constructed for ourselves upon the original  life. Let me say it differently. The life we have received from Nation has no form, no qualities. It is the universal, natural and original life.

But one cannot live it without constructing an individual form. Without an individuality life  will be like a vegetable. So you construct an individuality, which is your personality. It has self or the ego as its centre. 

So on one hand you are formless, and on the other hand you are an individual. Am I making sense? Life demands that you be fair to both the dimensions.  If you confine to one dimension your life will be a fragment.  

Q: So you have to these two dimensions. How can I be fair to my individual life as well as the original life?

B: For individual life fulfil its needs and expectations. Fulfil   your physical needs, security needs, social needs such as recognition, acceptance, emotional need like love, self-esteem, sense of achievement, power and self-actualization needs.

Q: Then what are the needs of the Original life?

B: Its demand is ‘Live fully’ ‘Experience the joy of pure life,’ ‘Stay in tune with  the Universal Life’ The original life is pushing you to experience the Highest Bliss of life’. 

Q; This seems like  serving two masters.  So I have to serve both the Masters. But what is the balancing point?

B: It depends on your maturity.  Some are more bent to individual life. Some are more bent to Original life. It also depends according one’s stage of  growth. Young are mostly concentrating on building the individual life. But as one matures with age and wisdom one bends more towards the original life. It seems the reality of the self is fading away with age  and in its place the need for original life comes into focus. However the ultimate life fulfilment comes through living the original life.