An article by Sha'Tara, local writer and friend.

Life: What's it For?

[thoughts from    ~burning woman~    by Sha'Tara]
 
(in part inspired by Robert Fulghum, and in part by "Dropping like Rubies" – a "feel" poem by Julianza Shavin – ref: AuthorsDen)
 
 
I agree with Robert Fulghum: I think there is no meaning of life.  I think we must discover meaning in life itself, by living it. By questioning it.  It's a kind of learn as you go thing.  Some are better at this than others, it seems.  I should explain?  OK. But this could blow your Sea-Doo right out of the water and your Harley off the street.  Probably not: if you're into that sort of thing, chances are the self-gratifying noise has inured your brain to anything I'd have to say…
 
I think it's safe to say, there's going through a life, and there's living a life. If you're going through life, you put in as little of yourself as possible while taking out as much as you can.  You believe.  You worship; you work; you have sex; you drive; you shop; you cheer and jeer to the prompting; you fight wars (literally or emotionally); you entertain yourself; you eat—and that's about it until the end in a truck heap or hospital bed. You went through life. Now it's up to whatever to decide what comes next.  You were never able to ascertain this while going through life, no matter what you believed, and it really didn't matter then anyhow because you were mostly taking, not really giving, and now it's too late.
 
There are those (rare) individuals who, somewhere along the going through life, decide to start living a life.  You've all heard the saying, "Oh, get a life!"  Well, some actually do that.  They become serious observers of what is going on and they allow their mind to become filled with annoying, dangerous, answer-less questions.  Such questions can be summed up as: "What's it for?" 
 
First you look at your little life, in your little world, filled with drama, trauma, repetitive events, happy, sad, funny, vicious, horrendous, and you make mind lists about all that stuff.  You redo your lists over and over, adding, deleting, joining, separating.  Once you're really good at this you realize you won't get the answers to "What's it for?" until you probe further.  Now comes the problem of moving out of your local space and time and into other places and times, so you can get the bigger picture.  You might get religious here, and seek meaning in the hocus-pocus of meaningless ritual.  Since you're now a practiced observer it won't be long before you know that such stuff doesn't answer your question.  Those involved in the show are no different than anyone else, they just think they are and close themselves off in their little organizations to keep up the illusion. 
 
You'll go beyond organized religion and look at what other 'spiritual' people do.  There's lots of stuff out there, from regurgitated paganism to New Age.  Lots more rituals and beliefs to play with.  It won't hurt, you say to yourself, to spend a bit of time and money here.  Maybe hidden in all of that you will find the answer, or at least an inkling of a path towards the answer to your question: "What's it for?"  It doesn't take much to scratch through the surface here: the veneer is much thinner than that of denominational religion (which has had to do a lot of painting, whitewashing and re-upholstering over the centuries to hide its rather blatant sins.)  You go through the pretty water color coatings and you're back to square one. 
 
No, not completely.  You read and heard interesting snippets here, about astral travel, for example, or near death experiences.  About ascended masters and avatars.  And you heard about doing it yourself.  Well, they don't mean it that way—there's no financial gain in entertaining doityourselfers—but even if you weren't supposed to get it, it was there just the same, in those piles and piles of shiny, colorful self-help books.
 
Recapping: You've prayed and got baptized—several times, in several different ways, just to be sure, and you've listened to all that you could take of boring, senile, sappy sermonettes.  You've read the self-help books and booklets and learned about the Pleiadians and Arcturians; got your houses sort of sorted out and don't know why the Mayan calendar ends at 2012.  You've practiced spinning and seeing auras and learned Reiki. Tried touch and touchless healing (kind of like a human car wash) and now you're seeing the dreaded treadmill starting again. 
 
No matter which way you go, you're going to be repeating yourself again. 
 
Essentially, you've done it all.
 
Come full circle again.
 
And now, you know that you don't know.
 
The answer to "What's it For?" isn't here.
 
You have to get off the treadmill.
 
Into other places, and other times.
 
You have to break free of the Matrix.