How God Can Be Cognized/The Meaning of Life

The Meaning of Life

What is the meaning of our life? It consists in qualitative and quantitative development of the consciousness. We have to become as perfect as God is perfect — this is our task according to Jesus Christ. Then we enter His Abode and merge there with Him to live forever.

The qualitative component of the development has three directions: an ethical direction, an intellectual direction, and the refinement of the consciousness.

The Creator does not allow ethically imperfect people to approach Him; they doom themselves to flounder in the sea of suffering of earthly lives.

The intellectual development is also necessary for the confident and quick ascent. A person with an undeveloped intellect is not capable of sorting out the many problems of spiritual work; having gone up the stairway of spiritual development such a person unavoidably falls down, and it can be very painful.

The intellectual aspect of development is the hardest and the slowest to realize in the process of one’s evolution. Yet this aspect is the decisive one on the spiritual Path.

The Creator possesses three main qualities: Love, Wisdom, and Power. And we, too, have to master them on the Path to the Creator.

Multi-aspect Love — which includes compassion, caring attitude, tenderness, the capability to sacrifice oneself, etc. — can be developed, first of all, thanks to ethical work on oneself.

One begins to gain Wisdom by receiving education, through creativity in various areas of social activity.

Power — the power of the consciousness rather than the one of the body — reflects the level of the crystallization of the consciousness. The term crystallization of the consciousness introduced by G.I.Gurdjieff denotes the growth of the amount of the energy of the consciousness of a person.

This is hard to understand for people raised in an atheistic environment, because the term consciousness was reduced by materialists to a synonym of the term mind. But in the spiritual tradition this term denotes the self-aware individual himself or herself — as opposed to the body.