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THE MEANING
AND PURPOSE OF LIFE: The meaning and purpose of life cannot reside in anything which
is subject to antithetical evaluation.
In other words it cannot reside in happiness, truth, love, goodness,
work, beauty, wisdom, knowledge, reasonableness, pleasure, virtue, etc.,
because of the inevitability and even necessity of sadness, illusion, hate,
evil, play, ugliness, folly, ignorance, unreasonableness, pain, vice, etc.,
which, by their regular (negative) intrusions, effectively guarantee the
intermittent prevalence of the former (positive) aspects of life, and are
therefore of crucial importance in the overall scheme of things.
No, the meaning and purpose of life has to
do with what Dr. Jolande Jacobi,
the Hungarian psychologist and disciple of Jung, terms 'the Way of
Individuation' - a development of the personality through the various stages of
life, with the invariable consequence of greater knowledge of the self both in
its relation to the individual and to the world generally. One doesn't foolishly strive to combat the
inherent dualism of life by taking an apparently one-sided though ultimately
self-deceptive stance in it. One
experiences this dualism as an eternal fact which, through its
comprehensiveness, inevitably redeems itself.
One could sum-up by saying that the meaning of life lies in life itself,
whereas the purpose of life is simply to live.