For thousands of years, men and women of every age, race, and culture have sought to understand the meaning of life. The people of our own time are no different. Throughout history, scientists and philosophers, theologians and artists, politicians and social activists, monks and sages, and men and women from all walks of life have discussed and debated many questions in the quest to discover the meaning of life. And while their discussions have been many and varied, to my mind all of humanity’s searching for knowledge and answers can be arranged under five headings, each of them a question.

These are the five questions that humanity has been asking consciously and subconsciously ever since human life first existed. Although we may be unable to articulate them, you and I are constantly asking these questions. Whether we are aware of it or not, our whole existence is a searching to answer these five questions. We seek the answers to these questions directly and indirectly every day of our lives. And how we answer these questions determines the shape, form, and direction that our lives take on.

These are the five questions that humanity longs to answer:

1. Who am I?
2. Where did I come from?
3. What am I here for?
4. How do I do it?
5. Where am I going?

All religious texts are centered upon and seek to illumine the five questions—including the sacred writings of Israel, the Chris-_tian scriptures, and the Bhagavad Gita. The five questions also form the major themes in the writings of Confucius and Lao- tzu, Homer and Euripides, Sophocles and Shakespeare, Plato and Aristotle, Dostoyevsky and Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, C. S. Lewis, and Henry David Thoreau. They are the questions that testify to humanity’s age- old search for the meaning and purpose of life. They are the questions that hungry hearts place at the center of their lives.

The second question, “Where did I come from?” introduces us to the ideas of creation and life. Within the fifth question, “Where am I going?,” we become intimate with the realities of time, death, and eternity. Most religious traditions answer the second and the last question with “God,” but the ideas that these questions unveil are complex. And though now is not the time, and this particular book is not the place, the second and the fifth questions deserve serious study and thought in their own right.

Questions three and four, “What am I here for?” and “How do I do it?,” give birth to the mysteries of love, joy, misery, happiness, suffering, fulfillment, discontent, and, especially, the never ceasing struggle we witness and experience between good and evil. We live our everyday lives in the realms of questions three and four. And owing to their practical implications, we usually become fascinated and preoccupied with these questions. But in order to answer these questions, “What am I here for?” and “How do I do it?,” it is imperative that we give serious thought and reflection to question one: “Who am I?”

Philosophically, this may all be very sound. Practically, however, the process of answering these five questions and conforming our lives to the answers we find is very difficult.

Each of us seeks to answer these questions in our own way. Experience is an excellent, though sometimes brutal, teacher. Yet at the same time, it is only the ignorance of youth that believes experience is the only teacher. As we grow wiser, we realize that life is too short to learn all of its lessons from personal experience, and we discover that other people, places, and times are all too willing to pass on the hard- earned wisdom of their experiences.

But where should we begin?

It has been my experience that nothing changes a person’s life more than the discovery of one solitary truth: There is meaning and purpose to life. More specifically: There is a meaning and purpose to your life.

Our modern culture proclaims with all its force: What you do and what you have are the most important things. This is a lie. It is a deception that has led whole generations down the well- trodden path toward lives of quiet desperation. But it is a lie that is reinforced with such regularity that we have grown to believe it, at least subconsciously, and have shaped our lives around it.

Two of the most common tools of social judgment are the assessment of what make and model of car you drive and the question “What do you do?” The whole focus of our culture is on doing and having. I get on the plane, and nine out of ten times, the person next to me will ask me, “What do you do?” We ask young children, “What are you going to do when you grow up?” and seniors in high school, “What are you going to do in college?” and college graduates, “What are you going to do now that you have finished your studies?” We live in a task- oriented culture. But this task- oriented approach completely ignores our need to connect the activities of our daily lives with our essential purpose. Doing and having are natural, normal, and necessary aspects of our daily lives; the challenge is to do and have in accord with our essential purpose.

In this task- oriented culture, one of the real dangers is to slip into an episodic mode of living. What I mean is, the happenings of our day- to- day lives can become episodic, one after another, like the episodes of a soap opera. In a soap opera, there is always something happening, but nothing ever really happens. In every episode there is drama—activity takes place, words are muttered, but nothing really happens. People abusing one another, people using one another, people talking about one another, people plotting and scheming, but nothing meaningful ever happens. Their lives are filled with superficialities, and they are constantly restless and miserable. There is no theme, no thread—just another entertaining episode.

When the days and weeks of our lives become like this, we grow depressed, disillusioned, and miserably unhappy. The reason is that without a clear sense of the purpose and meaning of our lives, the emptiness is overwhelming. We try to fill the void with pleasure and possessions, but the emptiness is unaffected by such trivialities. There are moments of pleasure, but they are brief in a long succession of twenty- four- hour days.

You are here to become the-best-version-of-yourself. This is the universal meaning of the human experience. Making the choices and decisions that make up the fabric of our lives involves embracing anything that helps you to become the-best-version-of-yourself, and rejecting anything that does not. Anyone or anything that does not help you to become the-best-version-of-yourself is just too small for you.