As with all things Jayism, I don’t claim that this is THE truth, or even “a” truth. It works for me, it might not resonate with you. If you dig it, that’s cool, and if you don’t, that’s cool too. If there is one commandment in Jayism, it’s this: Find your own truth. So without further ado, here is the meaning of life, according to Jayism:
In the afterlife, everything is peace and love and good happiness stuff. There’s no anger, no fear, no jealousy. There’s no miscommunication, because everyone knows exactly what is in everyone else’s soul. Your spirit is intimate with every other spirit. Everyone knows everything about Life, the Universe, and Everything. There’s no questions, no answers. It’s beautiful and peaceful, full of light and love.
It gets old after a while. trust me. I’ve been there. There’s only so much “enlightened awareness” that a soul can take before going totally bonkers with boredom.
So we all got together, and invented this really cool game called life. We created a physical reality for ourselves, and we built rules and systems to make it function. We then agreed to follow those rules while we are in the physical world, and to forget everything we know about the “real” world. It makes the game more interesting, you see.
I’m pretty sure the first conversation went like this:
“Whatcha doin?”
“I’m creating a new world.”
“Bo-ring. Aren’t you tired of that by now? I haven’t created a new world in ages.”
“No, this one will be different. In this one, we won’t be able to do anything we want. We’ll have…um…um…like we need to invent a word that means “You can’t do whatever you want whenever you want.”
“Like the opposite of omnipotent? That doesn’t even make sense. How can there be an opposite to existence?”
“Dude! That’s it!! We need a world that is completely opposite from reality! Like there will be things we can’t do. There will be things we can’t experience. There will be things we don’t know!”
“Can’t? Won’t? You’re not making any sense. In fact, you’re starting to creep me out a little bit, which is odd, because until just now, I never experienced such a thing.”
“Chill. I got this. Check it out. The problem with creating new worlds has always been that we choose to experience them in our astral bodies. No matter what we create, it always ends up being the same, because we’re the same. There’s no challenge that we can’t meet, no obstacle we can’t overcome. We need a world where our minds and bodies don’t work…at least not completely.”
” You mean like we pretend we’re broken?”
“Yeah. Exactly. We pretend that we are broken. It’ll be fun!”
“Cool. Let me help…”
And so we created this physical universe, and we placed this world called Earth in it. We agreed to be physically born into this world, and in that process, we gave up our powers and our knowledge of the other side. We agreed to be bound by physical laws, and to be separated from each other. We agreed that we would feel happiness and sorrow, love and loss, fear, pain, uncertainty, and doubt. We even agreed to forget that it was all just a game, so that we would believe that it was all real.
There are no winners or losers in this game. The only person you are competing with is yourself, and the only point is to beat your own high score. You earn points by loving others, by becoming more caring and compassionate, and by overcoming adversity and fear in a positive manner. You also earn points by reconnecting with your true essence, by becoming more like the all-powerful and all-knowing being you really are. Peaceful, kind, and loving acts earn you points, while hurtful, selfish, or fear-filled acts cause you to lose points.
The ultimate goal is to remember and reconnect with your true self…the being you are on the other side. Doing that earns you a ton of bonus points, and makes it easier to gain points.
At some point, the game ends, and you go back to the other side, where you tally up your points, go through a peer-review process (Duuuude, I can’t believe you passed up that promotion! What were you thinking?!? Me? What about you and that girl?! Total fail!), and rest and relax for a while.
Until you get bored, and then you come back for another round. Game on!
Love always (it gets you lots of points!),
Jay