Purpose of Human Existence

Purpose of human being starts because of its superior quality equipments of body, mind and intellect. Human being is the roof and crown among all the creations. What makes different a human being from the others creations is intellect.

Of all the living creatures in the world, human beings are blessed with the unique faculty of discrimination. This faculty is either only partially developed or fundamentally lacking in other types of life. In the animate world, plants are the least developed at the physical level, their perceptions are partial, and they practically have no conscious emotion or discrimination. In the case of animals, their perceptions are better than plants—their conscious emotions can be proved by evidence—but there is no conscious discriminative power, if at all there be such a power it is still rudimentary. It is only in human beings that all the three equipments—the body, the mind, and the intellect—are comparatively well developed.

What special a human being can do with this faculty of discrimination; the discriminating faculty in human beings is of a high order; it can operate not only in the province of everyday experiences but can also delve deeper into the subjective realm so as to distinguish the Real from the unreal, the Eternal from the ephemeral, and the Changeless from the changing. This faculty of the intellect, to penetrate into the Transcendental, is the prerogative of human beings, which no other creature possesses.

This faculty of discrimination with the help of which a human being can delve deeper into the subjective realm show the great purpose of human existence. Because no other creators on the earth can penetrate into the transcendental; even they cannot think over the transcendental.

The lower beings, plants and animals, have no choice but to follow their inherent instincts. For instance, the nature of a tiger is to strike, kill, and eat; it cannot be otherwise. The best among tigers have not been, and shall never be, peace loving and content to live on vegetation. Animals tread a beaten path and exhaust their desires in the realm of their own activities for which they are designed. While doing so, there is neither devolution nor evolution in their lives. But human beings, the roof and crown of creation, have the capacity to live intelligently and to regulate life in such a way so as to alter the texture and quality of their inherent tendencies. By an intelligent application of the techniques prescribed in the scriptures, human beings—within their limited span of existence—can overcome all their innate tendencies which are responsible for the present embodiment.

Every individual in the world is born with a set of fructified vasanas, which are the innate tendencies or inclinations ready to manifest themselves. The kind hand of nature provides human beings both a conducive environment and the appropriate circumstances to enable them to exhaust their vasanas and thereby reach the state of God-Realization. The mind and the intellect are the equipments which help to accomplish this.