The Purpose of Life: An Essay

By Xlibris US

The Purpose of Life is an essay emphasizing spiritual enlightenment as the ultimate purpose of our existence. Although attracted by the paranormal and accepting the immortality of the soul, the author wanted scientific reasoning! Consequently, he reviewed some of the most important works of the 20th Century on metaphysical philosophy and modern science and combined them with various precepts of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. The conclusion that stands out from all these sources is that we humans are dual beings: as matter we are part of this universe and are mortal creatures, but as souls we belong to a spiritual world and are immortal. And the purpose of life is to reach a higher level of consciousness through spiritual enlightenment

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499039030

Book preview

THE PURPOSE OF LIFE

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An Essay

Nicholas Dima

Copyright © 2014 by Nicholas Dima.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014910985

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4990-3904-7

                Softcover        978-1-4990-3905-4

                eBook             978-1-4990-3903-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 07/11/2014

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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CONTENTS

Grandma

First Paranormal Stories

Teenagers In Prison

Early In America

Starting To Write

Science, Culture And Religion

Evidence For The Paranormal

The Question Of Reincarnation

A Work In Progress

Lucid Dreams

Exploring The Dreams

More Search And Research

A Holographic Universe

Matter And Energy

The Big Universe And The World Of Quanta

Science And Consciousness

Cogito Ergo Sum!

Satan And His Cohorts

The Purpose Of Life And The Meaning Of Death

Where Do Souls Go?

The Grand Design

The Eternal Life Of Souls

Beings Of Light

Today’s World

In Closing…

Appendix

Notes And Bibliography

Additional Bibliography

GRANDMA

When I was eleven I spent one year with my maternal grandmother in the countryside of southern Romania. It was a tragic period for the country, but one of the most meaningful years of my early life. The Soviet occupation of Romania and a two-year period of severe drought threatened the very existence of our large family of eight children. Starvation was common in the country and many people suffered. We suffered too, and I was hungry for food. To ease the situation, my parents pulled me out of school and sent me to grandma…

To me, my grandmother was always an old and wise woman. After the death of my grandfather, she lived alone most of the time and made a living by cultivating her plot of land, which was no bigger than two acres. Her land, however, was nothing short of the Garden of Eden: flower beds with unforgettable aromas, fruit trees, herbs and vegetables, grapevines, acacias and willows, chicken around the house, small plots of corn, potatoes, cotton and more. Her home was at the outskirts of the village bordering a meandering river. That river had created an oasis of verdant trees, reeds, tall grasses, small pastures, flooded areas, little ponds, sand dunes and a few small banks. There were always thousands of birds flying in the air and a few cows and horses grazing in the meadows. Not far, on the river side, was the village pasture where kids like me would watch the sheep and would play endlessly. Inside my grandma’s land it was our small heaven and outside of it was my larger paradise. As a child I had them both! It was there in 1947 that I began to open my eyes. As a Bucharest dweller and a grammar school graduate at the time, I had no particular interests and definitely no attraction for learning. After a year spent with grandma, a year that I refused to attend the village school, I became a different person. It was the first of the three important periods of my growing pains toward maturity. With grandma I satisfied my hunger for food, but became hungry for knowledge, a new type of hunger that never ended. And it was there that I discovered the paranormal.

FIRST PARANORMAL STORIES

The village of Curcani had no electricity, no plumbing and no running water, but it did have a railroad station and a paved highway connecting it to the capital. Change was coming, but I was lucky to get to know the rural world and its people before the lore of the past was erased. And the past was full of strange and odd stories, premonitions, superstitions, ghosts and other popular beliefs that scared and fascinated me at the same time.

During the long evenings when the kerosene lamp was turned off my grandmother would tell me such stories, and I could not stop listening always wanting for more. Grandma was illiterate, but at my age I was awed by her tales and knowledge, a knowledge shared by most of the elderly of the village. It was then that I learned about fairies, about "iele, invisible spirits that would play havoc on people, and about ursitoare," the women spirits that would decide your fate before being born. Grandma also told me about omens, premonitions and special dreams that people have. She would often warn me, however, that many of those strange stories were not for kids. I listened attentively and I believed them all. Later in life I learned that some people have an innate ease to believe in the paranormal while others, however hard one tries to convince them, never believe. As a child I believed, but with time passing I wanted proof of them.

My maternal grandfather, also an illiterate peasant, had a stroke and remained hemiplegic for the last years of his life. The night after the stroke he had a vivid dream and my grandmother relayed it to me. He had a vision of Virgin Mary visiting him with a stern-looking woman dressed in black. The two of them stopped in the doorway and the Virgin Mary told him serenely that he was slated for four years of retribution for his sins after which time the lady in black would come to take him away… One night four years later the Virgin Mary showed herself again in his dream and this time the lady in black accompanying her was carrying a big scythe. "We came to take you," the Virgin Mary told my grandfather in a peaceful and considerate way. The first thing next morning he told grandma the dream and insisted that she should prepare for the event. And my grandma added that strangely, while talking to me he was smiling and speaking to some of his close friends and relatives that in his opinion had come to visit him and apparently were in the same room with us. He was also stretching his arm in the air as if shaking hands with some invisible visitors. For a few minutes he was talking to me and then, on and off, he would change his demeanor to greet his visitors, grandma would tell me. He died the same morning.

There were many such stories in the village. Before dying, an elderly neighbor had a telling dream of his own. He also saw the lady in black, but this time she asked him if he preferred that his ‘life-line’ be cut with a sickle or a scythe. The old man was scared and told her to wait a little because he did not know which one was less painful. He died a few days later…

My grandma was not rich, but she did have the little that she needed to live decently and maybe a bit extra. One day she gave a poor Gypsy woman who was shivering from the cold one of her old winter coats. Not much later she had a dream as if