Jigsaw Puzzle of Life

Life can be likened to a jigsaw puzzle, with our authentic self as the goal. We all have an ego, which represents the inauthentic aspects of ourselves. The purpose of life is to be true to our authentic self, which brings love and connection. However, the ego presents a challenge as it consists of pieces that don't belong to the puzzle. Therefore, we must remove these ego pieces before we can put together our true selves. The pain and conflict in the world stem from people trying to fit these ego pieces into their puzzle. This analogy reflects the essence of life. One of the best descriptions of what life's about is it's like a jigsaw puzzle, but let me back up a bit and I'll explain how that actually works. So if we look at life, as I've mentioned in many of these talks before, it's all about the authentic self. So all of us have this ego in us in the broadest sense of the word, meaning everything that's inauthentic, whether it's the tendency to do the wrong thing even though we know it's wrong, or whether it's a learned behavior, or whether it's some sort of value imposed externally from institutions or other people's egos. So we have this negative side to us, this ego, and then we have this beautiful, loving, peaceful, creative, driven side of us, which is the authentic self. In a lot of ways, the quest in life and the purpose of life and meaning of life is to be our authentic self. It's through the experiences of life and the tests and challenges to be who we truly are and to experience that, and when we're at that point, that's when we're giving and receiving the most love and feeling most connected with everything else. So if that's life, it's kind of a sort of brilliant, I believe, illustration of what life is, is it's like a jigsaw puzzle, and finding your authentic self is kind of like putting all the pieces of the puzzle together, but here's the twist. What the ego is, is like a whole set of other pieces that are just thrown into the mix that aren't even part of the puzzle. So we sort of have these two challenges in life. The first is to kind of find all the ego pieces, which aren't even part of the puzzle, but have just been sort of thrown into the box, sort of remove them, and then we can actually start putting the pieces of our true, authentic self together. That's why there's so much pain and suffering and war and conflict, both in ourselves and in the whole world as a whole, is because people are trying to slam these egotistical pieces into their own puzzle, and they don't fit. Just a brilliant illustration of basically what our lives are about.