My Thoughts on the Connection Between Life and Spirituality

What is the meaning of life? There are as many answers as there are people who’ve asked the question, and I don’t claim mine is the only one. But after years of meditation, loss, and paying attention to the pattern of my own life, I’ve come to believe that life is a journey toward understanding our place — not as isolated beings figuring things out alone, but as people who become fully ourselves only in relationship with others and with something larger than any one of us. This is my own reflection on that journey, offered as one person’s beliefs, not as a claim on anyone else’s.

What My Own Journey Has Shown Me

As an old soul, I’ve often felt out of step with the pace of things around me, and I’ve learned to follow the path of least resistance rather than force outcomes. That has led me, over time, to a working belief: that life is a journey toward becoming one with God — where God is All That Is, everything in and outside the universe held in one entity, and we are fragments of that whole.

Ubuntu names this same intuition from a different direction. The philosophy holds that a person becomes a person through other people — not that we start out separate and then choose connection, but that connection is what makes personhood possible in the first place. When I say I believe we’re fragments of one larger entity, I’m describing the same relationship Ubuntu describes: I am because we are.

I don’t experience death as an ending but as a transition — consciousness moving to another plane before whatever comes next. And the unconditional love I’ve experienced along this path, the kind that asks nothing back, has taught me more about letting go of fear than any single teaching could. Meditation, gratitude, and quieting the mind have all helped me get there — and our piece on music, ritual, and the science of belonging explores how these practices were never meant to be done alone. Community sharpens what solitary practice can only begin.

A Lens I’ve Found Useful: Soul Age and the Roles We Play

One framework that has helped me make sense of my own tendencies comes from the Michael Teachings, a body of channeled material popularized by authors including Shepherd Hoodwin. I don’t offer it as established fact — I offer it as a lens, one map among several, that has given me language for things I recognized in myself long before I had words for them. The framework describes souls progressing through stages of development across many lifetimes (what it calls soul age) and describes recurring roles — server, artisan, warrior, scholar, priest, sage, king — that people tend to embody. I find myself resonating most with the description of an “old soul”: patient, often turned to by others for perspective, more interested in understanding than in being right. Whether or not the system is true in some objective sense, it has been a useful mirror.

The same tradition describes something it calls the twin soul — a counterpart bond said to be especially intense and transformative. I hold this lightly. It isn’t something I need to believe for the rest of my framework to hold together, but it’s part of the map as I’ve come to know it.

Where Science Meets This Search

None of this asks me to set reason aside. Researchers studying near-death experiences describe something strikingly consistent — a transition into a state of love and acceptance — and I find that comforting rather than contradictory to what I believe. Our piece on epigenetics and ancestral memory explores how the wisdom our ancestors carried is literally passed down in our bodies across generations — another place where what elders always knew and what science is now confirming meet in the middle.

None of this is a closed system, and I don’t experience it as one. It’s an ongoing practice of paying attention — to what meditation reveals, to what grief and love teach, to the people I share this life with. Ubuntu Village exists because I believe healing and meaning were never meant to be solitary pursuits. I am because we are.

https://ubuntuvillageusa.org/2023/01/16/the-role-you-chose-before-you-were-born