All the major religions and wisdom traditions teach that the ultimate purpose of life is to attain a state

of being or soul or awareness or consciousness that one does not yet have. The precise character of this
state and how it is attained differ widely, but there is an underlying agreement that it involves a
transformation from a state of separation, isolation, conflict, fragmentation, and lack to one of union,
love, peace, integrity, and completeness, and that this transformation presupposes a transcendent or
overarching or absolute reality of which we, in our present state, are more or less ignorant and from
which we are more or less separated, of which we are invited to become more and more aware and to
which we might be joined. Regardless of the role and efficacy of moral, spiritual, and religious acts to
attain this state, the essential transformation is one of being, consciousness, and awareness—it is
something or someone we become more than it is something we do.

And there is also consensus among all the spiritual traditions that, although effort on our part, even if
just the effort to surrender and obey—to “let go and let God”--to attain this transformation in being and
consciousness is required, it is never sufficient for the task. That which is already unified, full of love,
unalterably peaceful, and infinitely complete must to some extent come down to us, as it were, to bring
us into awareness, participation, and union with itself.

However we identify and characterize this Source or Ground or Plenitude or Infinity or Power, and the
journey to it, our task in life, as conscious beings who, whatever our varying beliefs about the world,
ourselves, and God, are inexorably aware of our not being this source, ground, plenitude, infinity, and
power, is to become more like this mysterious Other, to become more and more aware of our being and
consciousness as not ultimately separate and other than it, and, as the mystical traditions invite us, even
to become it so that my “I” and it's “I am” come to be one and the same.

Everyone, even those who purport to be “irreligious” and “secular” and “modern” are aware of
something akin to the aforementioned, even if it is not described or considered in religious or spiritual
terms. They too are conscious of their own limitation, finitude, lack of peace, and mortality, and they
seek to overcome these to some extent to attain a state of being and consciousness that is “better” than
the one they have. They may not call this state God or Salvation or Enlightenment, but they can't but
admit that it involves human flourishing, completeness, well-being, and peace, however this might be
characterized, and that they are, as isolated individuals, incapable of obtaining it all on their own,
without knowledge of a bigger reality other themselves, and participation in a community of other
people to acquire knowledge of this reality and to aid them in their quest for human flourishing,
completeness, well-being, and peace—what we today call happiness.

What is different, even radically so, about the men of today, both those of a traditional and religious
bent and those not, is the priority of individual freedom as the sine qua non of any human quest for
happiness. This is so much the case that freedom has become a religion and spiritual tradition in itself,
under the name of liberal democracy or just liberalism.