This article examines the question of what life is across four domains: biological science (autopoiesis, metabolism, the origin of life); philosophy (Aristotle's telos, Existentialism's authentic existence, Absurdism's embrace of meaninglessness); psychology (Viktor Frankl's Logotherapy, Csikszentmihalyi's flow, Maslow's hierarchy); and the Indian philosophical tradition (the Upanishadic identification of Atman with Brahman, the Bhagavad Gita's Kshetra and Kshetrajna, the Vedantic understanding of consciousness as primary). Five things every human being should understand about life are identified through this convergent analysis: that life is purposive at every level from cell to civilisation; that meaning is created not discovered; that impermanence is a feature not a bug; that consciousness precedes its material expressions; and that the question of what life is cannot be separated from the question of how to live it.
Narayan Rout (Tue,) studied this question.