Life Purpose in 5 Minutes

Here’s an interesting TEDx talk by Adam Leipzig on “How to Know Your Life Purpose in 5 Minutes.“

He skims over the profundity of some things like Know Thyself, which can make further answers more obvious. But he makes some interesting points. Here’s a few for reference:

151 thousand books on Amazon on life purpose. But if you’re just examining, you’re not living.

5 Steps:
1 – Who you Are  (name)
2 – What you do (love to do – single words)
focus down: what is the one thing you feel supremely qualified to teach others.
3 – Who you do it for
4 – What do they want or need? (one or 2 words)
5 – How do they change as a result?

Put it all together into a kind of sentence. You’ve just done something people who have gone to Yale couldn’t figure out in 25 years.

Note that 2 of the questions are about me and the other 3 are about the people I serve. Focus on those you serve. If you make others happy, you will be taken care of.

When someone asks what you do – use the last answer – how you change people.
Good one 
Davidya

Gratitude for Self

I’ve spoken here a lot about the importance of gratitude. Being thankful for what’s in our lives helps culture an openness and allowing. It also helps enable support.

But there’s a deeper aspect of gratitude than just being thankful for the people and things in our life. It’s being grateful for ourselves.

This may, like self-love, sound like narcissism. What we’re talking about is something much deeper. For most of us, buried under all our emotional drama is a wounded self, a self that feels alone, unworthy and/or unsafe.

For some seekers it is very easy to accept that the ego is bad and needs to die. It builds on the old unworthiness. But this is just more story. Even though some may experience a sense of “ego-death” in awakening, the ego function remains and continues. Otherwise we could not function in the world. The actual shift is from identification with an ego concept of self to cosmic Self (or no-self). And that takes place through allowing, not rejecting.

It takes great courage to reach beyond gratitude for what is in our lives to being grateful for our life itself and who we are. We would not be here if we had no purpose or function. In the film It’s A Wonderful Life, Bailey questions the value of his life and is shown what it would have been like without him. While you may consider this a little maudlin, it illustrates how we often don’t recognize the impact we’ve had on others and the benefits we’ve brought the world. Our natural gifts can be least obvious to us as they come so naturally.

Sure, we’re not perfect in a superficial sense. That’s the nature of living in a divided reality. But finding gratitude in what we can offer is profoundly healing. It brings light to what is often a very dark place for us.

And that’s a fine thing indeed.
Davidya

Specialness

An interesting discussion in another forum brought together some points discussed here before.

I’ve talked about the 3-layer nature of the ego: the mental concept of a me, the emotional/energetic drivers of that, and the core subconscious identity. That core is fear-driven and arises when we lose our sense of connection to divine wholeness.

This fear in turn leads to layers of resistance to life. The seeming loss of safety, control and approval are common drivers. These create barriers to ourselves, causing us problems and suffering.

On the surface, we have the conceptual ideas about self like “I am this” and “I am not that.” Of course, the troubles arise when we make what we aren’t wrong and judge others accordingly. More subtle energetically we have feelings of “I don’t want to” or “I won’t.” While a healthy No is a very good thing, this can be a way of feeding our barriers. Deeper still, we have identity-based senses of “must” and “should.” These are usually sub-conscious drivers of how we act based on our sense of self. They can often in get in the way of being who we are or why we’re here. And under that, the sub-conscious sense of “me-ness” that we take as reality. This is subtle and belief-like but sub-conscious so it’s difficult to recognize directly. We can recognize it more by our most intractable challenges and the need for things like safety and control.

“Me-ness” is not stories like “I am fat” or “I am smart”. Those are conceptual “I am this” messages we tell ourselves. But those may be driven by the deeper “Me-ness” sense making them much more persistent. For example, we find it difficult to eat in a healthy way that will retain an appropriate body size because we fear for the safety of our illusory self or fear the exposure of repressed emotions. We then dull the feelings with physical overload or wrong food. This dynamic is obscured by the “I am this” story of why we behave this way and it’s self put-downs. Plus the ego uses emotional drama to distract from how you’re actually feeling. Thus, body, mind and emotions are all distractions from how we are. Ironically, our apparent lack of self-control is driven by ego control.

A key aspect of “Me-ness” is the sense of being special or unique. This is directly associated with the early sense of “mine”, only in relationship to the me. My talents, my name, my rights, my intelligence, and so forth. It can also relate to deficiencies like “not enough” or “weak” that are layered on later.

This is not to say Mr. Rogers is wrong. It’s healthy for young children to differentiate themselves and see their uniqueness. But this may become distorted by the ego later in life.

It’s worth noting that we can be proud of our specialness but we also fear it. We fear it because it is created by fear. As a result, we fear it being seen and our identity exposed as a lie. Thus, we fear success as our specialness may be exposed as false.

Curiously, it’s all a big boogie man without substance. The fear of being seen is greater than what we’re trying to avoid.

To understand “Me-ness” better, lets explore more examples. We all have gifts or abilities. But if we frame them as my abilities for me, we fail to understand our purpose. As we explored in Sacred Gifts, our gifts are for others. It is when we find how to use our gifts to support others that we’re living on purpose.

Human rights is another good example. If we see them as my rights rather than our rights, we’ll fail to uphold others rights and lose our own in the process. This includes things like property rights. Individual property rights cannot be upheld where there are masses of homeless people. It’s unsustainable. Rights only work from relative equality, from shared rights.

Entitlement is another. We live in a culture where advertising is constantly reinforcing the idea we deserve things. One of the results is widespread unsustainable debt, both by individuals and governments. But eventually, that debt comes due. We cannot accomplish anything by expectation; of employers, government, relationship, or the divine. The field of action and energy don’t work that way. Things are created with energy, with action. Action increases your deserving power as one teacher put it.

It’s not what we have, it’s what we give that counts. There are no separate individuals here.
Davidya

Anita’s Love

A friend sent me an interview with Anita Moorjani. This reflected beautifully on the recent theme of Value. Most of us have spiritual experiences as a result of a practice or circumstance. But occasionally, someone gets a glimpse of truth through dying, then coming back to tell about it. These are called NDE’s or Near Death Experiences. I’ve mentioned the Mellen-Thomas NDE here a few times. Anita’s is quite different. While in a coma with terminal cancer, she heard everything around her. When her body formally died, she apparently didn’t leave but instead felt a great deal. Her deceased father urged her to stay and fulfill her purpose. She said that her disease was the result of living in fear. She experienced her value and oneness and her fear was relieved by discovering she was love. She chose to return and her cancer was cleared in a few days.

Interview with Lilou Mace (about 47 min)

Here’s a few quotes I really enjoyed. I’ve paraphrased a bit.

Be yourself and allow, live life with abandon and the purpose of your life will unfold before you.
Don’t pursue it – it means you don’t think its yours.

When you find your centre, you can allow everything thats yours to come into your life.
When you know you are amazing and deserving then you know you just have to allow it.

Don’t try to suppress the ego or it will fight back. Just allow.

The most important take-away:
All of us, at our core, it’s who we are. We are love.
When you are totally being yourself, all you can be is love. So don’t be afraid to be who you are.

Anita Moorjani
Remember your magnificence.
anitamoorjani.com

Core Values

What do you stand for? What are the values you operate from? One of the churches in my area is doing a survey of the community to set their Core Values. When you know your Core Values, decisions on projects, funding, priorities and so forth become much easier. Priorities, goals and practices all flow out of ones values. And they allow an organization to set their Vision and Mission as well.

You may see such exercises as meaningless drivel. There are any number of organizations with fancy mission statements that are largely meaningless and unknown to most staff. But if you wonder at your own purpose or mission, you may find it useful to consider what your Core Values are first. These values flow out of your purpose so can help to illuminate it. It’s also always worth being conscious of what’s driving you, what your passions arise from.

Here are a few dozen. Mark or make a list of the ones that strike you as important. What you value, believe in or find meaning in. Don’t spend a lot of time thinking about “good” ones. Focus on what feels important to you personally. Remember, you’re not looking for skills or desires but rather what you value, what has meaning for you. You may have similar words you prefer or other words altogether. Add them to your list.

	Accessibility		Fairness		Involvement		Quality
	Accomplishment		Faith		Joy		Rationality
	Accountability		Fame		Justice		Recognition
	Adventure		Family		Knowledge		Rehabilitation
	Appreciation		Fitness		Leadership		Relationships
	Authenticity		Flair		Learning		Reliability
	Autonomy		Flexibility		Love		Resourcefulness
	Beauty		Forgiveness		Loyalty		Respect
	Charity		Freedom		Meaning		Responsibility
	Clarity		Friendship		Merit		Responsiveness
	Cleanliness		Fun		Mobility		Rule of law
	Collaboration		Generosity		Non-violence		Safety
	Commitment		Global view		Nurturing		Security
	Communication		Goodness		Openness		Self-reliance
	Community		Gratitude		Opportunity		Service
	Compassion		Growth		Optimism		Sexuality
	Competence		Happiness		Order		Simplicity
	Cooperation		Harmony		Organization		Sincerity
	Courage		Health		Originality		Spiritual Growth
	Creativity		Heritage		Patience		Spiritual Practice
	Curiosity		Heroism		Peace		Stability
	Decisiveness		Honesty		Persistence		Strength
	Dependability		Honor		Personal growth		Style
	Determination		Hope		Perspective		Success
	Discipline		Humor		Philosophy		Support
	Discovery		Imagination		Play		Synergy
	Diversity		Inclusiveness		Pleasure		Teamwork
	Duty		Independence		Positive attitude		Tolerance
	Education		Influence		Power		Tradition
	Efficiency		Initiative		Practicality		Tranquility
	Empathy		Inner peace		Preservation		Trust
	Empowerment		Innovation		Prestige		Truth
	Environment		Inspiration		Pride		Variety
	Equality		Integrity		Productivity		Vision
	Excellence		Intelligence		Prosperity		Wellness
	Expression		Intuition		Purity		Wisdom

Once you have a list, narrow it down to about 5-7. If you have very similar words like Truth and Honesty, consider which is the Core or Root value for you. The idea is to find the values that are most important to you. They are the essence of your greatest priorities.

By being conscious of your values, you gain insight into your beliefs and motivations. It makes setting priorities more straightforward and you can make better choices. When you’re faced with a decision, you can ask yourself which choice meets your values.

“The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.” – Albert Einstein

“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” – Roy Disney (Walt’s older brother and the Disney financier)

If you want to go deeper, you can put the Values in priority order and explore how you want them expressed in your life. What are the results and behaviours you see if you’re acting from Clarity, for example?

You can then consider how this translates into a Vision for your life. Several years ago, when I wrote Expressing Purpose, I spoke of Core Values arising out of Purpose. But if we’re trying to discover Purpose, we can also work from Core Values back to uncover our Purpose. The article also points to one’s Vision and Mission.

What do you value most?
Davidya

Remembering Dharma

In the past when I’ve spoken on Dharma, I generally translated it as Purpose. For example, in the traditional 4 Levels of Purpose (Universal, community, life period, and personal).

However, on a deeper level, Dharma is that which sustains. It is in sustaining that our purpose can unfold. Dharma maintains a balance between creative and destructive forces, thus upholding creation. For example, when we act positively, we experience positive results (karma) but this throws off the balance. Dharma responds with feelings of satisfaction, restoring balance. This is the essence of evolution. (Bucky Fuller talked of Action, Reaction, and Resultant, a triangle)

Everything is happening in an eternal now. But this is more a reflection of how God perceives, all at once. We as humans are a reflection of a single point of awareness, of awareness becoming aware of itself at a single point. From a point, we see one point at a time. (Bucky Fuller called this Special Case) We experience a sequence of individual points incrementally as a sequence of experiences, like a movie. The effect of this we call time. Thus, we experience the unfolding of our being in a systematic way, sequentially in steps.

For this process to be able to happen, time and space must continue. This introduces a fascinating aspect of totality: memory.

When Self recognizes itself fully, it leaves an impression within its eternal structure. This is known as Smriti or memory. When intelligence takes a direction or intention arises, it does so on the foundation of this memory. This has the effect of sustaining or Dharma. Dharma functions on the level of eternal Being. We could say it is the hand of God in our lives. Put another way, Prakriti (Nature) takes the next step on the basis of the last. Each step comes built on the memory of the last step and the memory of prior unfoldment.

Let’s look at it another way. Creation or expression arises from an impulse or intention. Physics talks of virtual fluctuations in the unified field. But you’ll note here there is an impulse, then it falls back within itself. The vast majority of impulses do just that, like a passing thought. But some continue.
What’s the difference? Memory. Some impulses are remembered and some are recalled from memory. This sustains that impulse.

Without this sustaining or Vedic principle of Vishnu (Rama, Krishna, etc.), all expression would cease again and there would be no playground or forum for experiences to unfold, for a process or evolution.

Thus Dharma is that which sustains and that which allows the unfoldment of who we are. Memory is the mechanism of Dharma. Of course, this is not memory in the sense of what you had for breakfast. That is a pale reflection of the eternal memory within consciousness itself. Smriti memory is beyond all expression. In fact it is the source of Veda (knowledge). Without this memory, eternal knowledge would be lost. Instead, it is only forgotten and remembered again.

There is quite a bit more that could be said. This process is the foundation of perception and brain functioning. It is memory that sustains you forward, lifetime to lifetime. It is the memory that brings creation back after dissolution and sustains it for its duration. Without it, it would be like God had Alzheimer’s: no knowledge, no enlightenment.

We could say evolution is a process of remembering. Remembering what is everlasting.
Davidya

Your Whole Life Is About Awakening

“Everything that happens to you from moment to moment happens because it has the highest probability of waking you up. I know that this idea might sound crazy, but there’s no getting around it. Your entire life has one agenda: awakening.”
– Tom Stine

This makes more sense if we consider all of reality exists as a process of self-knowledge, of waking more deeply to itself. This is of course reflected in every aspect of itself, including each of us.
Davidya

Surrender Date

Recently, I had one of those curious experiences where I started to look at a different career direction, then the means in question vanished. Later that same day, I went to a talk on book publishing and was surprised by the dramatic changes in the industry. Independent publishers are now producing more titles than the traditional houses and Print on Demand dominates the market. All of this is driven by an unsustainable model in retail book sales where a large number of books are burned just a few months after printing. More to the point, there was a viable new way of making a living in this market. Something like what’s happening for independent musicians.

What further amused me was the crowning touch. An article in the career pages of a local paper I read on the way home by Dr. Career*. It was called Surrender date: Have you reached yours yet?

“A surrender date is a unique moment in your life when you accept what your natural born talent is. Not what you want it to be or what others want it to be… when you decide to no longer live your life by other people’s rules that are either imposed on you or are part of your belief system…”

I laughed at this for a number of reasons. For one, I talk about Surrender dates here in reference to moments of awakening. Many people can very clearly remember the place and time of their awakenings. A kind of before and after point when life made a major shift.

“You will never forget your surrender date. Like the time when your first child was born or when you lost your virginity.”

He goes on to talk about the freedom and the reduction in worry. “…you no longer have to pretend or spend energy comparing yourself to others.” “When you are not fighting, you are accepting.”

“Signals you have not had yours yet?”
- a very busy person that never stops (to cover whats not working)
- your life is a struggle or fight
- you feel stuck or not progressing
- you are angry or blaming

He then shares his own experience of deciding not to do what he wanted but to accept his nature. Mainly because his life was a disaster. He had known since childhood but had been resisting it  because of negative beliefs.

“What beliefs do you have that are not allowing you to surrender?”

I was unnecessarily surprised to see how much this had in common with awakening. But one can certainly see how the dharma or purpose of awakening is closely linked to the more personal value of career.

It’s also notable how discouraged many of us can be from our talents. Messages of bad career choice from family. Poor results in school. Beliefs laid on about good and bad, right and wrong. It goes on and on. All of that masking why we’re here and thus where we can have the most success, joy, and sense of well-being.

I’ve been struggling with this some as I’ve been nailed a few times in my life for being myself. While I’ve approached it, I’ve not fully “surrendered” to this one. I empathize with a resistance to what Gangaji calls a willingness to be seen.

It should of course be noted that career is not necessarily a fixed thing. It will tend to evolve in life. Just as the rules of life can sometimes shift, so too our role. There are obvious things like becoming a parent. But sometimes less obvious things shift and what worked before stops working, calling us to change.

This can quite simply be due to karma. We may even spend a hunk of our life more in obligation than purpose. But the closer we are to purpose, the more easily we can resolve obligation. Change will still arise when a certain role has finished, but not with such difficulty. Now we have a new opportunity to stop and take a look. What is the best choice rather than what is the first thing that comes along? The second may seem easier up front, but it’s the bumpier road long term.

What do you want to be when you grow up? 
Davidya

* I couldn’t find the article on his site or the papers site

Memory Continues

Last month I spoke of the subtler values of Memory, what is called Smriti in Sanskrit. We could say consciousness is remembering itself through us. Reality is structured in the core intelligence of being. But the vastness of this remembering is rather hard to comprehend. And although it’s all one thing, this remembering is as if layered.

Firstly, everything is being remembered in the eternal now, all at once. In every moment, everything has happened. All of the past, present and future is only now. This is not just events we might find in a newspaper, but everything experienced by every person everywhere in all times. Plus the experiences of every devata, animal, insect, plant and inanimate object that has ever been, anywhere. Every grain of sand in the universe. Every universe in creation. Every creation in Being. Right now.

This may perhaps begin to give you a sense of how vast we are as consciousness. As That, Tao, Brahman. This ‘all of everything’ is known by consciousness right now, both as an experience and as an alive memory. They are in essence the same thing.

At the same time, every point within consciousness is also experiencing itself. It’s like a recursive fractal of every point, going into itself in fine detail to know itself more fully. This happens both in scale and resolution. We call this our apparent individual lives, following an apparent timeline, unfolding within the totality of now.

So we see both a macro inclusivity and a micro ever-refining detailing that happens on multiple scales concurrently. These are not separate things but rather one process happening at all values.

We can also note both a size scale and a refinement (or resolution) scale that interpenetrate. We are primarily and habitually tuned to scales we normally interact with. With average perception we are unable to see much smaller size scales without aids like microscopes. But we are also unable to see (or measure) more refined scales, whatever the size, unless we also refine the process of perception.

In spite of the grand scale suggested by the Now above, there are various perspectives, including from modern physics, that suggest humans sit somewhere in the middle of the size scale. And towards the lower end of the refinement scale. For example, on the scale of Kalas, humans begin at 4 out of 16. Interestingly, Kala means time or attribute in Sanskrit. Both are qualities of the process of experience, that which defines our perception.

Models?
These clips don’t reflect reality itself but can give you a sense of the detailing mechanism. They are explorations in fractals, simple recursive formulae that have surprisingly organic qualities.

Mandelbulb:

Mandelbrot zoom:

(the edge of the black regions are the event horizon)

An interesting aside is that while creations and universes and people come and go, memory remains. And thus, we rise again in vast time scales beyond imagining. Super deja vu.
Davidya

Lost Purpose

Spiritual writers often talk a lot about subjects like ego identification and the suffering that results from it. We may get the sense that ego is bad, but this is a misunderstanding of its role in evolution.

In essence, there is a process of fullness collapsing into a point, then that point opening up back into fullness again. This is how fullness comes to know itself in every detail.

In our own personal growth, we experience this collapsing into a point as the development of individuality. A clearly defined sense of local self. In the fullness of that we find what Maslow called Self Actualization. However, in our culture we’ve tended to encourage a less mature form of individual where the sense of being separate is dominant. This personal alienation leads to individual suffering. But it is also writ large on the world stage.

Business is rightly a means to offer a product or service for the mutual benefit of both company and clients. It creates a good for the community and, through an exchange of value, we produce a betterment. A flow of good called an economy. A true economy is essentially an energetic system that mirrors life itself.

A false economy on the other hand is one where there is not a mutual exchange of value. For example, marketing may create demand for a product that has no real value or may even be detrimental. Cigarettes would be one. Or, through the manipulation of markets, profits are produced without adding anything to the community. This is called false wealth as it is actually destructive to the economy. Profits are made at the expense of others, either directly or through debasing of value and markets. The stock market, for example, has become a charade of card tricks designed to produce false wealth. Banks, who task it is to manage wealth, become some of the greatest debasers, betting against their own customers.

When a business becomes an entity solely for generating profit, it looses sight of its function in society and becomes an amoral cancer. As we discussed over on 4 levels of Purpose, profit and labour must follow purpose, not the other way around. It is only through this ego sense of alienated separation that anyone would consider a business entity separate from the society in which it functions. When purpose is so debased, “It’s just business” becomes an an excuse for madness, a justification for any senselessness.

In our society, we give a corporation the rights of a person, then often structure the business to be anti-person. Now certainly, the business is “customer aware” for the purpose of generating profit. But only in the sense that it can convince people to consume.

One just has to watch a little TV to see a parade of advertising designed to convince people they need things that serve no purpose other than producing profit and waste. This is so prevalent that most people are oblivious to it. It’s become “normal” to destroy one’s body, home, environment, and financial well-being. The Hidden Influence of Social Networks spoke of some of the mechanisms of that. It becomes normal to eat badly, fill your home with poisons, waste vast quantities of resources while expecting them to vanish, pollute your community, and go into unsustainable debt to support it all. This is why some speak of our cultures madness. Its obvious if you stop and take a look. And scary for those that do, seeing they live a life of “quiet desperation.”

This also spills over into governments. Because they have to be reelected at close intervals, they have to try to quickly meet the vested interests of populations that will support them. Even “conservative” governments typically spend far more than they have. Long term planning in the greater good serves no profit so the process becomes completely debased. Politics too becomes a bizarre stage ritual of meaningless posturing over artificial positions, dancing to a media people are leaving in droves. Bureaucrats proliferate, seeking to uphold the rules at whatever the cost to the community. And then of course there are the amoral “business interests” with money to spend. Government gradually destroys the community they were tasked to support.

Contrary to the message the ego might offer, we are not alone in this. There is no “every man for himself.” We are in this together. What you do to another, you do to yourself. If this is not apparent to you, you have forgotten who you are. One only has to look at a little longer stretch of time to see the folly of our society as it is now behaving. History repeats itself. If you keep making the same mistakes, you can’t expect the results to change.

Money is energy, the ability to do work. When we place these means above or ahead of our purpose, we lose the whole point of why we’re here.

It’s like we’re collecting hammers without building a house.

Ask the average person to tell you about themselves. They will give you their name, work role, perhaps hobbies. Now ask them what their purpose is. Any entity that focuses on the means rather than its reason for being is bound to lose its way. Without a compass, we chart a path to hell.

We have created a culture that teaches the value of meaninglessness, yet have the gall to call it the “pursuit of happiness”. It is actually the pursuit of suffering. Without purpose, we, and the government trying to please us, behave like children in their terrible twos. Spending money we don’t have, borrowed from agencies wishing to enslave us financially, to run an economy without value. This is a prison of our folly.

It is only the belief that people can’t make a difference that keeps the parade going. Yet we vote every time we pull out our wallet. Businesses play close attention to this. It’s not that hard. It’s just paying attention. What am I feeding with my attention? What am I feeding with my money? What am I feeding my body? My friends and family? My society? My landfill?

I am perhaps talking to the converted. But this was the muse that arose a couple of days ago. And notably, similar points came up in other quarters. So here it is. Your choice.
Davidya