Posted on 31 Mar, 2011 -
How I found my purpose in life
I have found a section in a book that I have promised to read over and over again because it fills me with joyful peace and purpose
The fight to pacify the ego is always ongoing
And bliss is always there beside you
Dear Reader,
I can now understand why people (used to) constantly re-read certain passages from the Bible.
I have recently discovered a small section of a book that I can only presume has a similarly profound effect on me as parts of the Bible have had on others.
It is a book I have had on my shelves for several years now and although I liked it, I probably didn’t get beyond about page 90 before I turned eagerly and hungrily to yet another book.
I can’t even remember now what enticed me to pick up this book again and turn to page 262 but I’m very glad that I did. It must have been the words ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ that attracted me in particular as these have been a theme for me of late as you know.
I was already aware that the desire for my life to have a strong meaning and purpose in the world was an egotistical one. In all of us there is an ego (the perceived self) that in its loneliness and fragility nurses a desire for superiority. A desire to be somehow special.
The need to work on our relationship with this both needy and often too over-dominant ego is something that I have written about myself in the past, particularly in The Super-fit Mind. In the first place the ego is something that we need to take care of because a badly bruised or unhappy ego can be a great source of pain. On the other hand, we also need to be aware of it for what it is and try to realise that we are not our ego and lessen its hold over us.
Why even being good will always be of the ego
So if I came to this book with the question still unsettled in my mind about what my purpose is in this world then I found myself an answer:
“Your purpose is to sit here and talk to me, because that’s where you are and that’s what you are doing. Until you get up and do something else. Then, that becomes your purpose.”
My purpose is always in exactly what I am doing in this present moment right now. And any purpose that we seek to have outside of this will always be temporal, short-lived and prone to fading or destruction.
Of course, says Eckhart Tolle in this book, ‘A New Earth’, doing things like caring for our children, helping other people, being a great friend or doing an important job are good things to do and they can be part of what he calls our ‘outer purpose’. But these purposes, these sources of meaning in our life will always be “relative, unstable and impermanent”. They are of the ego and are subject to the destruction of time.
“For example, if caring for your children gives meaning to your life, what happens to that meaning when they don’t need you and perhaps don’t even listen to you anymore? If helping others gives meaning to your life, you depend on others being worse off than yourself so that your life can continue to be meaningful and you can feel good about yourself.”
And also: “‘Making it’ in whatever field is only meaningful as long as there are thousands or millions of others who don’t make it, so you need other human beings to ‘fail’ so that your life can have meaning.”
A New Earth - A new way of Being
We will all, of course, enjoy a series of successes and relative failures in our life - especially, perhaps, in our work or hobbies. Striving to do things well and to achieve excellence in a certain field is a positive thing and forms part of our ‘outer purpose’ but it will also bring with it a sprinkling of disappointment, of set-backs, of pride as well as shame.
Which is why it can offer us great relief if we are able to take a view of these activities in our life from the outside and understand why they can be a source of both pleasure and pain and why they will never afford us total satisfaction and inner calm.
A true and lasting sense of contentment and calm comes only when we realise that our ‘inner purpose’ is always fully activated and rewarded in what we are doing and where we are right now.
What this is really about, perhaps, is living in the now, become truly aware of and in love with the present moment, and escaping from thoughts based in time.
Why all those other things we think of as our purposes in life cannot really be our purpose
Whenever we are thinking it is often either about things we have done or things that we are thinking might happen in the future. But something that you have done in the past cannot be your purpose now - nor can something that you may or may not do in the future. Your only purpose today is to be alive right now and do what you are currently doing.
In the Guardian weekend magazine a few weeks ago they had an article about men and women over 100 years old.
The words that struck me most were from a lady called Alice Herz-Sommer who is 108. She said:
“I survived the concentration camps, and this is something extraordinary. Thousands and millions had to die and we are sitting here. When we are old, we are aware of the beauty of life. Young people take everything for granted.”
Best wishes for a great April
