The purpose of your life becomes knowable when you submit to a relationship with His Endlessness.
The way to Him is broad but for each of us individually it is as narrow as a knife’s edge.
The way for you is who you are, the original creation of His Majesty.
You do not decide your purpose, you uncover it, remember it.
Your purpose is the exposition of your nature.
You do not ‘do’ your purpose, you are your purpose.
You must know who you are, who you have always been.
Tags: purpose
In these inquiries, you use the language of dualism. You use pronouns such as ‘I’ and ‘you’, ‘we’ and ‘they’ that reflect the illusion of separateness and individuality. Isn’t this misleading?
I am in conversation with you so I use the language of conversation. It is not difficult to eliminate pronouns, although it is somewhat stilted at times. But eliminating pronouns does not establish non-duality. And non-duality is just one perspective…it is not, in my view, the final word on realization.
First, language is communication which includes intonation, cadence and gesture as much as word choice. My feeling when I speak a word, my body sensations and posture, placement of the eyes…these can be used with intent to convey meaning, to share an experience, to disarm your point of view, far more than sentence structure. At certain times and places, on certain topics, with certain people, I can invoke direct understanding. This is what matters to me.
Second, I think that non-dualism is perhaps not correctly understood by some people. Non-duality is not uniformity, it is not everything becoming one thing. In my experience, in presence and even more in the waking state, the individual is even more precisely and uniquely itself, yet not separate from everything else at the same time. Reality is intimately connected and wholistic but the essential aspects of its component parts are not lost.
In the eastern traditions, it is sometimes suggested that creation is an accidental consequence of a karmic mistake which can be unwound by diligent striving for a perfect end state, nirvana or mahamudra, beyond sorrow and rebirth. There is great truth in this view and its accomplishment is worthy of the greatest admiration. But there is another view that suggests that the world of form, of individuality, struggle and suffering, is not a mistake, that it serves a purpose, and that to live this life consciously, with conscience, as a real human being, is also a great accomplishment.
Tags: conscience, creation, duality, karma, mahamudra, nirvana, non-duality, presence, purpose, waking state
Is it important to know the purpose of your life?
Yes, without a doubt. The aim of work on self is to bring you to your purpose.
How do you know your purpose? How do you go about finding it?
Your purpose is the one thing that makes your life satisfying. What the Sufis call rida. It reveals to you who you are and removes an immense amount of anxiety and confusion.
Your purpose has been with you always—it is an inalienable part of you. It is not found, it is remembered. It is not a kind of work or role in the world, it is a way of being, a self-arising quality of existing just so. You cannot fake it or learn it. Rather, it is the gift you were given before time began.
If this is true, how do I proceed?
The khwajagan masters had a saying: “The undesirable must be relinquished before the desirable can be attained.” The false diversions and attractions that have overprinted your being have obscured your purpose. They must be seen and relinquished in the work of observing self. What remains is who you are and who you are is indistinguishable from your purpose.
