One Purpose, One Process
Thursday, August 3rd, 2006People often suffer from the desire to know the purpose of their lives, to fill their lives with meaningful activity, and to be successful.
Purpose, meaning, and success are generally defined for us by our cultures. We absorb these definitions so deeply, we hardly notice them governing our entire existence.
What we don’t notice, we cannot examine or question. For some of us, the compulsion to find purpose, meaning, and success is a kind of slavery.
Most cultures define these by external actions and accumulations.
For instance, in many, many cultures around the world, a woman’s life is thought to be wasted if she is not married with children. And this must, as the social imperative goes, be accomplished by a certain age.
Even young, “hip” women suffer from the fear of not measuring up.
Men’s purpose, meaning, and successfulness is more often dictated by their employment and how much money they make. Unmarried men are not subject to quite as much social disapproval as are unmarried women of a certain age. But men who are not well-off, or simply not hugely ambitious, often feel judged, or judge themselves harshly. When men go through periods of unemployment or underemployment, they tend to experience deep feelings of worthlessness.
Many thoughtful people are obsessive planners and agonize about their direction in life. These activities can be accompanied by self-disapproval and loneliness.
“What should I do?” “What decision should I make?” “What if I make a mistake?” “What is my dharma?”
There is only one answer to all of these questions: Self-realization.
All creatures, not just human creatures, share a single fundamental purpose: to Self-realize.
What does Self-realization mean for a human being? It means to know your true nature. What does it mean to know your true nature? It means to know and participate in Reality to its fullest from a human perspective.
We live a shared existence, but we believe we are fatally separated. We live in a totally responsive world, but we feel unanswered and unmet. Liveliness and primordial awareness are pervasive, but we experience much of reality, including aspects of ourselves, as inert. Many of us believe we are the sole sentient beings on this planet, or in the cosmos even, yet Reality is teeming with sentient lives unrecognized by us.
We identify with being distinct individuals so strongly that we are cut off from embodied, aware participation in our shared life. This shared life, that even includes our sense of separation, is what we call Self, with a big “S.”
Our only purpose is to realize this shared life in its entirety and rediscover the vastness, creativity, and intimacy of the world Self.
We are born with this purpose, and we cannot decide to exist for other than this. We can only be ignorant of our situation.
I am speaking of the world process itself, of which each and every one of us is an expression. Our purpose is non-different from this world process of Self-recognition.
Does this mean that in order to fulfill our purpose we should drop everything and run off to a mountaintop cave? Should we sit there, sweating it out in a lotus posture until Self-realization dawns? (Or until our creditors find us and demand to be paid!)
Not necessarily.
We don’t have to concoct or contrive or conceptualize a “spiritual” life. The life process is Self-recognition, and it is already underway in all of its myriad manifestations.
The only question is, are we going to move with the life process or fight against it until we die of exhaustion.
The first step is to give yourself a break. Allow it to sink in that purpose, meaning, and fulfillment are already built into Reality in advance. You don’t have to make anything up, or struggle to find the meaning of life. Life is not a problem. Life is the process of Self-recognition unfolding.
You can relax.
The second step is to align your life with this process by taking care of some fundamentals such as eating, sleeping, physical activity, and relationships. Find out what your body needs to be as relaxed and healthful as possible. Find out what you need to create a foundation for developing mental and emotional equilibrium.
All of these everyday life “balancing” acts are necessary to support what is narrowly called spiritual practice. In other words, choosing harmony and healthfulness in everyday life is spiritual practice, along with meditation or mantra or whatever specific sadhanas you are doing.
The third step, which is simultaneous with the other two steps, is to recognize that we all must create a life. This usually involves work. Even rich people have to work to manage their money. Many of us are raising children. We have things to do.
However, there is a world of difference between a life of frantic doing and a life that is consciously participating in the process of Self-realization.
When we overload the activities of our external lives, and the choices we make, with the imperative to be our identity and to make our lives meaningful, they become sources of suffering and exhaustion. We overwork, overplan, and live with the constant fear of not making it and not measuring up.
When we relax and refocus on Self-realization and aligning with the world process, we are freer to choose a life. We are not slaves to anything. We are not slaves to the demand to accept social norms or to reject them. We can do what feels appropriate to us. When life’s usual ups and downs come our way, we can remain balanced because we do not feel our identity is threatened.
Our “identity” is already Self-realization. Our identity is the entire world Self. We can relax.
Everything we do in life can be consciously dedicated to Self-realization, whether it is going on a meditation retreat or washing the dishes. We can always relax, listen to, sense, and open to our shared life, to the shared life process. We can always remember to relax our sense of separation. In every moment we can do this.
“Purpose,” “meaning,” and “success” are the words we use when we are in various states of ignorance. When we acknowledge and accept the world process of Self-recognition, we can more simply speak of relaxing and going along with that in a conscious way.
This is true ritual. True surrender. True devotion.
OM Shanti,
Shambhavi
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