If I were to ask you: What is your purpose in life? There is a chance you’ll begin thinking about an answer. Perhaps you’ll try to figure it out, this purpose.
Sometimes, people look puzzled, confronted with the possibility of pointlessness, individual uselessness, or the dangerous death-trap of failure. With confusion, fear arises, and panic to come up with an answer.
Knowing the answer calms the system, bringing stability, identity, and the confidence of being informed. But even when we come with an answer – my purpose is x or y – the answer itself can seem to expose a field of questions waiting to be born. There could be a background sense of the lie, a subtle frustration, a lingering expectation for a long-forgotten miracle, or an ancient sense of disappointment surfacing as fresh as the morning dew.
Knowing our purpose is not always the same as finding it. Finding it means we’ve got a sense of it – in our heart, gut and bones. Between knowing it, finding it, and living it, there can be whole rifts of despair. We can feel cheated by God, denied by the world, and betrayed by life. The pain of an unfulfilled promise can be worse than no promise at all. So, sometimes we deny the promise, to try to get rid of the pain.
When we do something on purpose, with purpose, we do it consciously. Consciousness brings a qualitative richness to purpose. It aligns head, heart and body. It bridges those rifts of despair where we don’t make sense to ourselves.
Our sense of purpose is intimately connected with the Nondual Quality of Passion. When we find a depth of purpose, we become alive and thrive. Purpose is the intelligence of passion. At the formational layer of the psyche, it activates the unique information within the individual with vitality. It offers that information into the collective field, making it useful, as it goes into service to the whole.
In so many ways, to question our individual purpose is to question the purpose of life itself.
This kind of question can be a catalyst for healing and evolution, an accelerator of transformation and a compass in our return to the natural flow of True Nature. Yet the answer will come from the Felt Sense – from the somatic sense of being alive. The purpose of life is found in a sense of purpose. It’s in the feeling of mobilization in which individual skills and talents get orientated toward the wellbeing of the whole. There’s a quickening of energetic flow, arousal of the nerve system, and alignment of head, heart, and body. This agreement between dimensions of experience lets us rest back as the source of all quality. Quality energy flows through us, merging with fields of resonance. The separate “I” becomes a perfunctory label, appearing here and there when it’s technically needed in service to the wider purpose.
Imagine a singer who is delivering a song to wore-torn soldiers. Traumatized and grief-struck, they are energetically clinging to the tenderness of her voice, as the power of her melody supports them in the long journey back to the open heart. When her song is done, she steps off the stage.
“Hilda!” says a voice. “Hilda!!!” They need to call several times because she doesn’t recognize her name. For a moment, the singer looks confused. Who the hell is Hilda?
Her whole being is still residing in the purpose of the song. Informed by the sense of purpose, the quality of passion had transported her beyond the limitations of the thinking mind and personal identity. As the song moved through her, so did the voice of heaven, calling its forsaken children home.
The Felt Sense of purpose is primary, and the many ways it expresses through action are secondary. The sense of purpose is the compass of passion, giving purpose to the actions that arise out of it.
Purpose is not an ambition, it’s a felt sense.
Yet we have a top-down approach to the world. We tend to believe we are our thoughts and that our consciousness is also kind of thought. This can give us a superficial feeling of control. at the same time, it generates a background atmosphere of victimhood and dreadful impotence. We are mentally required to manifest a purposeful reality, at the same time that we seem to constantly make a mess of it.
We actually contract our consciousness into this provisional control center within the thought storms of the head. From this contracted mental state, it can seem that our purpose is a battle. Any success is in spite of the hostile environment of an unfriendly world. We are commanded to be purposeful, even while weathering the strange, unpredictable climate of our emotions and inner states. We get alienated from purpose, just as we are attached to the strange and unsafe territory of a physical body. In a purposeless universe, gas-lighted by the gods, we are required to find purpose, and the whole thing feels like a big fail.
All this anguish is arising from a core conditioning that we are the thinking mind. Thinking defines us, or, ‘I think therefore I am.’ Yet so often, it is the thinking process that takes a simple sense of pain and whips up a whole psychic split.
This split can mean that on the one hand, we are raging against life, declaring it meaningless, while threatening god and wife with non-existence and personal suicide if we don’t get what we desire; while on the other hand, we are stroking our dog with a tenderness that says you will never leave her. Do you recognize such splits in your psyche? Between the mental rage at senselessness, and the body’s ongoing, purposeful movements toward wellbeing?
When we look into nature, we will find an abundance of the sense of purpose. It seems that all forms are hardwired to experience it. When I give our dog a piece of sausage, she sometimes looks at it, like a bizarre object. If I ask her to sit, lie down, follow me around the room and rollover, and then give her the same sausage, she is in ecstasies at its flavor.
When you look at all animals, you can get a connection with the sense of purpose. It’s in how the bird flies with the twig in her mouth, in the awesome engineering of the bees in the hive, as well as the individual gathering of nectar. It’s in the salmon, determined to swim backstream up the river, as they must. It’s in the trees, stretching toward the sunlight, and in the cloud, decorating the sky as he awaits that moment where he must become rain down and become.
The spiritual teacher Russel Williams used to say that everything is perfect. It can be perfectly good, or perfectly bad. But it’s perfect according to the conditions that surround it. It’s the same with the sense of purpose.
Everything has its purpose, even the feeling of being useless has an undercurrent of the sense of purpose. Even our wild declarations that life has no meaning, are infused with the frustrated vitality of purpose. Even existential absence, negation or non-being, have a sense of purpose. Why would this be? Could it be that the sense of purpose is integral to our consciousness? That wherever we are conscious and alive, we are blessed with a sense of purpose? Even though we have learned to ignore it?
