This is going to be a long, meandering blog. There will be multiple sections. And, even though they seem separate, they all come together.
Pay attention. I intend to shake your foundations.
First, lets talk about what is the ‘purpose of life’. Many of you are grappling with this question. You want to ‘find’ it.
Here is something from the syllabus of Creativity and Personal Mastery. I wrote it more than thirty years ago.
You wake up in the morning suffused with an ineffable feeling of joy, a deep sense of well being. You go to work, to a job you love so much that you would pay for the privilege of doing it. You labor intently but are so focused that time flies by unnoticed. At the end of the day you are invigorated, brimming with more energy than when you started. You have a penetrating awareness of the course you are charting, a clear knowledge of your place in the scheme of the universe. Your work feeds this, is congruent with it and brings great contentment and peace.
You face obstacles, big ones and small ones, perhaps more than your fair share of them. You understand very clearly that their purpose is to test your mettle, to bring out the best in you even as the abrasive whetting stone serves to finely hone the knife. So you plow on indomitably, sure of what you want to achieve and yet unconcerned about results. At times it seems as if you are riding on the crest of a powerful tidal wave, as if the universe itself is helping you, working with you and through you. Locked doors open mysteriously. Incredibly fortuitous coincidences occur. You accomplish prodigious feats, feats you would never have imagined yourself capable of. Yet it would have been perfectly okay if you had not accomplished them. You accept accolades gracefully but are not swayed by them because you march to the beat of your own drummer.
Your personal life is intensely fulfilling. You are active in a variety of civic, charitable and political causes and successful in all of them. Your spouse is perfectly compatible with you, a true helpmate in every sense of the word. You beget progeny and your offspring bring great satisfaction. You have a sense of trusteeship towards them and intuit what Gibran articulated:
“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.
They come through you, not from you.
And though they are with you, they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit,
not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but strive not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and he bends you with his
might that the arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so he loves the bow that is stable.”
So it goes on year after year, each day more perfect than the one before. Your gratitude is so intense that at times it is like a physical ache. Your heart bursts as you thank the universe. What have you done to deserve such good fortune? And when the time comes for you to depart, you do so joyfully and in peace, achieving identification with the Cosmic Principle, that incredible merging which has been called many things by many peoples but is ultimately indescribable, far beyond the feeble capabilities of language.
A life such as described above is your birthright. You have to reach out and claim it. Will you succeed? I do not know. I do know that the first step towards getting there is recognizing that you want to get there. It is very important that you desperately want to reach the goal. It is equally important that you do not particularly care whether you do or not. If this sounds like a paradox to you, you are correct.
It is.
Remember that all paradoxes are resolved as you reach higher levels of understanding, even the ultimate paradox of all – that which we call life.
Identification with the Cosmic Principle is an incredible merging. That is when you, as a body-mind-intellect combination, disappear into awareness.
This is Nirvana. This is jnana. This is The Kingdom of Heaven.
This is where all your worries and concerns vanish forever. This is where you experience bliss beyond comprehension. To be precise, you do not experience it. You become it. This is the end of all suffering. You do not die because you are no longer bound by time.
Isn’t this a grand goal? No suffering. Eternal happiness. No conditions on that eternal happiness. All you have to do is wake up.
Everyone wants that, right?
Certainly I did and do. Or I thought I did.
So I was quite puzzled when I heard Ram Dass say, “You don’t want to escape from the prison you are in. You just want better food.”
And later I read Anthony DeMello saying the same thing. “You don’t want to wake up. Be honest with yourself and recognize this.”
Now the truth of what Ram Dass and Anthony DeMello said is blindingly obvious to me. I don’t want to wake up. You don’t want to wake up. You don’t want freedom from suffering. You just want better toys to play with.
Are you confused?
I will tell you more in my next blog.
Peace!
