Life Purpose

Please enjoy this contemplative meditation on how that which we truly are effortlessly and eternally fulfils both the expression and the experience of our whole selves. Both as divine consciousness and as manifest humanity, we perfectly carry out our creative and witnessing roles in life.

Transcript

I'd like to share a few thoughts about fulfilling our life's purpose.

Think how great it would be if we knew our life's purpose with absolute clarity.

The energy we could draw on.

How free we'd be from worrying about the unimportant things,

The noises and distractions.

To focus on what really mattered.

How our hearts and our attention could flow fully along just the right path.

Even better than knowing it,

Imagine we understood how to fulfil it.

This almost sounds too good to be true but it is possible.

It doesn't even take a special skill,

But it demands great self-awareness.

It asks that we intimately know who we really are.

Life purpose.

Well I think,

In truth,

Life has its own purpose.

It doesn't exist for something else.

Life doesn't serve some other purpose.

It is its own purpose.

It's the expression and the experience of itself.

Of all that it is.

Now there I'm talking about a capital L life,

Not an individual life.

So what does it mean for us as individuals?

Well each of our lives is a specific instance of that capital L life.

Our lives are the expression and experience of all we are.

So we fulfil our life's purpose by expressing and experiencing our full selves.

Whatever this me is,

Satisfying my life's purpose has two elements.

The first one is a creative one,

Which I term expressing myself,

And the second is more of a witnessing one,

Or experiencing myself.

Now these creative and witnessing roles are pretty broad,

But they do seem to fit and to resonate with much of what gurus and sages tell us we should do.

We hear speak your own mind,

Live your truth,

Be present,

Drink life in,

Live the dream.

And all these pointers seem short and simple,

They seem useful,

But for the most part we stumble when we try to put them into practice.

Now perhaps the trick is that truth and life,

This flowing thing,

Are alive.

They squirm and wriggle and dart about,

They dance,

They're never standing still.

They're fresh each and every moment.

Now if that's true for capital T Truth and capital L Life,

We have to remember that you and I are also alive,

We live.

Because we live,

We are ever changing,

As persons,

As people,

We change every moment.

But our self images,

I'll say a bit more about this image,

Our self images,

While we flow,

While what we are flows,

Our self image is at best sticky and at worst frozen.

So we get in our own way by mistaking our self images for ourselves.

You see,

It turns out that expressing oneself and expressing one's self image are quite different things.

What we truly are changes second by second,

So setting out a plan to express any given picture of ourselves,

Any definition misses the point.

So let's explore this at two levels.

First we can commit to expressing our true,

Ever changing selves instead of the more fixed self images we've spent our lives projecting and protecting.

Maybe then we'll reach and glance back from a second level,

A sort of new platform.

So our life purpose is to express and experience all that we are.

I've been talking mainly about self expression,

But I want to now turn to focusing on our experience of ourselves.

Please consider this,

Much of what we take as our experience of the world and other beings,

Other people mainly,

Is actually self experience.

How could that be so?

In any moment our own genetic make up and our life's accumulated experience to that moment colour our current interpretations.

So the present in that moment is largely defined,

Our experience in that present is defined by the filter we look through and that filter we inherited some of it in the sort of blueprint for making us and then as that making occurred each experience we had did a little update to that filter.

So not only does that make up and accumulated experience what we might call our conditioning determine our interpretations,

They even determine what we attend to and what we unconsciously ignore.

So if we're to pursue our life purpose of experiencing all that we are we have to come to understand these filters and their effects.

They sit deep in us so we can't eliminate them,

That's not a name here.

The best thing we can do is shift our perspective looking at the filters as a part of life.

These filters don't sit outside of this flow of life,

They're part of it,

But we have to see them as such.

The way that we normally interact with them is we look through them at life but this shift in perspective can have us look at them.

We can't get rid of them but we can better realise they're there.

Even this can be challenging since they are unconscious but life does help us.

Because life is wild and untamable it will crash against anything that attempts to stand fixed within it,

Anything that tries to deny that flow and that's exactly what our self-definition does.

These most powerful images of us that try to tell us what we are and also try to tell us the way the world should be.

But life,

That's carrying our true,

Our ever-changing self and life and that self butt heads with our self-image and those collisions are uncomfortable.

They create intense feelings and sensations in our body and we can use those,

Unlikely as they seem as allies,

As signposts to help us indirectly see this self-image and its filters.

Well what's the benefit of that?

As we see that then we increasingly let it in.

It doesn't hold the threat of overwhelming us,

It doesn't present as it probably did early in our childhood as unworkable or potentially destructive and so we let more in.

Our experience becomes richer.

We open and remember any opening allows movement both inward and outward.

So as we open to allow more experience in,

Here's where we come back to that other half of life purpose.

I've been spending some time here talking about experiencing more of ourselves,

Experiencing our full selves rather than a restricted partial and in many ways because of the filters false self,

Experiencing our full self.

But because this opening allows movement in both inward and outward directions it also allows better expression.

So we express ourselves with less hindrance,

We're able to be just what we are in each moment.

So with this opening comes a deepening in both our creative and our witnessing roles in life.

Now among what happens with this opening is a relaxation.

You can just sort of picture a sort of like a tight fist when we think in terms of that image of that fist opening that's a relaxation.

And something like that is going on throughout our nervous systems not just in those motor neurons that are controlling the clench of that fist but right through us.

Relaxation and it becomes a virtuous circle in a way.

Relaxation begets more opening,

More opening over time as it slowly lets us demonstrate to ourselves that the opening can remain safe,

Brings more relaxation.

And this increases our intimacy with experience and that opens a door to a further perspective and that's this sort of second level.

I'm talking about an image of a second level,

I'm not trying to say that reality itself has these different levels.

This is just the way we're talking about it.

So the living truth we're here to experience is simply what is happening each moment.

That's sort of where what I've been talking about brings us.

Life flows,

Our self-image doesn't,

Our image of how the world should be doesn't,

Certainly doesn't flow at life's speed.

And so when we talk about experiencing and expressing all that we are,

We're really saying to experience what is happening and to play our role in expressing what is happening right now.

That's it.

And when that sinks in,

Everything shifts.

As we increasingly relax and access the intimacy that's always been available with what is happening,

We realise certainly as persons,

As bodies and minds,

We're not,

We're not sitting outside of what is happening and sort of looking in.

It brings an even greater sense of awe for the comprehensiveness of the current moment,

The present moment,

What is happening now.

Because it contains every person,

Every aspect of every person,

Every mind,

Every thought.

It contains every projection to the future,

So that's every intent,

Every future-oriented worry,

Every lingering decision.

It contains,

If you know,

And if we're thinking materially at the moment,

In our brains,

In the memory functions,

You know,

The part of our brains that are involved in memory,

That's all we have of the past.

We have no access to the past except through our memories.

But when we think of ourselves as separate from that,

Which is sort of the core bit of that sticky self-image that we've taken ourselves to be in the past,

We can fool ourselves.

We can create all sorts of problems.

But through our work identifying our self-images and filters,

We begin to see ourselves in more of an organic interdependence,

An intricate interdependence,

Not just with these previously rejected or abandoned aspects of ourselves,

The parts that didn't fit the self-image and therefore were ignored or distorted,

But also with all the rest of life.

And it's as an integral part of that capital L Life,

An integral part of reality stream that we express ourselves.

So there's no need to define ourselves.

Life does that for us in every moment without effort.

We evolve,

Expressing and experiencing as part of reality's larger weave.

The special ingredient we bring to all this,

The special ingredient we're bringing to existence doesn't sit apart from what is happening.

It doesn't really even sit within it.

I've said that as persons,

As bodies and minds,

We're in that stream,

We're in that flow of what is happening.

But the special ingredient we bring actually holds and composes that entire stream.

Now what's that?

Well,

It's not a thing.

It's not a person or a mind or a part of a person or a part of a mind.

That gift is awareness.

We want to say our awareness.

A person doesn't own that awareness.

A person floats in the stream of reality which is made of that awareness and which is held in that awareness.

It's held in the embrace of that awareness,

In the open space of that awareness.

So our witnessing purpose is to bless everything that arises with our intention.

Now that special ingredient does that.

That special ingredient that really isn't an ingredient within us,

Not within us as persons,

Consciousness automatically blesses everything that arises.

That's how those things reach us,

Reach our awareness.

Consciousness does that automatically,

Does it easily every instant.

So we,

That's now the we in this witnessing role,

It's the,

That larger I,

That larger Self.

We talked about life with a capital L,

This is Self with a capital S.

Consciousness,

I as Consciousness have,

Even when what I've witnessed was a false sense of Self and a filtered version of life,

I always have experienced not just this person,

This person who's speaking to you now,

I've not just experienced this person with perfect clarity.

I've experienced all there is to experience with perfect clarity.

So expression and experience,

Expression and experience,

All that needs doing still gets done.

We may find our steps lighter,

Free from the worry that stemmed from this imagined isolation and struggle.

And we still fail as persons,

We fail and sometimes spectacularly to impose our self-image and our preferences on the world.

When what is happening contains these conflicts or seeming conflicts,

Then we get this sense of personal failure.

But when we realise that this apparent conflict is actually held perfectly comfortably,

Consciousness,

If it had eyelashes,

It wouldn't bat an eyelash at the ease of holding these contradictions or these conflicts within it.

So we can't fail to play to perfection,

Even when that perfection has a sense of failure within it.

We can't fail to play to perfection the role that life asks of us.

And that's both our expressive or creative role and our witnessing or experiencing role.

We've always fulfilled our life purpose and we've done that as an effortless aspect of life's cresting creative wave and as the awareness that always peacefully witnesses exactly what is happening.

Reviews

Thank you, there was a lot of brilliant information that you communicated clearly. I will need to listen again so I can absorb more.

Beautifully and clearly expressed
Thankyou