Life purpose

Being able to focus on one's purpose requires seeing what is most important, as well as what is delusion.

There are many things that we could spend our time doing, but usually we feel under pressure from our family, teachers, bosses and laws to only consider some of them. So, how do we decide what we are to do? Laws and regulations decree what activities we can or cannot do, and so to avoid unnecessary restrictions on our freedom, we need to obey them. Sometimes laws need to be challenged as they are unfair, but it is always about deciding what is a reasonable balance between personal freedom of action and public safety.

If we have agreed to a job or relationship, we need to honour that commitment. That is duty, but that does not mean any are forever, or cannot be renegotiated if circumstances change. The point is that most so-called obligations are entered into voluntarily, so they can be changed by mutual agreement. Many, such as exercise regimes, are totally a one-way personal commitment, so can be abandoned without putting anyone else out.

Deciding what we need to commit to, and at what level, requires discrimination, so that we choose the right balance between being able to support ourselves and our dependents, resist undue pressure, commit within our capacity, and achieve some measure of personal fulfillment. Additionally, the balance point will shift according to the present circumstances, requiring being able to determine what is most import at the time. To help us discriminate this, we need to have some perspective about the relative importance of what activities we undertake and what requires our attention in the present.

Dangerous activities require a real sense of them being important to do to even consider them. Rash decisions, especially if not considering our capacity to undertake them, may result in our death or serious injury without having a real possibility of achieving our desired outcome. It can be hard in the moment to make a decision other than emotionally, but even a couple of seconds can be enough to put a modicum of reason into the action.

Most possible activities are just distractions, and so are optional, but sustained indulgence in them will be unfulfilling, leading to frustration. However, sometimes a period of indulgence can be a beneficial distraction when we are having difficulty dealing with a perplexing situation. It can be an opportunity for our subconscious to feed us some answers to our many questions, as long as the activity is fairly relaxing. Some may call this procrastination, but it is sometimes necessary for us to be able to organise our thoughts internally.

The obvious aids to understanding are training and education, where the activity produces no worthwhile output, but helps us to have the extra mental and physical skills to use in future. They are not critical to our lives at the time, but hold the promise to provide some future benefit. However, while formerly education was the only way to gain knowledge, the internet has given us a surfeit of knowledge, and so we now have the ability to gain knowledge as we need it, rather than spend years of preemptive brain-stuffing hoping we will be able to use it.

Free of undue pressure, we may be drawn to particular activities. These can be the ones that, despite difficulties along the way, we feel most fulfilled by doing. They release something within us that feels like we are truly part of life. Despite ups and downs, doing them is relaxing and even meditative.

Doing these are what allows our higher selves to shine its light upon our consciousness, and so are what our true purpose in life is, even if they do not provide any income. Unfortunately, many others may see these as unimportant compared to a career or getting paid. The question we really need to ask ourselves is how much income do we truly need, rather than what is required to buy into others' ambitions.

A relatively few people have been instrumental in engineering societies to enable them to have excessive wealth and power. To do this, they have hijacked education systems and governments to focus on having everybody working long hours to get the usually unnecessary goods and services that their advertising has flooded our consciousnesses with as being important. This programming has to be undone to get to the simpler life that can be principally devoted to what is really important for us to be doing.

In our life on earth, we are the physical expression of the divine. How much we accept that is critical in us determining what we really should be doing while here.

For many, our vision of what is a life of service to the divine is heavily distorted by religions, which, despite many of them being inspired by those who were living in the divine, have been turned into rigid prescriptions of what we should be thinking and doing by those who have ulterior self-interested motives. It seems that if we actually followed all these prescriptions, most of us would be, and have been, bound up in knots about whether we are worthy or not of being alive.

As human beings, we are generally not equipped to be focusing on the divine for more than a small part of our waking day. So, what do we do with the rest of our time? There is no shortage of pressure from many to fill up our time with working to fulfill someone else's idea what is worthwhile, even if it poisons or kills us. We have to take back our power to choose what is best for us to be doing.

Living on a planet with such an abundance of physical forms of expression provides a plethora of opportunities for us to explore what has gone into creating these as well as giving us opportunities to be creators of new forms ourselves. This is really what we are here for: to be co-creators with the divine. In a way, we become the divine coming to know itself in a more conscious way.

By learning how to create we are focusing on the present, so being a form of mindfulness, which distracts us from focusing upon what might otherwise bring us anxiety. Being self-directed, we are not subject to the performance anxieties that accompany being focused on other peoples' agendas and expectations. We will quite happily spend time contemplating what may be required for our next steps. These mental skills are essential precursors to being able to be open to our higher selves.

Partaking in understanding this physical life and helping to create is what allows us to live in the divine without our consciousnesses being blown out by it. We can feel alive and fulfilled in balance. However, to really make this a reality for all people, we need to find the societal structures that allow all to fully indulge their creative ability without unduly infringing on others' ability to, as well as keeping within the earth's capacity to provide the resources for us all to do so.

The thing is that even without any consideration of the spiritual side of life, living lives where we all have the opportunity to pursue our interests without unduly affecting others or the planet seems just a much better way for all of us to live, period! In this way, spirituality is more akin to humanism than religion.