How do you discover your real purpose in life, the real reason why you are here on earth at all, the very reason you exist.
There are two different methods for defining your purpose offered here. Ideally you should use both of them; since each will help you understand different aspects of your purpose. This is going to be a lot of work, but the end result will be worth it because you will reach a point of tremendous clarity about your true purpose. In the end it will be far easier to make decisions and take action, and you will find that your life just seems to work once you know your purpose.
Method 1: Emotional Intelligence
The first method is to consult your emotional intelligence. Passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find it is something you are tremendously passionate about. Emotionally you will feel that it is correct.
Perhaps you do not believe you have a purpose and your life has no meaning. If you do not believe that you have a purpose it will not prevent you from discovering it. The laws of the universe are immutable such that not believing in gravity will not protect you from falling from a great height should you choose to jump or are pushed. All the lack of belief will do is make the inevitable conclusion take longer. Most likely though if you do not believe you have a purpose, then you probably will not believe what this anyway, but even so, what is the risk of investing some time just in case?
If you want to discover your true purpose in life, you must first empty your mind of all the false purposes that you have been taught, including the idea that you have no purpose at all.
So how do you discover your true purpose in life? While there are many ways to do this, some of them fairly involved and costly, here is one of the simplest that anyone can do. The more open you are to this process and the more you expect it to work, the faster it will work for you. But not being open to it or having doubts about it or thinking it is an entirely idiotic and meaningless waste of time will not prevent it from working, it will just take longer to find.
Here are the details of what to do:
- Take out a blank sheet of paper.
- Write at the top, “What is my true purpose in life?”
- Quickly write any answer that pops into your head. It does not have to be a complete sentence. A short phrase is fine.
- Repeat step 3 until you have an answer that brings out strong emotions in you and probably makes you cry. This is your purpose in life.
That is it. It does not matter who or what you are. To some people this exercise will make perfect sense. To others it will seem utterly stupid. Usually it takes fifteeen to twenty minutes to clear your head of all the clutter and the social conditioning about what you think your purpose in life is. The false answers will come from your mind and your memories. But when the true answer finally arrives, it will feel like it is coming to you from a very deep source entirely.
For those who are very entrenched in a state of low-awareness, it will take a lot longer to get all the false answers out, possibly more than an hour. But if you persist, after one or two hundred or maybe even five hundred answers, you will be struck by the answer that causes you to surge with emotion. If you have never done this, it may very well sound alien to you, but do it anyway.
As you go through this process, some of your answers will be very similar. You may even repeat previous answers. Then you might head off on a new tangent and generate between ten and twenty more answers along some other theme. And that is fine. You can list whatever answers pops into your head as long as you just keep writing.
At some point during the process (typically after about fifty to a hundred answers), you may want to quit and just can’t see it coming to a definite conclusion. You may feel the urge to get up and make an excuse to do something else. That is normal. Push past this resistance, and just keep writing. The feeling of resistance will eventually pass.
You may also discover a few answers that seem to give you a mini-surge of emotion, but they do not quite elicit strong emotions; they are just a bit off. Highlight those answers as you go along, so you can come back to them to generate new permutations. Each reflects a piece of your purpose, but individually they are not complete. When you start getting these kinds of answers, it just means you are getting warm; keep going.
It’s important to do this alone and with no interruptions. If you are still convinced that you do not have a purpose, feel free to start with the answer, “I do not have a purpose,” or “My life is meaningless,” and take it from there. If you keep at it, you will still eventually be surprised to find there is an answer.
The final result may seem strangely verbose for you. This is normal as the answer is coming from deep sources within and without.
When you find your own unique answer to the question of why you are here, you will be able to resonate with it deeply. The words will seem to spring off the page with special energy to you, and you will feel that energy whenever you read them.
However, discovering your purpose was the easy part. The hardest part is keeping it with you on a daily basis and working on yourself to the point where you become that purpose.
If you are inclined to ask, at this early stage, why this simple process works, just put that question aside until after you have successfully completed it. Once you have done that, you will have your own answer to why it works. Most likely if you ask ten different people why this works (people who have successfully completed it), you will get ten different answers, all filtered through their individual belief systems, and each will contain its own reflection of truth.
About eighty to ninety per cent of people should achieve a final result in less than an hour. If you are really entrenched in your beliefs and resistant to the process, maybe it will take you five sessions (about three hours, but if you are one of those people you will simply quit early (like within the first fifteen minutes) or will not even attempt it at all.
The answer you get from this process, however, depends heavily on your ability to generate good input. Essentially what you are doing is exploring the search space of possible purposes, and you’re using the heuristic of your emotional reaction to gauge how close you are. It requires you are clear about your overall context for life first. If you don’t have that level of clarity yet, then you’ll have a hard time making this approach work successfully; you will be approaching the problem from the wrong context, so the potential answers you generate will all be in the wrong neighborhood. The old adage applies: Garbage in, garbage out.
Method 2: Rational Intelligence
The second method is to use your reason and logic to work down from your context. The clearer and more accurate your context is, the easier this will be.
To identify your purpose, you basically project your entire context of reality onto yourself. Given your current understanding of reality, where do you fit in? If you buy into the social context that most people seem to use, this will be virtually impossible for the reasons stated in yesterday’s post. Social contexts don’t provide sufficient clarity. At best you may end up with a vague purpose statement that addresses the basics like making money, having a family, having friends, and being nice, but there won’t be any real substance to it. If you gave it to someone else to read it, they would not come away knowing you any better.
Fuzzy context and fuzzy projection means fuzzy purpose.
Clear context and clear projection means clear purpose.
Since your context of reality is based on seeing life as a process of ongoing evolution. The term evolution is used here use merely in the sense of growth and change, not in the strictly biological sense via natural selection. When you project this context onto yourself, the result is very simple; you are a participant in the process of growth and change.
This is such a simple approach that it is easy to miss completely. All you are really doing is looking at your overall context of life and projecting those same qualities onto yourself. This projection becomes your purpose, your role in reality.
Imagine a hologram. When you cut off a piece of a hologram, the entire original image is still contained within the smaller piece. Reality is the big hologram, and you are a piece of it. You inherit all the properties of reality. Your beliefs about reality become your beliefs about yourself. If your beliefs are accurate, you will end up with a sensible, achievable purpose.
This method will also help you identify problems in your context because you will notice that something is wrong when you project a false belief onto yourself.
If you do not like the purpose you end up with when applying this method, then what you’re really saying is that you do not like the context you are using. This is a conflict you will need to resolve. You must either accept the context and the purpose that accompanies it, or you must change the context.
Blending the Two Methods
It is helpful to use both methods for defining your purpose to see where they lead you. If your context is sound, you should get congruent answers from both approaches. Your emotional and rational intelligences will each phrase your purpose differently, but you should see that it is essentially the same. But most of the time that will not be the case, and the answers will be different, which means your context is incongruent. You rationally think about reality in one way but you feel it in another way. Perhaps you hold religious beliefs but only follow them sporadically; they are not integrated across your entire life. You may feel in your heart that your beliefs are true, but you do not think them in your head. In this case you have to identify the disparity, figure out where it comes from, and work it through until you can get both sides to agree or you can get clear on which one is correct. Use your consciousness to listen to the emotional side and the rational side, and be like a negotiator between them.
For example, if you feel emotionally that your purpose is to be some kind of artist or musician, but rationally you work out that you should be serving people in need, then you have to work through this disconnect by taking a look at what your context says about it. Remember that your context is your collection of beliefs about reality. When you experience a conflict like this, it will typically lead you to a hole in your context, a fuzzy area that you have not yet clarified. In this case you might see that you have mixed feelings as to the overall value of art and music. You partly see them as serving people, and you partly see them as a relative waste of time compared to other pursuits. You will have to decide which the most accurate, empowering viewpoint is. You have to fill the hole in your context.
This can be a lengthy process if you have a very fuzzy concept of reality or if you’re very conflicted internally. For many people this will require rooting out incongruence and consciously filling contextual holes, and it will take a long time before enough of those are eliminated to wield sufficient clarity to define a clear purpose.
At this point your purpose is likely to be very abstract and high-level. Once you have identified your overall purpose/mission, the next step is to turn that purpose into achievable goals, projects, and actions.
Once you have your overall context and your purpose worked out, you begin setting goals that would be congruent with that purpose.
The basic idea is that you must align your purpose with your needs, abilities, and desires. Your purpose tells you what you should do. Your basic needs (money, shelter, clothing) dictate what you must do. Your inbuilt and learned abilities (skills, talents, education) dictate what you can do. And your desires (enjoyable work, passion) will dictate what you want to do. Taken individually each of these areas will only point you in a general direction, but when you put them all together, you’ll find it easier to set specific, practical goals. This way you’ll be setting goals that help you fulfil your purpose, meet your needs, do what you love to do, whjat you can do easily and do what you are really good at.
Ref: 1201111715