What is Your True Purpose in Life?

Before we begin to awake, most of us manage to find some sort of purpose to our lives. When we are young we have so many dreams and ambitions – we want to climb Mount Everest, invent a cure for AIDS, or make a million pounds before we are 30. As we get older, we begin to realise that time is running out, and that some of our dreams are not going to be realised, but most of us can still look forward to spending time with our grandchildren, or yearly holidays in the sun.

Once we begin to wake up however, we usually start to realise that normal living is actually very unsatisfying. We may manage to grasp a few moments of happiness, for example when we first fall in love, or first visit a beautiful foreign country, but when we look back on our lives, we can see that most of our time on earth has been rather dull and unfulfilling, whilst occasionally it can even be hellishly awful. I certainly remember, just before I began to awake, thinking to myself, ‘I am in my mid forties, and on the surface my life is so easy, but surely there must be more to life than this? Am I just supposed to snatch a few moments of peace and happiness out of 70 or 80 years in a body and then drop dead? What on earth is the point of it all?’

Then, on a retreat with Jason Chan, the light hit me right in my third eye with a big bang, and I realised - with an incredible shock - that God really did exist, and that my life was certainly not meaningless. I just wasn’t sure, at that point in my awakening journey, what exactly it all meant. For a while, I even felt quite messianic, and was convinced that God had chosen me for some very special mission down here on earth. But luckily, I eventually came down off my crazy spiritual high, and began the hard work of grounding the light in my very weak physical and energetic bodies.

However, for quite some time I still felt rather special and certainly superior to ‘normal people’ who were content to seek comfort in ordinary things, like making money and going on holiday. I believed that God needed me to ‘spread the light’ to as many poor, unenlightened souls as possible. I just wasn’t quite sure how I was going to do this, although as soon as I started to read A Course in Miracles and noted the phrase ‘teachers of God’, I thought to myself, ‘I could do that!’ I have been a lecturer for nearly 30 years, now I can give lectures on A Course in Miracles and save the world!

I have to confess that it has taken me many years of quite diligent spiritual practice to realise that God does not need me to save the world. In no way am I specially chosen to be ‘God’s little helper’. The only person in the whole world whom I need to save is myself. If I have any special purpose at all down here on earth, it is simply to wake myself up from my insane little dream of victim-hood and fear. God has no other special role for me to play. It is only my ego that wants God to give me a very special task in the world, to prove that He loves me more than the rest of the human race.

I now think that one of the greatest egoic traps on the spiritual path is this belief that by following a spiritual practice of some kind, we become especially virtuous, and therefore specially loved by God. So many spiritual seekers play the game of wanting to be more spiritual than their peers. We compete to have higher and more blissful meditations. We fight to get closer to our spiritual teachers and guides. We become determined to practise more diligently than anyone else – and we somehow make sure that everyone knows just how diligent a practitioner we are!

Please don’t think that I am pointing the finger here. I can assure you that I have engaged in all these egoic activities at some point or other on my own spiritual journey!

Another egoic trick that may well sabotage our genuine spiritual progress, is that the ego insists that we cannot fulfil our spiritual purpose this lifetime without a major change in our external circumstances. We cannot possibly be spiritual and continue to be an ordinary teacher, nurse, accountant or homemaker. We cannot possibly be spiritual if we cannot afford to go to India to find a guru, or to go to Scotland to meditate with Jason Chan. We cannot possibly practise Infinite Tai Chi, or meditate twice a day, until all our children have grown up and left home, or we retire from our very important career, thus freeing up at least an hour or two a day in our hectic, but unalterable daily schedule.

Sorry, but what a load of old egoic claptrap!!

Our true purpose in life has absolutely nothing to do with our external circumstances. Our only true purpose in life is to know The Truth – but this word ‘Truth’ is so abstract, that I much prefer to say to myself, ‘My true purpose is to return home to love’. That’s it really. Each and every day, each and every moment I have just one purpose – to connect to love, (or light, or truth, if you prefer) and to extend that love outwards to all my brothers and sisters without exception. This is so simple that I can actually do it whilst sitting in Starbucks drinking a skinny latte, washing the dishes, typing this article, or even whilst sitting on the toilet - I think you get the picture (no don’t go there!!)

In one sense our spiritual task is far too simple for us to grasp. Certainly our egoic-self really wants to complicate everything, so that we never quite get it. The ego absolutely loves us beginning to search for enlightenment. The ego will happily encourage us to search for anything that we are never quite going to find. But true love cannot be found in future enlightenment. True love and light surround us always, simply waiting for welcome.

Love is all powerful, all healing, and full of infinite purpose, but as long as our minds are tied up in fantasies about our future role as enlightened spiritual teachers or healers, we really miss the boat. We are like that very religious man who was standing on a very small rock surrounded by rising tides. First, God sent a swimmer out to him, then a boat, and then a helicopter, and each time the religious man said, ‘No thanks, I don’t need your help. God will rescue me’ - and then he drowned.

Please don’t be like the guy in the spiritual joke. God has already rescued you totally from your nightmare of separation and suffering, but you will not realise this until you can fill your heart and mind with nothing but love. This is a simple task, but not in any way an easy one, because we have made ourselves so complicated! Our egoic-self does not want us to return to love, because our egoic-self can only exist if we continue to believe in separation, fear, attack and sinfulness.

Our egoic-self loves it when we ‘lovingly’ forgive others for their sins against us. But this type of forgiveness is not true love, because it is not true joining. When we ‘love’ others from a position of victim-hood, or arrogant superiority, (I am a healer. Only my love can heal you, you sad little creature you’) we are not really dwelling in love at all. We are pretending to love, whilst secretly attacking our brothers and sisters for being ‘inferior’, or ‘unhealed’, or ‘the guilty ones’ who need our forgiveness.

Learning to love like Christ or Buddha does seem to take some time and effort in this crazy dream world of attack and defensiveness that we all think is so real. But in reality, you are nothing but love, and so your so-called life’s purpose is, in one sense, meaningless. This is what those Indian sages mean when they tell you that there is absolutely nothing for you to do to gain enlightenment. How can you gain something that is already totally what you are?

However, in my experience, learning to love like Christ does feel like a full time job! Or rather it is like the most difficult course I have ever taken in my whole life. It’s even more difficult than my ‘O’ Level Maths – and believe me, I found that difficult. So it really does not matter where I am, whom I am with, or what I am doing. I only have to keep asking myself one simple question to stay on track and fulfil my true purpose this lifetime: ‘Am I dwelling in love or fear right now?’

If I then notice that I am not in love, I have a whole range of strategies I can employ, if I so choose, to bring me back into love. For example, I can ask for divine help to forgive the situation, or person, that appears to be making me fearful – or angry, which is basically the same thing. I can choose to nurture myself compassionately, for example by sitting in the sun in my favourite park for a while, until my anger or fear subsides. I can choose to reach out to a close spiritual friend, and ask them to hold the light for me whilst I share my nightmare with them.

I could go on and on, because returning to love can seem to take a lot of effort sometimes, and we basically need all the help and all the tools we can find to assist us on this core task. But, as Jason so often says, every single effort counts. Each time we release just one fearful attack thought and replace it with a loving, kind thought, all the angels in heaven rejoice, and all the earth breathes a sigh of relief. How good is that? Doesn’t that sound even better than gaining the temporary admiration of ‘lesser’ beings by becoming a world famous spiritual guru, healer or guide?

Please do not misunderstand my message here and think that you have to stay in a job you dislike forever, or sacrifice a genuine opportunity to become a spiritual healer or teacher just because you do not want your ego to get off on being ‘chosen’ to fill such an exciting role. If you are meant to change careers, move home, or even change countries in order to grow spiritually believe me it will happen to you (ask Gloria!). But none of these external changes in your life can happen until the divine timing is perfectly right.

Our external life always reflects what is going on in our minds. If our external circumstances feel dark and entrapping, unfortunately we still have some dark shadows to clear from our psyche before we can move on. But if, even in very difficult circumstances, we can find some way to tune into love and light, we are undoubtedly fulfilling our life’s purpose at that very moment. Actually, even if we are experiencing nothing but pain in a given moment, we are still fulfilling our life’s purpose!
As Byron Katie said to a participant on her recent London workshop, who asked her how she could fulfil her life’s purpose, ‘What are you doing right now?’ The participant replied, ‘Well I’m standing here talking to you’ ‘OK sweetheart’, Katie replied, ‘that’s your only purpose right now. To stand there and talk to me.’

See how simple it can be? Or, to put it another way, a young spiritual seeker once asked His Holiness the Dalai Lama, ‘Can you sum up all your teachings in just a few words?’ and His Holiness eventually replied, ‘Yes. Do your very best to be happy, and help others to be happy’. The young man thought to himself, ‘Is that it? That does not sound very profound to me’. Twenty years of serious spiritual practice later, he finally saw the deep truth in the Dalai Lama’s reply.

I absolutely love these simple but profound spiritual teachings. So, wherever you are, and whatever you are planning to do for the rest of your day after reading this article, please take a moment or two to reflect on His Holiness’s brief summing up of thousands of years of extraordinarily complex Buddhist Dharma, that could take you many, many lifetimes to fully assimilate:

“Do your best to be happy, and assist others to be happy.”

Please don’t wait to be enlightened to do this. Do it now. Do something right now to increase your inner happiness and then pass it on. Your purpose for today fulfilled. Full stop. End of story.