Finding The Purpose Behind Your Purpose

Finding The Purpose Behind Your Purposenby
Bill Cottringe
nnn Finding the real purpose to our lives can provide us with valuable meaning. Such meaning can give us the right direction and structure we need, which will eventually lead to the success and contentment we want. I have discovered six inter-related purposes to my life that give it more meaning tha
I will never need to keep on giving a command performance to the end.

Fitting in and making what we are fitting into bette

We are all on a journey in life. The psychological aspect of this journey involves a combination purpose of fitting in and making what we are fitting into better. In my own experience, I have found that we often start out focusing too quickly on the second part of this purpose. We try to change things and make them better before we learn how to fit into something that was here long before we were and will remain long after we are gone. At least I know I flip-flopped these priorities.

In the beginning I started out being convinced that everybody and everything in life needed changing. For a long time I thought my main purpose in life was simply to change others with my chaos-spreading behavior. My particular brand of chaos involved imposing complex and unusual ideas about life and how people should live it, with my high energy, creativity and multidimensional thinking.

I liked to push people’s buttons and upset their ordinary, comfortable mindset, challenging them to expand their thinking. Entire viewpoints were my main target. I also liked to take things apart in an attempt to understand them better, forgetting to put them back together again afterwards. In the first part of my life I operated under the impression that everything needed to be taken apart and changed.

In looking back, I now realize I rebelled against a psycho-spiritual reality that nobody can change: We have to learn how to fit into life and everything of which we are a part first, before we can be successful in making anything better and achieve the happiness, contentment and success for which we are searching. Our psychological selves stubbornly battle to avoid this perceived loss of free will and freedom. The irony is that once we let go and give in, our free wills and our destiny merge into the same thing. This is something no one can fully understand until the experience actually happens.

Once we understand the necessity of fitting in first, we begin to see most things are just fine the way they are. At that point we begin to see the few things that do need changing and start gaining the skills that are required to make these changes. Our focus moves toward trying to restore order by seeing clearly through the chaos and confusion, which we all create by failing to try and fit in before we try to rearrange life to our liking. The other purposes we start fulfilling are remembering, understanding, growing, serving, and enjoying.

Rememberingnn Much success in life is contingent upon remembering important things we need to know. Much of what we need to know is unconscious and consequently we have to increase our listening skills to hear our faint brain whispers, which are offering clues. One of the most important things for us to remember is what unique goal we promised to accomplish in return for the opportunity to have this life. Other important things to remember are answers to questions such as Who am I? Where am I going? How do I get there? Another part of remembering involves the gradual recall of all these other purposes we have in which to find more meaning.

Understandingnn One of the biggest challenges in life is trying to get along with others. The best way to get along with others is to try and understand them more. Once you understand something, your need to control or change it decreases. This is one of the most important insights about life in general—most things really doesn’t need controlling or changing, at least by our preferred mode of “attacking” them. Having this ah-ha insight frees up much energy to do other more important things and to even understand more. With understanding comes knowledge and with knowledge, wisdom. Wisdom is real genuine power that can get much done easily and quickly, such as discovering the best ways to create the most productive chaos with the least side effects.

A useful bit of wisdom is in understanding the three basic processes in which everything in the universe engages, including us: Creating, destroying and maintaining. Once we learn to fit in, we see how to create, destroy and maintain the right things to help restore the best order.

Creating involves giving unconditional love, acceptance and compassion. It also involves discovering new and unusual ways to combine opposite appearing things to benefit us all. The destroying function is solving problems, resolving conflicts, purging wrong beliefs and information, changing artificial viewpoints and shedding unproductive behavior and attitudes. The maintaining function is sorting out the valuable answers, solutions, truths and principles that are worth keeping apart from all the chaos that is going on around us. Sometimes this takes much attention, nurturing, creativity and perseverance. n
Growingnn Everything in this universe has this common purpose, which is growing. Humans also share that purpose in making improvements and becoming the best we can be in whatever we are doing. Whether we are learning as a student, teaching as a professor, being a child or parent, helping a friend in need, working at our job, or playing on vacation, our primary purpose is to give the best performance possible. This is no time for half-efforts or mediocrity. Life is not a trial run. This is it. Becoming better at what we are doing is a natural process that is only difficult when we make it so by struggling against it.

Servingnn Perhaps service is the highest purpose we can discover and carry out. Much like growing and improving, serving is a natural thing. Our service is a way we settle up the karma we created with the negative, irresponsible choices we made earlier in trying to change life before we learned how to fit in. The emphasis is on what we can do for each other to make life a little more pleasant, meaningful and rewarding. Service is always a win-win situation that is mutually satisfying for both the server and served. It is one of those rare activities that is innately rewarding in itself. The nice thing is that we are getting rewarded for undoing things we shouldn’t have done in the first place.

Enjoyingnn Although life has its fair share of tragedies and unhappy moments, there is virtually an unlimited supply of things to enjoy. Life is meant to be enjoyed. Even work or conflicts can be enjoyable with the right attitude. The right attitude is one of acceptance and lack of judgment in forming an unfavorable opinion before you give things a chance. The best enjoyments can often come from the simpler things in life, such as watching romantic sunsets, listening to a friend talk, or taking a relaxing nap on a comfortable couch on a Saturday afte
oon. The fact is, you can’t enjoy the bigger things in life until you learn to enjoy the littler, ordinary things right under your nose. This is a subtle part of fitting in.

Focusing on and carrying out these basic six purposes is a sure way to make the most of your time and achieve plenty of abundance that will be meaningful and satisfying. nnn