IT’S HARD TO MANIFEST TRUE PURPOSE
IT’S HARD TO MANIFEST TRUE PURPOSE
There’s an old saying, rooted in our history of being oppressed, “it’s tough to be a Jew.” So in the name of human oppression, it’s tough to discover, be and manifest your true purpose. These three stages of true purpose are overlapping stages. Let me talk about each one in turn.
DISCOVERING TRUE PURPOSE
I wrote a blog on how you might start to do this. As a completely quick and dirty summary, it’s the intersection of what lights you up, what you are really good at and what you really care about. Our society doesn’t want you to discover your true purpose, because, trust me, your true purpose has little to do with money and consumption, the hallmarks of what we teach. You might wind up making lots of money and even having lots of stuff, but that’s not what you are about on a deep spiritual level. The saying, “he who has the most toys wins” is the antithesis of discovering your true purpose because looking for what will get you the most toys pulls you away from the process of discovering your true purpose.
I’ve given in my previous blog post a way to start inquiring into true purpose. And, once you have started that process, there’s nothing quite like spending time in the more than human world asking this question of the trees, the birds, the small mammals, the plant life, yourself, as you wander through the woods or sit there.
We live in a culture which actively discourages introspection in the more than human world because it rightly perceives such activity as a threat to how it wants us to live. It is a radical and difficult act to take the time to do some kind of process of asking what you really care about, what you are really good at (regardless of whether it pays) and what lights you up while doing nothing “productive.” It’s tough to discover your true purpose.
BEING TRUE PURPOSE
It’s tough to embody your true purpose. While logically this comes after discovering your true purpose, unless you are blessed with the blinding revelation of it, I think it is more likely that your experience will be a dialectic, a back and forth process of seeking to embody your true purpose and discovering it. Let me use my history of raising cattle in Virginia as an example.
I had a revelation that my true purpose was to “dance with the rhythms of the earth.” I didn’t know what that really meant; it’s a bit opaque. I thought it had something to do with raising cattle, because I love cattle and pastures and I turn out to be really sensitive to grass and I am passionately in love with caring for land. So good at it, lights me up and I really care about it—only it didn’t work. How much of that was that I had minimal skills in many of the aspects of raising cattle, and I didn’t like any of my choices about the economic aspects of raising cattle. I couldn’t run a dairy by myself, I didn’t want anything to do with feedlots in any way and while I sold meat, I didn’t like selling it. “Dances with the rhythms of the earth” is nice and ambiguous.
Raising cattle is kind of perfect for dancing with the rhythms of the earth because everything you do is based on what is happening in the more than human world. But if I could deepen my relationship with the more than human world on these specific 100 acres, part of my task was also to become “dances with the rhythms of the earth” with my human tribe. I remember teaching about Sukkot while sitting on hay bales one year and that was a righteous activity, but basically I couldn’t get the tribal part right and couldn’t find how to dance with my fellow humans. One part of our ecocentric task is also to figure out how we fit in the human world. I believe that this needs to be a human world in dialogue with the more than human world, a human world that is able to treat the more than human world as a “thou.” I couldn’t find/create this. 25 years later I am struggling with the same issue.
I both don’t think that’s too unusual and it is a major impediment in our embodying a true purpose that embraces the more than human world. We in the west and progressively throughout the world are agonizingly divorced from the more than human world. It’s a disaster for us, and for the more than human world.
MANIFESTING YOUR TRUE PURPOSE
Manifesting your true purpose is making it visible in the world such that it has impact upon others. If your true purpose were bringing back your people into connection with the more than human world and all you ever did was wander in the woods and write in your dairy, that’s in many ways a great life, but there is something missing—making a difference for your fellow humans.
The core of what makes it so difficult to manifest your true purpose is the ridiculous power of our consumer conformist culture. We live in a radically sick culture. A lot of us recognize that, of course, but it is so hard to fight against it as social animals who need to belong to tribes. Further, we live in a culture that deliberately cultivates immaturity as a strategy to maintain its stranglehold on power so we have all internalized the power of our culture. To attempt to mature is an act of rebellion.
I spent a few years on a hippie commune after college. We lived a radically simple life, although we didn’t reject fossil fuels or all technology (this was in the days before personal computers, yes I am old). 50 adults shared 3 cars, we consumed very little by choice and we wanted to model a tribal lifestyle that wasn’t based on materialism. And yet, boy oh boy, did we bring our issues with us—and we had no individual or collective idea for how to address that. We mostly thought we’d take care of the external consumption part and it would all fall into line. Wrong.
It's hard to be a mature adult. To discover, be and manifest your true purpose is no easy thing and I salute all of us working in this direction.
