The Human Experience: Our Unending Search for Purpose and Meaning!

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." Steve Jobs, 1955- Oct. 5, 2011.

I celebrated my birthday on Oct. 5,  the same day Steve Jobs died in 2011. With me getting a year older, then remembering Jobs, it brought home to me the fragility of this human experience. It certainly invited  reflection on our purpose for being here.

While taking an early morning hike on Mission Peak, in my home town,  I did exactly that.

No one would doubt that Steve Jobs fully lived his purpose. He seemed to know exactly what he had to do; he did it, then left.

Just as important as the legacy Jobs left for the world with creation of Apple computers, the  iPhone and iPad,  the tales of his personality also  have become legend.  Based on all the public information written on him, there were many facets to Steve Jobs, and some of it was good and lots of it also was bad.

We then wonder about the purpose of those of us not intended to become "larger than life" personalities,  like  Jobs, or  Oprah Winfrey, or even Mattie Stepanek.*

*Mattie Stepanek, wise beyond his years, was a frequent
guest on Oprah's show. He died @ age 13 in 2004. 

Why, then, are we here?


As I picked my way up the hill in the early  early morning,  the answers gradually began to unfold.

I remembered Oprah talking on one show about the last words of a dying man:  "It was so easy, mom!" he'd exclaimed to his mother as he  made his transition.



What was so easy?

Life.

Yes. The dying man meant life was so very easy!

Huh?

Yes. Life is meant to be easy, yet, we make it all so very, very complicated.

Let me try to explain how easy it is, yet how we make it difficult.

There are several messages throughout the bible that are intended to guide us as to how to live our life's purpose,  but we conveniently choose to ignore them.

For example: Matthew 25: 14:30, we read of  a master giving his slaves talents, ranging from one to five,  "each according to his ability." 

We learn that all the slaves, except for the one given one talent, doubled their talents upon their return. The one with one talent chose to hide his in the ground for safe keeping!

The master rewarded all the others, but the one servant he threw
"into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Life is so very much the same.
We can choose to hoard our skills and talents or we can go forward easily into the world, following the path where it leads, multiplying our skills, talents  and values as we accumulate more wisdom and knowledge along the way.

But how many of us truly dare to live this way?

Often, we lock ourselves in the world into which we were born, recycling the same values and beliefs. From generation to generation, we never dare explore beyond the boundaries of our parents, indeed even our grandparents',  lives, values and style.

In "Four Agreements," Don Miguel Ruiz writes of when and how we learn to adapt to the ways of the world and the conditioning that is passed on by our parents and the generations before them.

For many people, life then becomes  a vicious cycle, going around and around, never seeking, thus never knowing, there may be yet another way!



Think about this.

We're born into the world with specific skills, talents, abilities and orientations. Some learn to enhance those skills and talents. But many others peek over into friends', families' and  neighbors' lives to copy what they are doing, without doing very much to multiply their own skills and allattributes.

This portrays the lifestyle many people aspire to have in their lives. But, we must ask: Will this make a happy life for Me?

Exodus 20: 17: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's."

Very simply, the bible, tells us not to want our neighbor's life! But we do! We want exactly what our neighbor has, and he/she wants what his/her neighbor has and so on and on.

Should we then  wonder, why,  by the time we get to the third decade of life, we are worn out. Many then  begin to feel the staleness of life and become weary. 

That's because we haven't grown anywhere. We have merely maintained the skills and talents with which we were born into the world.

Certainly our purpose in coming to Earth was to do more, much, much, much more than to maintain and to copy?

"Everyone is a genius. But if you would judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it would live its whole life believing  it's stupid."-Albert Einstein

Luke 12:31: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all those things will be added unto you."

Find yourself ...FIRST...and from that base...everything else will grow. You won't have to merely maintain, and you certainly won't have to copy!

I almost can hear Cosmic Consciousness, aka God, sighing in frustration, seeing our increasingly materialistic focus: "Why bother? They just aren't getting it! " 

Aha...but God knows there is hope and faith and also a growing awareness and awakening to TRUTH. He knows that in those seasons of discontent, we allow our Soul to reach up and rise up and through us.  Slowly, perhaps, but one day, many will wake up to FULL truth and wholeness, way before they hit any season of "discontent." 

The movie, "OMG: Oh My God," is a recent release based literally on searching for God. This Hindi language film, with English subtitles,  addresses the religious conditioning many accept, following blindly and seeking peace through rituals and adoration of images..

"Religion should serve humans, not humans serve religion," the protagonist  Kanji exclaims in one scene.

"People are not God loving but God fearing," a swami told Kanji. The swami further explained that people need to have symbols to cling to in their daily lives,  so much so that if you take away one religious symbol or idol, another one equally as powerful will spring up in its place.

"Religion is not for God but for people," Govinda, as "Lord Krishna," tells Kanji.  OMG is a powerful and provocative movie, and I strongly recommend it. 

Beyond religion, there are many other ways people give up their right to find their own meaning and purpose in life.

Many of us are so blinded by the world of material objects that we use our skills and talents to manipulate new ways of acquiring more of these things. Rarely do we step back and do a personal survey of our lives and see that with all the acquiring, we truly have not moved anywhere.

Materialism is a seduction of our Souls and most do not move beyond the initial stage of this seduction to TRUTH. We believe that by succeeding in a material way, we have conquered the world.

Far from the TRUTH.

Some people are born rich. Others are born poor. So at either end of the spectrum, both poor and rich seemingly have their life's purpose defined early on.

Many of the rich believe their purpose is to maintain their wealth;  the poor believe their purpose is to acquire wealth. Maintaining or acquiring wealth then becomes the only and final purpose of many walking the Earth.

Both those who are born rich and those who acquire riches are living far from the truth, if that's where they stop. We have to move beyond only the material aspects of this world, which cannot then be taken with us when we depart, to discover the many other traits and characteristics we have to enhance. Essentially, getting rich should not be end; it should viewed as the beginning.

What will our legacy be, if it's based only on material goods, which can disappear with one catastrophe?

Each of us was born with our own set of fingerprints and footprints that are stamps of our unique selves that carry us through this lifetime. The fact that others are along with us on the journey does not mean they are there for us to copy, envy, hate or try to diminish so we may feel good about ourselves. Others are in our lives as witnesses and models, good or bad, of what we should or should not aspire to become.

The people in our lives serve as mirrors of ourselves. Where and when we see those "mirrors" becoming clouded or distorted,  it's time to change the mirror and move on.


Our "becoming," then, in the business of life is the expansion of ourselves in as many ways as we truly feel authentically able to express, without stress or strain. But we never should become complacent, just to feel "safe."

We're here to reflect the best of all of our uniqueness. Not to copy anyone else...but to be the darn best with what we were given. [CAUTION: This does not mean to "stay busy!" Far from it, becoming your best self may be to "unbusy" yourself from doing "things" for appearance's sake!]

Just as the biblical story talks about how one person multiplied his talents, and one did nothing, so too are we asked to find our purpose in myriad of ways.

To end up our lives becoming just one thing in this life, such as a rich man but devoid of compassion, has to be a grave and deadly sin.







We are not asked, as some suggest, to love more than we are capable of loving, but simply to love.
We are not asked, as some suggest, to give more than we are capable of giving, but simply to give.
We are not asked, as some suggest, to become better than the other person, but simply to become our best.

Most importantly, for those reading the many gurus and self-proclaimed spiritual leaders, we are not asked to be GOD! .

We simply are being asked to be the best we can be by giving full expression to our skills and talents while we remain here on Planet Earth. We do so by staying fully in the flow of life, not hiding out when things get rough, but staying the course, getting up and putting one foot in front of the other to march down the road again.

Set of Ruiz's very popular, spiritual books.

Ruiz offers  in Four Agreement, these recommendations for living our lives:

1.  Be Impeccable With Your Words
2. Don't Take Anything Personally
3. Don't Make Assumptions
4. Always Do Your Best

Yes. It is that simple. 

For Christians, following The Ten Commandments, also would make for easy living. Each religion has its own guide for human behavior. Beyond these guides, everything else is doctrine, beliefs and also dogma. Be careful. 

We can follow the simple ways to become a decent human by staying conscious to who we are and to our truth.

Even if our legacy is just intended to serve only our family, friends and immediate circle, our time on Earth would have been fruitful. It eventually will multiply.  Life has a way of spreading...and expanding...beyond our years.

Honoring our unique purpose,  becoming our best  unique self , is our purpose in life. THIS IS the reason for this beautiful but oh, so humbling, human experience.

Stay in the flow of your life. Don't let your life get away from you. Learn the easy way to expand your "talents" by staying connected to your Soul.  Honor it,  first, and always. 

"Infinite Mind will put ideas into your mind, words into your mouth, creativity into your hands, boundless opportunity before you, and guiding light on your way.”-Eric Butterworth,* Daily Word, Oct. 7, 2012 

At the end, we, too, will say:

 "Ah, Mom, it was so easy, and yes, Mom, I lived it in just the right way. I lived my    purpose!"

Or like Steve Jobs, we may simply say, "Ahhh."  This makes words unnecessary and becomes an expression of our gratitude for the journey and our utter joy for having truly lived our purpose.

Namaste',

Che'

*NOTE: Mattie Stepanek, born July 17, 1990 and died June 22, 2004, suffered from a rare form of muscular dystrophy, dysautonomic mitochondrial myopathy
Eric Butterworth,  born in 1917, was senior minister of The Unity Center of New York City from 1961 to 2003. He died on April 17, 2003.