Summary: One of the most frequent questions people ask or think is: what is my soul’s purpose? what am I supposed to do with my life? How to live on purpose to get fulfillment, and a sense of life well lived? This article contributes the purpose part…
If you want to do this exercise correctly, you need a distance to see the forest for the trees. With distance comes “Witness” and you begin to see, without the constant chatter of the Mind, that tries to tell you what you should see to look good, to be good, to be socially acceptable, to conform to your own expectations of what’s good… all misleading. Your job is to see what is so, not what should be so.
With distance you see even the time-line. Tendencies, trends, inclinations. You can see what was important and what wasn’t. 1
The time you spend in the middle of it, I would call “driftwood” because in that vantage point you have options at best, and you choose the option that seems easiest… Thousands of choices made and you get which direction the Self is going, which direction the Self thrives to go.
The move of zooming out, both in space and time, is called “Temporality” and the capacity you need is “bi-location” or Witness.
When you are in position, then you start looking. Back and forth, past, present… you just look. At that point your life is laid out like a painting, all your significant actions on a timeline, as if it happened all at the same time.
The question I asked myself this morning: What was important to me? I didn’t ask “What is important to me?” because it would put me into the mind… It is not useful to go there.
There was an unintended question: it was posed by a part of me that I wasn’t controlling, and the question came from a series of dreams I had last night.
In those dreams people were doing drugs, or they were partying with drinking.
For that reason, I think, the events on the canvas of Temporality were mostly about addiction, mind altering, and bondage.
I watched the “panno” and I saw a common thread: me fleeing from bondage. Fleeing from dependency. Fleeing from the clutches of ownership.
My lips said: For me Freedom is more important than life
The freedom to feel the wind in my hair, the freedom to say what is so, the freedom to make things happen, the freedom to experiment, to climb, to lead or to seek solitude. The freedom to be an individual with no restraint.
- I remember sitting in at a part of the Landmark Education Forum on a Sunday night about love. The way we have love is given by movies, books, poems, and pop music. All that love is bondage.
We say “I love you” and it’s over. From that point on you can’t say “I don’t love you now” because of societal understanding that now you have to love or it’s over. What is over? Relationship, that’s what is over… So relationship, in our culture is bondage… the end of freedom.
The picture showed my heroic escapes from relationship.
- Employment: suddenly all your brilliance, all your ambitions, all your motivation is owned and managed by a man or a group: and you are not allowed to be you, you are not allowed to pursue the task the way you would if it were truly yours… In one of those dreams last night I was fired… smeared…
Being self-employed, creating a business is hard, but yet again, it is rewarding. As long as you don’t allow it to own you or your life.
Or your customers… As long as you choose who you work with, who you serve, so your life remains your life.Mostly we don’t know what is good for us, because what is good for us gets tainted with what is “sensible” from the point of view of continuity: the continuation of enslavement.
You have lunch with people who you have to have lunch to forward your status in the jail of your choice.
Holidays, religious or secular. They bind you. Bind you to the most vicious blood thirsty monster of all: community, society, the whole horizontal of existence. Life, inside this construct is like crossing the continent in with vacationing students: you can’t do your own thing, you have to do what everyone else does… because life is not about what you want to do, what you are called to do, what you are good at, but it’s about keeping the herd together.
I am not saying that Freedom SHOULD be on YOUR banner 2 , I am saying it is on MINE. … Although if you are in the business of becoming an Expanding Human Being, of raising your vibration, you can do that ONLY in an environment where you are free.
Follow the steps, and do it many times. The first few (many) times your mind (with its societal, cultural conditioning) will do the looking, not the Witness.
So you’ll have to get higher, further, and have to bring “allowing” to the picture. If you are mortified by what you see, you are in the mind. If you like what you see, you are in the mind. Only when you can see tendencies, trends, commonalities, like watching a movie with the sound turned off, that you start seeing with the Witness.
The sound, the words, are social smoke blowing for the most part. Most of what you say is to avoid being seen, avoid being found out. To be liked. To be well thought of. To justify yourself. Most of the words you utter are a coverup.
You need to watch the events of your life with the sound turned off.
Actions speak for who you are, words cover it up. Actions over time.
Once you see it, you’ll be clear.
Try to do this exercise with someone who you are not connected with any social bondage. We’ll do this starting next week in the Carrot and Stick webinar.
If you have done coaching with me before, you are welcome to book a one-on-one to do some work. Or if there are enough of you, (you MUST have done coaching with me before!) then I may put a group together and thus increase the time we can spend together on this. Email me to request.
Once you find out what has been motivating you all along, you can put it on your banner and now have it be a conscious choice. It will set your direction… and half of your job is done in defining your direction and the Shadow.
- I am using scenes from the known life of Joan of Arc Jeanne D’Arc to illustrate how it is done
- in medieval ages, armies of lords fought under the banner of that lord… you could identify people by the banner and their clothing, it was easy to see who is friend and who is foe. Sometimes members of the same family fought under different banners… this is the meaning of banner I mean in this article, the banner that tells where your heart belongs, what drives you to fight wars
Sophie, to go back to the exercise of the other day, and actually look…part of my Greekness is the dreaded Dutifulness. Also, never bringing shame to family or culture. Very conservative, especially Greek-Americans. There is also Greek pride, independence, and stubbornness. And the religion on top of that…and my own Fundamentalist Christian trip on top of that. It’s hard to pull my focus back far enough to see how trapped I am, but I have been practicing with the witness, and will do much more, and just observe. Thank you.