To a debate on philosophy vs spirituality…
To me the bigger question is who wants to know. As the old texts note, we’re usually driven by desire for pleasure and aversion to pain. But when we move out of that drama, the old drivers fall away and there may be a fallow period. What once moved us forward is no longer there. It’s a little like how “childish things” fall away as we become teens.
When who we recognize ourselves to be changes, so too does our perception of the world and what is true. And that changes our motivations, our Why.
As the refinement unfolds and the heart opens, the Lila becomes obvious, the divine play. We come to recognize our role in the larger scheme of things. This may or may not have anything to do what we used to think it was. Or the form of it may simply evolve with us.
This isn’t our “purpose” as has become popular in new age circles. That’s usually more about seeking meaning outside of ourselves. Meaning is one of the deeper ways to lasting happiness but real meaning comes from within.
As Joseph Campbell said, we’re meaning-makers. The meaning we give life is up to us. And that is directly connected to who we recognize ourselves to be. As Monique MacDonald said, it’s really about living life On purpose rather than finding a purpose. Again, that is directly related to self-recognition.
A big part of the natural world is about balance. Much of the activity is energy seeking a new level of balance. When we move more successfully with that, we create less disturbance around ourselves and find increasing levels of support for our desires.
The more we push against where nature is flowing, the more challenges we’ll experience. This doesn’t mean we should become passive. Life is built through action. It means we should learn to move with nature as our ally rather than foe.
If you really want to understand the why’s of the world, look at the who. On the cosmic level, you contain all of creation, including all universes. Know Thyself and all things become known.
Davidya
Hi David, I was thinking about your post in terms of enlightenment for householders.
If I interpret correctly what you have said above, when you say that the divine play is not our “purpose”, you seem to indicate that each of our lives has two components, once the spiritual journey consciously commences. There is the growing and persistent desire for spiritual meaning and experience, and then, there is the other 99 percent; love, career, family, friends, travel, home, health, and hobbies, for example.
Aside from those very few in a society meant for a monk’s life, the rest of us have as much responsibility to all the other aspects of life, as we do to our personal spiritual pursuits. This is an key thing to recognize, since our spiritual pursuit, is by definition, a journey, which means that the experience is always changing.
That being the case, we cannot take such information as a means to run and structure our lives. Spiritual data is not meant to lead our lives, but rather to inform it, through integration. That means that the revelations we come across in our spiritual practices frequently need some adjusting, some homework, in order to seamlessly disappear into our lives, and promote us towards whatever is coming next.
If we are doing it right, we will continue to be successful in whatever personal endeavors we are pursuing, without too much disruption or dislocation, while making rapid spiritual progress.
Hi Jim
No, it was not my intention to say lila was not our purpose. I can see how that may have seemed though. This was more a broad reference to the general trend of people seeking their purpose in what they do, an extension of the idea that we’re defined by our work. And that related to seeking meaning outside of ourselves.
I made a lateral jump between paragraphs that I didn’t catch on rewrite.
I see the spiritual journey as inherent in our life, even in our biology. The growth of body, mind and spirit is completely intertwined. And in a very real way, we can never not be living our purpose. It is threaded through everything. However, if we don’t recognize it consciously, we can resist or act against it, causing struggle, etc.
Thus, I speak here instead of living On Purpose rather than seeking a single thing we’re “supposed to” do. As a prior post on Bucky Fuller mentions, life is constantly growing and changing, so our “purpose” continuously evolves in its form.
So yes, I quite agree with your points.
However, occasionally, spiritual progress can be quite disruptive, but it very much depends on the persons journey. For some I know, the outer life continued much as before through the whole process. Success grew in fact. For others like myself, the outer form of life changed markedly, beginning in the approach to the first shift. While I made attempts to find a related way of being, none of that worked. I had to make a radical departure, then things fell into place.
That said, the falling apart of the outer life quite supported the shifts and integration taking place internally. While I didn’t need 2 years on a park bench a la Tolle, I did need some extra digestion time. This process supported that, though it took a little time to stop thrashing about it. (laughs)