Originally Posted by impaul99  Hey Steve, I've got a question for you. I was doing a lot of meditation today and went through some purpose finding exercises today as I like to do at least once a year.
The strange thing is that while in previous years, my goals and purpose revolved around all kinds of things in all different areas of my life, when I went to go through the exercises today I found that all my answers all revolved around spirituality.
In essence, I was really looking for ultimate purpose, not just purpose I guess you could say. This led me to ask myself questions regarding what purpose really is and I found myself thinking that the only true ultimate purpose has to revolve around the spiritual realm (the true self) since the ego and even the body are just temporary.
In essence, I guess you could roughly summarize that the only purpose I could identify worthy of pursueing is the spiritual purpose of ascending myself and helping others to ascend up the scale of consciousness. If the spirit exists, which I believe it does, that is really the only thing that would persist.
So, effectively, every endevour in life seems like it has to be measured against that.
For example, this presents an interesting case for something like becoming vegetarian. Previously I would look at something like the possibility of becoming vegetarian from the point of view of nutritional common sense, but I didn't really look at or consider becoming a vegetarian because animals are killed. However, if my ultimate purpose is to ascend throught he levels of consciousness, I would have to look at stopping eating the flesh of dead animals at some point.
Another example is in regards to physical exercise. Instead of working out for the purpose of building strength or looking good with my shirt off, I would now look at exercising as a way of training the body/spirit connection. Meaning, even if it's just a little bit of pain, working out IS painful, compared to lets say sitting on the couch watching TV. However, by working out, it allows my spirit to train my body to go past pain and essentially grab control over the body so that my spirit is running the show here on earth, not my body. Incidentally, when spirit is running the show, the body will be treated with the greatest respect anyways. However, if the body is allowed to pursue "bodily pleasures" it leads to the self destruction of the body due to excesses, addictions and such.
Essentially, you could really look at EVERYTHING you do every day and begin to immediately only do things for the purpose of living in spirit of your true self only.
Simplified even further, the purpose of life becomes to live life in such a way so that your spirit learns and ascends up the scales of consciousness as much as possible, while at the same time helping others do the same as well, INSTEAD OF the purpose of life being to "be happy".
I'm not saying "be miserable", or "suffer" but rather to be true to your spirit even if it means discomfort, pain, or whatever.
Is this partly what you meant by polarization? To choose to live this way of having the best spiritual life, versus living your life for the attainment of the most "happiness" this world currently has to offer? |