Living Without A Need To Have A Purpose

The meaning you put on anything makes it become real. This is how creation occurs. When you just ignore it, when it has no meaning to you, it has no reason to stay in your reality because it doesn't need to. Definitions are like beliefs, and by their very nature they also cause whatever you've defined to become real. And there's no bigger definition than how we define who we think we are. We believe we need to become something but in fact the exact opposite is true, it's about letting go of something-and that something is whatever has been motivating us to live, the so-called "purpose" or "meaning" that we were told, even at a very early age, we're supposed to have, which stays with us until we die. Such motivators actually place us in a box, no longer free to respond however we feel. Once there is a purpose, now the mind thinks it has to live up to that purpose or image, and from then on we now choose to act in a way that will (hopefully) convince everyone else we are good because, "Can't you see? I have a purpose-this is who I am!" And of course, most importantly, "Dear God look, I'm good because I'm at least trying to fulfill my purpose." Not having a purpose feels terrible to most because on the deepest level there is a fear of what God will think not to mention what our friends and family will think. However, you are God, so if you drop the purpose, now you're undefined and thus, free. Any action at any time is possible because you no longer have an image to live up to. Now that's true freedom and also the scariest thing for most humans. But that is where we have all chosen to go at this time in human history.

For me, letting go of the need to have a purpose has been a slow process because I really had this purpose thing drilled into me. However, I now understand that all l need to do is whatever brings me joy and then trust that my soul will take care of the rest. In other words, let's say you get inspired to do something and the idea of doing it feels really good. Great! What you do next is to breathe into your desire and, using your imagination, get a sense of what steps you need to take to make this desire become a reality. Then you simply let it go and begin with step one, and just continue following your joy from then on. There's no need to set a goal and to push yourself to achieve it. The only thing you have to do is focus on what it is you want. This may sound like you're setting a goal but you're really not because unlike a goal, you have no idea exactly what the end result is going to look like. Rather, you have an imagined idea and a good feeling. Now your "work" is to stay focused on doing only what feels good. The rest of what's necessary, all the details and the hows will come to you when appropriate. That is active being. You are the creator and when you put your focus on something and remain joyful, it takes on a life of its own. All energy flows in service to you. The time will come when your desire becomes real. It may not look quite like what you first imagined, but you know you are the creator of it and it will feel as though it was effortless because all you did was follow your joy. This is the way of creation in the New Energy. Creation occurs through passion, not hard work.

Now, there may still be issues in your life that you wish you could somehow change, such as having a belief in not being good enough, or having doubts about yourself, or fears, or even lack. Perhaps you feel you have been diligently working on these issues, in wanting to shift and change your own belief systems, and don't understand why they never seem to improve much. You probably also understand that you need to accept and embrace what is, and yet I acknowledge the very human and very understandable desire to change what is. After all, if you just accept it, embrace it, and leave it at that, maybe it would never change and you don't like what it is, so the idea of just embracing it doesn't resonate too well with you.

I as much as anyone understand this and have the greatest amount of compassion for you. You are here on earth, you're living out your human existence with all it's interesting dynamics and situations, learning to accept yourself more than anything, learning to accept your creations, and hoping to learn how to change your creations. I invite you to sink into simply accepting them, to simply accepting what is, and to perhaps give you a different perspective on what this means.

As you know, you're God having these experiences and I invite you now to revel in them. Not just to tolerate or to just accept in order to change, to grudgingly embrace, but to revel in your experiences. Part of the challenge is that you put a lot of meaning on the things you see reflected around you. You put meaning on the lack that you perceive in your life, for example. You say, "Well, I'm such a shitty creator because I'm still creating in lack." And you see the lack around you and you put the meaning on that. You put meaning on all these different things and you say that it means this or that about you. And I also invite you to let that go, to just experience. Experience the lack and then say, "Wow, God's really having fun with this one. Why, I have no idea how this is going to work out! What a ride! What a suspense story. This is a good story!" Can you allow yourself to revel in your human experience, your humanness? Part of you may be saying, "No way in hell, I don't like this. Why would I want to revel in it?"

I want you to open your awareness to yourself, to who you truly are. You are God, reveling in this incredible human experience. I hesitate to even say this because it may be counter-intuitive or rather a paradox, but it is true that as you truly begin to revel in life, things will begin to change. Whatever life brings you, let's say life brings you an experience of no money, or money is tight, or an experience of God knows what. Life brings you this experience and you revel in it, saying, "Look at that, how is it that I created this to seem so real? It's fantastic! What a creator I am because what an act of creation it was to play this small role. It is as if the greatest actor who ever lived is playing the role of some beggar on the street. What an actor. What a role you are playing, and you are playing it fully. When you can fully revel in your experiences, not to change them or wish them away or any of those things, they will begin to change. As I said, I hesitate to say this because you tend to want to skip over the part of truly reveling in it, and in fact, it can tend to hold you out of the experience. You say, "Yes, yes, I'll revel and embrace," but only in order to change it.

I invite you here to make friends with the situations in your life without making them mean something. What if you, for example, go so far into debt that you have to walk away from it all, that you have to declare bankruptcy or whatever situation you might be facing, what would that mean about you? Absolutely nothing. It would just mean you had that experience. So I invite you to take off the meaning of these experiences and just fall into them. Imagine you're in this amusement park and you got into the haunted house and, oh my goodness, all these things are going to get you. They look like they want to eat you. They're scaring the shit out of you. Oh, but it's so much fun, it's just an experience. You go up on the roller coaster. It goes so slow and then you get to the top and go over, and your stomach comes up in your mouth and you think you're going to lose your dinner as you drop down. But you don't think, "What a stupid thing for me to do, that was foolish." No. You think, "Wow, what a ride."

Allow yourself to revel in the experience itself. There's nothing to do but to live life. Oh perhaps you say, "I want these experiences, but not those experiences," but life brings you experience, that is all. How you choose to experience those things is up to you. When you live it fully you revel; in the morning you get up and are tasting your breakfast as if for the first time, walking outside, seeing the world as if it's brand new, through new eyes because you revel in life, whatever it brings. "Oh look, there's another letter. They want money from me too. Wow! What a game I've created." Allow yourself to fully experience everything that life brings you. It will change, it will flow, it will reflect a different level of your consciousness but your consciousness is here to experience.

For me, I recognized there was still a part of my consciousness or my subconscious, whatever it is, that still tended to believe God hates me, or I'm not worthy of love, but my soul made it very clear that this whole perception or feeling God hates me, well, who is God? I struggled with this for many lifetimes, this self-hatred. It's actually not God who hates me. It has been me hating me. This feeling is really two sides of the same coin-God hates me and I'm unlovable. But I am changing that-have changed that! I now know that I am God also, for one thing, and that there's a part of me that does love me, and that is lovable. This is why for several years I have focused only on loving myself. It all comes back to that. It all comes back to trusting yourself and loving yourself, discovering the love that is already inside you. It's just those old overlays from past lives that convince you differently. It's like putting on a mask and dreadful clothes and then looking in the mirror and saying, "God I'm ugly." Well, take off the mask. Take off those clothes and see your beauty. It's just been a mask, which is a type of overlay. You actually do love yourself, very much.

The reflections in your outer world, because of living on earth, because of the human situation, there tends to be a time delay or a time factor in reflecting your inner self. I invite you to stay completely focused within yourself, finding that love, remembering that love; remembering your beauty. Your external situations will come to reflect that. When your attention and awareness is focused on your external situation it turns into a type of loop where, "Oh look at that, there's more of that." When your attention and consciousness is focused within yourself, within your own grandness, brightness, your love, the incredible essence of you, you are hardly even going to notice your external world but it will come to reflect your true self. When it doesn't seem to reflect your true self say, "Oh well, that's just leftovers. It doesn't mean anything any more." As I said, the meaning you put on it gives it a type of reality and stability within your reality; it makes it real. When you just ignore it, when it has no meaning to you, it has no reason to stay in your reality because it doesn't need to. You don't recognize it as real or with meaning any longer. Now, as long as you are trying to push something out by saying, "You have no meaning, you don't belong in my reality, go away," oh, you're giving it lots of attention and meaning regardless of what your words are saying because your attention is on it. When those other things are irrelevant to you because you're so caught up within yourself and within the reveling of the experience, it's almost as if the external will become fluid and shift and change because your attention is no longer focused on it.

You might feel as though experiencing something is actually putting all your attention and focus on it, and therefore giving it relevance, but let's say you wanted to go for a swim so you went out to some mountain lake and jumped in. Those mountain lakes can be icy cold. Now, are you going to be thinking about it and putting all sorts of meaning on it? "Wow, this is cold. It must be high elevation. It must be winter," all these things, or are you just going to experience the breath-taking cold and the exhilaration and frantic feeling of that cold? An experience that drastic tends to get you out of your mind. In a sense, your consciousness is fully immersed in the experience, though your thoughts are not exactly focused on it. Your thoughts have been obliterated by the cold. You will have very present thoughts. You may form words and shout out as you express yourself in that coldness, but you are experiencing it because that is all that is in your experience. Later you might get out and say, "Well that was a dumb thing to do, now I'm going to get sick," making it mean all sorts of things. Or, you can just say, "Wow, what an experience that was!" and then go off and experience warming yourself by the fire and whatever else is going on. There is a difference between immersing yourself, your consciousness and your awareness in the experience verses analyzing it and thinking about it and wondering why you chose it and wondering what's going to happen next and all of that-a big difference; a bit hard to convey but a big difference. Basically, the idea is to stop analyzing life and just enjoy it.

Potentials will come to you when you are in your life, when you are experiencing, when you are feeling. When you're involved in your life your body is participating in your day more than just your head. When you are fully present in your life, potentials can find you. In any particular moment you may feel an inspiration to take some kind of action. There is a difference between doing rather than just being. When you're doing you're trying to accomplish something, you're trying to get somewhere and get something done and you have a purpose. Got to do this. Got to get it done. But when you are being, you're just being. You're just experiencing. You're being present within your being. When you've made the choice to simply be, sometimes things happen. Sometimes you make a choice to take action. Even that isn't doing, it is active being because you are moving and acting from inspiration rather than agenda; propelling yourself from the here and now rather than hooking onto a future goal and pulling yourself along with that. You're propelling yourself from this now point, expanding out and expressing out from here and now rather than hooking on to some future or some potential outside of you and trying to pull yourself toward it. You might go the same direction. You might end up taking the same action, but the energy of it will be very different. So, what you do is not so important as why you do it or what motivates you. However, don't get caught up into analyzing that either.

There are many spiritual people who feel a desire to change the world. They get inspired to end animal cruelty or poverty or junk food or God knows what-there are so many causes out there it's amazing. Let's say something triggers you and you feel incensed that anyone could possibly act or live that way. Your tendency is to create a cause and to begin working towards making everyone else aware of this so-called problem you see. You encourage people to join the bandwagon and of course, to change too, should they happen to be guilty of whatever your issue is. However, what's really happening here is you are allowing an external illusion to affect the way you feel and then you are placing so much focus on it that it becomes very solid, thereby causing the issue to get bigger. Let's say you go to the movies and see a film that turns you off. Okay, so you tell a few friends about how you didn't like it and you forget about it. Would you make a sign that says, "This movie sucks" and then stand out in front of the theater with that sign? Seems silly but that's exactly what you do when you create a cause and begin fighting it. The images on the screen were just an illusion created by light passing through film. The same thing is true about your perceived problem. It's actually just something your mind has created, like a hologram, but it's not real at all. Your soul put it in your world to reflect to you yourself-the illusions you still believe are real. It's there because your soul wants you to let go of that illusion. So what's really happening when some issue triggers you is that you probably were involved in some way in a past life in doing the very thing you don't like. Your response to it, saying, "I don't like that and it needs to be stopped" is actually you saying, "I don't like that fact that I'm allowing this illusion to make me angry and that needs to stop." Indeed, and the only way to stop being triggered by it is to take your focus away from it and place it on whatever it is that's going to restore your joy.

You aren't doing what you're doing to save people or to change consciousness or any of that high falootin' stuff. You're doing what you're doing just to be, with yourself and with those you contact, without agenda, completely without agenda. Witnessing the divine within them from the divine within you. You don't even have to say the word "Namaste." You can simply be that. The divine in you greets the divine in them because you are fully in your being.

Also, on the spiritual path we're told to become the observer of ourselves, of whatever the human is doing, that who we really are is the one doing the observing, not the human. However, even with being the observer of your life, yes there is something to be said about being in the observer standpoint, but observing can even turn into a mental activity where you are thinking about something while you observe it rather than immersed in the experience itself. So simply experience whatever it going on without giving it any great deal of meaning about you.

The more in your life you are rather than living in your head, the more you will be able to recognize your inner guidance. You can feel within yourself what is appropriate and potentials will find you wherever you are when you are open. But the clearer you are, the more you realize that the purpose of potentials isn't always what they appear to be. I will give you an example. In early December 2007, I got what I felt was a real inspiration to go back to Lincoln, Nebraska where my father was, and I almost did it until I got on the phone and heard his begrudging words that he really didn't want me there. Even that didn't necessarily have to stop me and yet it gave a different perception to everything and allowed me to work through some deep feelings of not being accepted, which I thought was a great thing. And after bringing those aspects home I chose to stay in Florida and I've since felt lots of gratitude for myself, for having made the decision to stay here, because I truly love it here. But I was amazed that all kinds of potentials were popping up in Lincoln that would've allowed me to go back there and jump right back into the way things were at one time. It all opened up and was ready and willing and inviting me and yet, somewhere inside I sensed that really wasn't the best thing to do in the moment. So some potentials may open up something else for you rather than what first appears to be. When you are connected with yourself, you can always trust the guidance you get within yourself. You can always trust your own wisdom.

I also want to say that when you are deeply involved in walking this path of melding yourself with the divine, you may not find any great amount of upliftment and joy connecting with other people, even with other "spiritual" people because this path of enlightenment is a turning inward. It is a letting go and a disconnection from everything outside of you and all around you. It is going into your experience and it tends to be rather solitary. In a way it is a bit like dying. You can talk about it, and be with people while they die, but ultimately you can only do it alone.

Paul Reinig has recently released his new book, "Apostle Paul: The Untold Story," which is available on amazon.com in both the US and UK, and an audio recording, "How To Accept Yourself and Bring Home Your Aspects", which is available as a download on his website. He hosts an online listener call-in radio show accessible at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/mastering-true-love, is a speaker and facilitates seminars involving dance in which he shares how you can learn to love yourself on an intimate level. For more information, see http://www.MasteringTrueLove.com.