Now you've reached the point, perhaps, where you see that anything is possible, that you can create your world exactly the way you want it to be. Anything you want to achieve or own is possible. How you act and why are completely up to you. So: what are you going to do with your life?
This is where your own purpose for living comes in. Purpose is Why you are here, What you have come here to accomplish in this life, The Reason for existence. Many people have never worked out their own purpose.
Wayne Dyer has done some incredible research down this line. He boils it down to a simple question: Does what your doing bring you peace? If you are on that line of thought, action and accomplishment which makes you consistently happy, consistently challenged and thrilled with your every action in life, then you are on your purpose line. As Dr. Dyer points out, anything you are doing or required to do should pass the little test of bringing peace to your internal world.
While some can get into some intense personal soul-searching for the BIG Purpose they were sent here to achieve in this life, the system for finding your purpose in life is very simple:
Let it find you.
All you have to do is to start to weed out of your life all the things which are irritating. If you don't feel peaceful after reading the newspaper, then find a simpler source of data – or skip the front page and read the comics or sports first. Most TV network and cable news is designed around the idea that controversy keeps people tuning in, and so sells the advertising they need to keep afloat. So, limit your time watching. Take up a hobby or spend more time playing with your children, reading good books, or exercising at the gym, etc.
The trick is to gradually get the things you don't like out of your life and spend more time doing the things you do like. This doesn't mean quitting your job without having another lined up and ready to take up the bills you have. It may mean taking on a second job in order to pay off those irritating credit card bills in a year or two and then start paying by cash or check for everything you need (or using only one card and paying that balance off immediately when that bill comes in – they make record keeping very simple).
Just keep weeding your life garden and you'll find room to plant new activities that you actually love to do and those that bring you peace. Gradually, your life becomes more peaceful. Begin listening to that quiet internal voice which gives you advice from time to time. This is called intuition (among other things). And the more you use your intuition, the more accurate and reliable it becomes. Eventually, you will hear something that makes perfect sense about what you are here for and what you should be doing with your life.
Once your purpose has found you.
Once you have your purpose, then you can use the tools above to work out how to achieve it. Hill's 6 points (covered in Part I above) are the simple steps necessary to go from having a purpose to achieving it.
Goals
Goals are smaller steps which can be achieved enroute to your life's purpose. A purpose might be so large that it is bigger than any one life and might be a continuing effort involving not just your life, but able to be expanded to involve hundreds, thousands or even hundred-thousands of others. By setting large and small goals, one can make progress toward any purpose.
While there are many good books on organizing and project management, the simple procedure is to:
1.Have a worthy purpose.
2.Find a way this could be accomplished in a large or small way.
3.Work backwards from that end and figure out what you would have to do to achieve that – in big and smaller steps.
For example – taking a trip:
- There is a destination and what you want to do there.
- You will need to decide on where to stay while there.
- You have to have transportation there and back.
- You will need to eat enroute there and back and also while you are there.
- You will need finances to pay for your trip.
- You will need time to take the trip. If this isn't done as part of your job, you will need to arrange this.
- You will need clothes appropriate for the trip and suitcases to carry them in – or finances to buy these.
- You will have to decide to take the trip, which includes being responsible for all the decisions above.
While getting something done by taking a trip would be a major goal, all the others are minor goals – sometimes called targets or steps. Writing the whole thing down could be called a project. Getting this list done would be project management. Each step could be alloted a specific time or amount of time to get that goal or step done.
Anything in your life can be accomplished by breaking the goal down into sub-goals or steps and then executing each step. The old phrase goes: A journey of a thousand miles is completed by taking single steps.
Peace of mind
Peace of mind is a self-generated state. It doesn't depend on the external world for you to have it. You find your peace of mind first, then create your world to align with it. Simple statement, but most people have never achieved the first step, so can't get to the next.
My own encounter with this datum was in a vacation I took from work back to the family farm. I liked taking long walks in the woods, accompanied only by one of the family dogs, or both of them. That day, I stopped to rest in a shady grove of some truly huge, old, magnificent oak trees. Gnarled and massive, these creatures towered several stories in the air and were older than all the man-made objects around me. As I simply stood quietly and started listening to the sounds of the wind and the birds and simple sounds from these woods, I became impressed with a very different force than I had been used to. I became peaceful, a sort of internal quietude overcame me. My body relaxed and I began to smile.
This is what I had been looking for in my 20 some years of working in counseling and personal work across the U.S. My hard and frantic work at achieving various production targets and sorting out peoples' problems, tragedies, and messes – all this had been very involving, but never brought me personal peace.
A simple walk in the woods had brought me to realize a goal I had been seeking my entire life. For all that time in learning, training and counseling, I had been seeking my own personal peace of mind and hadn't found it – until now.
I found I could walk in the woods to get peace. An experiment in my room determined that I could achieve that peace anywhere on the farm. On returning to L.A., again I was besieged by the mundane and hectic pace of my chosen profession and living in an uncaring megalopolis. By choice, I then sought out this peace and found it again. This showed that it wasn't location which determined internal peace, but a personal choice or decision. In other words, I could have peace of mind where ever I went. I only had to decide to have it.
Needless to say, this threw all the data I had been training, studying and working with into a cocked hat. This is truly where I started re-evaluating all I had learned to that point. This also forced a wider research into the actual sources of what I had trained in. The result is this series of books to date.
Peace of mind seems to be a generated quality. One simply seeks peace and it arrives. Others have also given some gradient steps to this, such as:
1.sitting in a quiet room,
2.relaxing completely,
3.imagining your mind a basin with a stopper covering the drain. Empty this basin by pulling the stopper. Do this three times or more, until you have “drained off” all your turbulent and noisome thoughts.
4.Then fill your mind with peaceful thoughts, as through repeating soothing, positive phrases or words – such as “tranquility”.
Repeated use of this method on retiring nightly, or when alone in your office over lunch, develops the mental habit of keeping a peaceful mind at all times.
The only limits are those you set for yourself.
As you review all that's covered above, you'll see that as the world is literally what you think it is, there are no limits to what you can manifest (“thunk”) for yourself.
What you “thunk” into existence is up to you. I've covered your habits which have limited you before this. Also covered is tapping into universal “habits” which exist in the “cosmic habitforce” Hill describes.
I've stated that the same universal laws which enable you to thunk something into existence also reciprocate, so what you thunk must be ethical. If you create a harmful environment for someone else, you will also in-flow a similar effect. There are also no limits as to how destructive you can be. But all that you create you will similarly receive. Best is to work out the optimal solution for all involved in a given situation and then create this outcome. You can always come back, on a review, and create a better solution. The point is that your intention should not be destructive.
There are emotions which are negative. Hate, Anger, Jealousy, Fear – all these can motivate action. However, they also then require “payment in kind”. As you think and act from a negative emotional state, you will continue the existence of that state in your own life. “As you sow, you shall reap”. All of these negative (or mis-) emotions are generated because of the lack of Love.
Love can be defined as “finding the good within”. Huna holds this as one of seven key principles - “To love is to be happy with”. Hate cannot continue in the presence of love. Perhaps this is an explanation for Jesus' saying, “Love your neighbor as yourself”. Defined in this way, in light of what has been covered above, we see that this is a powerful action statement, not some idle philosophy. Essentially, were everyone to continually work on improving their co-existence with those around them and in their sphere of influence through continually finding and reinforcing the good within those around them, we would in short order find a world at peace and in good living conditions.
Many authors cover this concept of working in cooperation with those around us and not in competition. One can see how this works in alignment with the Golden Rule. As well, if everyone can create anything in their world, there is no reason how one should receive less than another, or be unable to purchase some good. Practically, anyone can have any amount of anything they want in life.
They just have to “thunk” it.
No comments:
Post a Comment