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Dear Soul Arcanum:
Many people talk about the higher purpose of life and our reason for incarnating. This has always been so confusing to me, for most of us seem to busily pursuing material possessions and the accumulation of wealth. Is there any higher purpose to life? If so, how can an individual discover his or her life purpose in order to pursue it? I’m sure no one wants to leave this world not having fulfilled their highest purpose. I would be grateful if you shared your thoughts on this matter.
Muralidhar
Dear Muralidhar:
There are indeed all sorts of ideas about the higher purpose of life on Earth. Most people look to religion for such explanations. I’m in harmony with some of the teachings of all the major religions, such as the Christian focus on love and faith and the Buddhist belief in karma and reincarnation. I’m in greatest harmony with the oldest religion, Hinduism, and its core teachings that we are all part of God, and through learning and growing via the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, we can progress toward enlightenment and eventually remerge with our Divine Source.
My personal views are based on the information I’ve received from Spirit throughout twenty years of spiritual reading work in combination with research into the near death experience and life between life therapy. (In life between life therapy, people are regressed to the period between lifetimes to review their plans for their next lives as well as all sorts of other very deep spiritual issues.) The main tenets of all of these sources mesh well, which suggests that even though I may not be able to firmly grasp the entire picture, I am honing in on some big truths.
The two main life purpose themes that emerge time after time in my own experience as a channeler of Spirit and in the NDE and LBL research are the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom and the development of an ever greater capacity for selfless love. While we all share this general life purpose, how that translates for each individual is of course unique. I believe we make our own plans for each life before incarnating, and that these plans are based on the karmic lessons and issues of previous lives combined with the desire to move to higher levels of learning and development.
The higher purpose for our life does not equate to a set plan, however, for we always have free will. In fact, once we get here in the physical, it can be very challenging to stay on track. This is why life on Earth is such a powerful learning experience: when we are plunged into this dramatic situation where we have to find a way to survive and get all our physical and emotional needs met, we tend to forget about the higher truths and lessons our soul is hoping to master.
The analogy of Earth as a school is popular because it is so apt. When we first begin the incarnation cycle, our lessons are simpler and more mundane in nature. There are people whose goal is to simply learn how to work with their divine creative power in order to create the material things they need to physically survive and enjoy life. Often when people graduate from learning how to physically survive, they spend a lifetime or two “playing” with their newfound power to manifest <q>the good life.</q> Eventually, this naturally gets boring and they start to ponder deeper questions and issues, at which point they begin a conscious spiritual journey. (They’ve been on a spiritual journey the whole time, of course, but they may not have been so conscious about it.)
To denigrate others’ goals and values is a bit like a college student sneering at kids who are just learning arithmetic; we’ve all had to go through the same basic lessons, so just because those classes no longer challenge or interest us is no reason to put them down. In fact, I’ve often seen that people who have been through a very difficult journey in life are being prepared to fulfill a very high life purpose. Their highest destiny is to move through the experience to the other side of it so they can become a source of help and healing to other people who are going through the same thing. In order to help people, we have to understand what they’re going through, so people destined to become great healers may go through years of darkness and misery.
In some ways, we are all always living our higher purpose, for whatever we’re going through is what we need to experience in order to grow into a higher level of experience. Thus we see people who have been touched by cancer creating cancer charities and support groups, and people who have lived some very dark years battling addiction becoming mentors and healers for other addicts.
To determine your own higher purpose, it’s wise to listen to your own life story and trust that it is leading you to the knowledge, experience and wisdom you need. It’s also important to honor and trust your passions and interests, for these are also trying to guide you to fulfill your destiny. This is how my own life’s work came about: I experienced the death of my first love at a very tender age, which made me all too familiar with grief and encouraged me to develop great compassion for the grieving. I also had amazing spiritual experiences that produced unwavering faith in an afterlife. As my own journey ultimately led me to profound healing, I developed a strong desire to help others discover the peace I had found.
Perhaps our highest destiny is to find or create something good out of our suffering. It doesn’t matter exactly what form it takes, the point is to transmute the darkness we encounter into something light. With this in mind, some key questions to help you determine your own life purpose include:
What unusual or extraordinary experiences have I suffered through? How can I turn my own struggles into something positive? What am I most passionate about or interested in?
Please note that your higher purpose in life does not necessarily relate to what you do to earn a living. Since someone has to build the houses and grow the food, what people do for a living should never be taken as a sign of how evolved they are spiritually. By way of a very famous example, someone can be the very embodiment of wisdom and unconditional love but work as a humble carpenter. In fact, having simple, straight forward sort of job can bless us with the time and mental energy to pursue higher aims.
Also, having psychic experiences does not necessarily mean you are meant to become a psychic professional. I often hear from people who have been having psychic experiences and want to know what they’re “supposed” to do with them. Since we are all psychic to some degree, that’s a bit like saying that lately we’ve been hearing noises and we want to know what we’re supposed to do with our ability to hear. What we do with our gifts and talents all depends on what we want and/or feel called to do.
To determine your higher purpose and find a way to fulfill it, you must listen to your intuitions, insights and conscience, for it is through these channels that you receive guidance and direction from your soul. The more you work with processes like meditation in order to clearly hear your higher self, the more you will tend to fulfill your higher plan for this lifetime. With this in mind, perhaps the most direct and powerful way to determine your life purpose is to engage in life between life therapy. For more information on this amazing process, I recommend books by Michael Newton, Ph.D., who wrote Journey of Souls, Destiny of Souls and Life Between Lives: Hypnotherapy for Spiritual Regression.
– Soul Arcanum