Awakening to your life's purpose

New Earth: Awakening to a Greater Openness

The world is filled with great opportunities for learning, for self-improvement and for personal growth. However, these opportunities are available only to those who are willing to open up to them. This is the premise at the center of the discussion here below. Namely, each of us has a chance for a life filled with stimulation, intrigue and happiness but only if we remain receptive to the unfamiliar; prepared to face unseen challenges and, ultimately; considerate, respectful and loving of those around us.

While there may be no one secret to leading a fulfilling life, this process would surely be helped by the cultivation of an open heart. So many of us are conditioned with inherent prejudices which cause us to prejudge unfamiliar experiences, to fear that which we don't understand and to avoid that which seems alien to us. This, however, is a very limiting way to navigate the word. Here, I am inclined to agree with the sentiment that "when you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life." I have always found this to be quite true. There is a socially conditioned tendency to presume without much knowledge that we know enough about those things unfamiliar to us to know that we wish to keep them unfamiliar. The quote above suggests that by dispatching with these prejudices, we have a chance to know so much more, not just about the world but also about ourselves.

Of course many people will simply avoid the unfamiliar as a way of evading the potential for suffering. And this is not necessarily an irrational way to behave in the face of the unfamiliar. Travel to an unknown destination may lead to unpredictable dangers. Venturing to speak to an unknown member of the opposite sex may lead to embarrassment, rejection or even heartbreak. A high seas adventure might well lead to scurvy. There is no way to predict what balance of enlightenment and endangerment might occur when one takes a chance with the unfamiliar. But there is, to be sure, value in the experience either way. To this end, great suffering has the capacity to bring about great insight. As the sentiment goes, "suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego."

This denotes that for every experience that brings on some amount of suffering, the individual is likely to come away with some greater knowledge of himself and perhaps some greater respect for the forces that transcend him. We must be willing to fail, to falter, to suffer, in order to become greater versions of ourselves. Sometimes, being shown lesser versions of ourselves can be the key to this personal evolution.

And perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that this personal evolution does not occur in a vacuum. To the contrary, we improve ourselves only if we improve the value we represent for the whole of humanity, in whatever modest capacity this may be possible. Here, we are driven by the idea that "a human being is a part of a whole, called by us the 'universe', a part limited in time and space."

This is perhaps the unifying principle in our discussion. The openness which is a recurrent theme here denotes especially the imperative to remain open to one's fellow man. Nothing that we do occurs independently of the needs and wishes of family, friends, communities, societies, civilizations and so on. We are infinitesimal units of an infinitude that is well beyond our comprehension. The best we can do is attempt to comprehend this notion as a function of that which we can impact. Where we can improve our lives, the lives of those around us and the lives of those beyond us, we have a responsibility to attempt to do so. Only through an openness to the unfamiliar, a willingness to learn from suffering and recognition of the broader magnitude of the universe will allow us to do this.