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Excerpts from A Practical Guide to Meditation and Prayer
What Is Your Purpose? What is your purpose in life? Have you ever really thought about this in relation to the big picture? Because so much emphasis is placed on the development of intellectual and physical skills in our society, you may have defined your purpose, as most people have, according to how adept you are in these areas. After all, authority and expertise are often determined by the number and kinds of degrees a person has listed after his or her name. And from the standpoint of physical development, our professional athletes command some of the grandest salaries in America. Do you think your purpose is to be an architect, a writer, a schoolteacher, a plumber, a computer programmer, a good mother, father, son, or daughter? While all these are important roles you may play, areas of service to others in which you may make a marvelous contribution to our society or even the world at large, they are secondary to your true purpose in life. If you consider your purpose to be centered in any of these areas, the time will come when you will have no sense of purpose at all. You may retire, the kids grow up, parents pass on; any number of things can happen to remove the supposed object of your purpose, and with this removal comes the removal of a reason to live a creatively happy life. Your purpose has to be based on a factor that will always be relevant, and the only thing you have that you will always have is your spirituality. You have intelligence and you are clothed with a body, but you are primarily a spiritual being. As a spiritual being you have a purpose, and when that purpose begins to dawn on you, you will carry it into your chosen fields of expression, whatever they may be, bringing a depth of meaning that will make your life worth living, whatever you are doing. Understanding what this purpose is will clarify all foggy areas in your life. It will especially clarify the subjects we are dealing with in this book, meditation and prayer. The reason meditation sometimes seems difficult and even unproductive is that it is often practiced only to relax the mind and body rather than to also tap the inner spiritual resources. Prayer, too, is often misdirected because, more often than not, it is practiced solely in response to some mental, emotional, or physical desire or need. When your true purpose is understood, the reasons you meditate and pray will change dramatically. How can we best define your purpose as a spiritual being? In simple terms we can state it thus: As a spiritual being, your purpose is to express the attributes of God in everything you do. This statement may require some thoughtful consideration, for on the surface it may sound like an oversimplification. But you are happy and fulfilled to the degree you are involved in expressing the attributes of God. Why? Because some of the attributes of God are love, life, peace, joy, success, harmony, freedom, prosperity, wholeness, fulfillment, intelligence, enthusiasm, security, and power. Do these not comprise the essence of what you are looking for in everything you do? Do you know why you spend so much time looking for these qualities in people, places, and things? Because they are the very elements that compose your true identity, and your desire to experience their external counterparts is really the bubbling forth of God’s desire to express them through you. It would be impossible to desire to express any of these qualities as deeply and as universally as we do without our already being connected to them in some intimate way. While the feeling that we lack any of these qualities usually sparks an all-out search in the outer world of things, this sense of lack is only a signal to us that it is time to express a broader and deeper range of God’s attributes in our lives. As Meister Eckhart wrote: “One must not always think so much about what one should do, but rather what one should be.” Herein lies the key to finding true fulfillment and satisfaction. The first place these attributes of God must be expressed is within our consciousness. Emerson wrote: “A deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its thought in a thing. As soon as a man masters a principle and sees his facts in relation to it, fields, waters, skys, offer to clothe his thought in images.” The building of an internal foundation of consciousness always precedes the demonstration of its external equivalent. You will never see anyone sustain a lifestyle, whether it be one of poverty or prosperity, sickness or health, struggle or harmony, that is not an extension of his or her consciousness. To get in touch with your sense of purpose, you may find it helpful to speak the following words: As an expression of God, I now let God’s infinite qualities shine through me in all I do. I am blessed with a sense of wholeness and harmony. Thank You, God.
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