Seeing further discussions relating to the previous video I shared, I found this amazing video where Bernardo Kastrup describes what “purpose” truly is and how it is nothing like the ego-based goals that most people create in their lives, that often cause disillusionment.
So I think this kind of ego purposes are illusions that will lead to disillusionment.
Bernardo Kastrup
The first part of his description of purpose is pretty much exactly how I perceive purpose as well. It is something that you don’t understand at the beginning of your life but rather it is something that you understand more and more as you live your life, as it guides you and pulls you forward. Thus the perception and expectation that you have to figure out your purpose early in life, like when you’re in college or university, is completely ridiculous because you haven’t experienced life enough to truly understand and make sense of what it wants from you yet.
So I think the key is when you realize it is not about you. It’s not about your little egoic goals. It’s about surrendering to what nature wants to do through you, to what nature wants to manifest through you, or learn through you.
And this type of purpose is not something you can write down on paper and say, “I will have achieved this purpose by year X.” It doesn’t work like that. It’s a continuous unfolding. You don’t know where it’s going.
You only know, if you develop the sensitivity for it, where nature wants to be next day with you. What you’re supposed to do next. You don’t have a global picture of super plan. I don’t think nature has it either. It’s game of warm and cold. “You’re getting warming. Oh, you’re getting colder. You correct your path.”
Bernardo Kastrup
Now the next part of his description of purpose is something that I probably have intuitively felt in the past but it wasn’t something I fully realized yet, until he said it out loud. That being that nature really doesn’t care about what you want or need but instead your purpose is actually its purpose of using you.
Usually the impersonal whispers of nature don’t give a damn about whether your happy or not. Whether your ego will be satisfied or not. Whether you get respect or not. It can almost be self-destructive from an egoic perspective. It doesn’t give a damn about your safety.
Bernardo Kastrup
This might seem crazy to a lot of people but this actually makes perfect sense to me. As I noted previously, higher stages of development and accompanying levels of consciousness go beyond your base ego needs focused on happiness, realizing that they are’t enough, and begin to focus on meaning. Yet in focusing on meaning, to truly make a difference in their lives and the world, means to experience suffering and hardships to do so. In effect, the very things that people avoid if they’re just focused on happiness.
And thus to creating more meaning in your life, you effective do have to let your own previous egoic sense of self-identity die, so that a larger sense of Self can be born, one that has the capacity to comprehend and embrace the complexities of life in a broader way.
Finally Bernardo closes off his discussion of purpose describing how it at first seems paradoxically purposeless, compared to our personal goals, but then becomes full of purpose, becoming the engine that moves us.
You don’t really exist. You’re just a part of nature. You’re at best a tool. You’re not even that because you’re not even individualized enough to even be a tool.
But to surrender to Nature’s teos is so reaching purpose and, at the same time, it requires a complete abandonment of your goals, your personal goals, of your five year plan, of your New Year’s resolutions. All of that. It’s a total surrender to the now, to the subtle whisper, which at first seems to be a complete abandonment of any purpose, any goal, because you’re in the present. And goals and purposes seem to be future oriented.
So at first it seems like everything became purposeless but the next level of subtlety, when you get there, it is pregnant with a kind of purpose that has nothing to do with personal goals. It is bursting full with that. It is the engine of everything. As Dante said, “It is the love that moves the sun and the other stars” and can move you.
Bernardo Kastrup
His mentioned of not begin individualized enough perfect fits in with vertical development as becoming individualized and psychological independent of society’s expectations of you are what allow you to begin to explore yourself and what your purpose truly is beyond the conventional goals and expectations that society has predefined and scripted for you.
What I also find remarkable about his final words are that I’ve metaphorically described passion and purpose as two aspects of an artifact that one discovers and crafts as one adventures through one’s life. Think of it as a sort of magical gyroscope that is symbolically both an energy source that can light your way but also a compass that tells you which direction to go in.
When we fully grasp and understand these two aspects of it, integrating our passion and purpose together, it most definitely becomes an engine of everything, allowing us to transform the heavens and earth, as well as our worldview in the process.