Life Has No Purpose

Many people who come to me in my role as a Spiritual Teacher are searching for a purpose to their life. And this is a worthy quest in the Before Awakening stage of the path.

But what if life has no purpose? What if “having a purpose” is simply a quest manufactured by your ego to keep you busy and in search of something. To keep you distracted from what is.

Consider an apple tree. It lives. It grows. It produces apples. Now people may put these apples to a purpose, like making apple juice for sale, but the apple tree is oblivious to this human constructed purpose and will happily continue to produce apples, whether they are picked for juicing or not.

It is producing apples because that is its nature, not because they are given a purpose. And that’s the key. Are you living to serve a purpose, or are you living as an authentic person.

When we live in authentic alignment, we know what to do and how to behave in every moment. We respond to life spontaneously, no need for a purpose or a plan. This very spiritual path you are using was created that way. I trust you agree it has order, clarity and purpose, although none of these were intended as it was being created. As a piece of life, this spiritual path happened, spontaneously as an unplanned fun activity, in response to my authentic interest in the subject.

So what if there is nothing to find and that this quest for a purpose is ultimately futile. When it comes, this is a realisation that both frees us and scares us. Suddenly we are pitched into the void - the void of emptiness and fullness.

This void is empty of content and full of Being. Indeed we can only open fully to Being when we are devoid of content. When there is no content in our mind then we are free of all distraction.

This opens the doorway to Presence. And Presence is life being lived full on. Then, and only then, is our attention totally focussed on the process of creation rather than its goal, on its joy rather than its discipline. And that’s the secret to extraordinary, effortless achievement.