Who am I and what is my purpose here?

In this months podcast we explore some of the larger questions in our lives around our existence and what our purpose here on earth might be.

Transcript

Good morning,

I have struggled in the last few weeks to bring together my thoughts for this podcast. I seem to have a lot of things I want to say, but bringing those thoughts together into a coherent story seems to have been a bit of a challenge for some reason.

Today I want to talk about our place in the world. I am sure most of us have at some stage in our lives on earth have asked ourselves the question “who am I?” and “What is my purpose for being here?”,. These are huge questions and I am not sure I have ever managed to answer those questions in my lifetime.

If you go online and ask these questions you will be bombarded by advice about your role in life, your passions, whether you have ambitions, what you care about, what job you should do, what hobbies you should undertake, what kind of personality you are, the list is frankly endless.

The problem is, the world seems intent these days on finding a purpose and definition for you within the physical world around us. It is for this reason that the harder we work towards trying to find ourselves in this reality, the more confused and frustrated we become. Why is that? If we really consider this question we realise that the answers simply cannot be found in the reality around us, there must be something else. The reality we are being asked to engage with is not ours, it belongs to other people. Your ideal job belongs to a global capitalist system, your hobbies being to the ideas of others that created that hobby, your passions are probably a function of what others have instilled in you, your ambitions are a reflection of a competition between your ego and this around you, your personality is probably several layers thick with masks and contrivances that you have adopted over your life in order to fit in. The reality is that not one of us is “us” we are a mixture of everything around us and for the human spirit, this kind of self illusion can only last for so long before something happens that leads us to question everything and we undertake some sort of existential reckoning with ourselves and the universe we find ourselves in.

In some ways when you think about it, you have to wonder why we exist at all. Doesn’t it seem odd to you that we are born without any understanding and knowledge, we then spend most of our lives trying to understand the world around us as best we can, only to die at the end of it? there seems to be a certain purposelessness in it all, if we were well designed we would be born with all the knowledge that our parents and grandparents and thousands of years of family had learned and be able to make our contribution to the world in the full knowledge that what we had done and learned would get passed on to our children. You can quite see when you think about it like that, why we seem so confused at times and have to ask ourselves what the purpose of our existence is.

It can’t be the case surely that we are put on this earth just to procreate, that doesn’t seem to make anymore sense, but that is what the evolutionists and biologists would have you believe. 

It can’t be that we are put on earth to drive a successful economic global system that drives everyone to work for 13,000 days of our life with 28 days a year with time off for good behaviour, that surely can’t be the reason.

Could it be that we were put on earth to further human knowledge for the benefit of mankind? Why would that be it, there are tribes on earth today who we can only assume have lived with the same knowledge for a hundred thousand years and live quite happily, so maybe we should assume that this might not be entirely the reason for our existence.

Could it be we were put on this earth to find ourselves and give purpose to our lives, I know the western coaching industry would love that to be the case, but what if there is no need for purpose and what if the person you find is not the person you really are - how do we know the answers to these questions and anyway who are these coaches that profess to know these answers.

Maybe we are simply meant to exist - god that sounds awful doesn’t it? 

But we do have answers, we do have theories, we do have science and when you go exploring in this space you find some of the most wonderful ideas and beliefs ever to have been written down or passed down. Some of these ideas trace back over 100 thousand years. In fact it’s probably fair to say that ever since mankind learned to communicate we have probably been asking some version of this basic question. - “Who am I and what am I doing here?”

So where did this need for purpose and self justification come from in the first place. I am not entirely sure your average hedgehog or mountain lion sits in quiet contemplation on a daily basis and wrestles with these large and wobbly questions about life the universe and everything. 

Well let’s start with what I think is probably the oldest theory known to man. It is a compelling story and according to the written texts is probably between 50 and 100 thousand years old if we are to believe that the knowledge was passed down by word of mouth for upto 100 thousand years until around 4500bc in the Indus valley it started to be transcribed when we first invented the written work. Two great civilisations emerged at this time the Harappen civilisation in the Indus valley and the Sumerian civilisation in what is now known as Persia and the Middle East.

If you are a Christian then most of your Bible originates from the Sumerians and Babylonians, If you are a mathematician than most of your Maths originates from that time too. If you are an astrologist then most of our known knowledge of the cosmos comes from the Indus valley. In fact it is probably fair to say that most of what you know, have and do in this world today started over 6 thousand years ago with an ancient knowledge that predates even this time. Things like irrigation, time, dentistry, wind power, writing, wheeled vehicles, numbers, geometry, the list just goes on.

So why am I telling you all of this?

Well I think it is important to take a step back. Most of the time when we ask the question of who we are and what our purpose is - we do it in the context of “now”, “today” and we tend to measure ourselves against what we know today. For example we tend to think of ourselves today as an advanced civilisation with more knowledge than we have ever had at any time and almost limitless potential through science. And yet there is clear evidence that we are still only just starting to understand things that were known thousands of years ago without access to all of the supposedly advanced knowledge and techniques we have today.

It seems when you think about our purpose in the historical context I have just mentioned that we were put on earth to discover and develop new knowledge - that would make sense. But let’s think about why that would be? What do we have a need to discover and invent things? These ancient tribes in the Jungles of the Amazon and elsewhere haven’t found any need to invent an f16 fighter or a Space shuttle so it doesn’t follow that we are necessarily put here to create these things for the sake of those things, so what could be the reason for this?

Well it appears to me that the main driver of all of the manifestation of knowledge we possess as humanity is driven by our desire to be in communion with each other and help each other as well as ourselves to survive and prosper. As we became a society and moved from small tribes into bigger communities we created problems that we hadn’t come across before and therefore we needed to solve those problems. If you look at it this way, solving problems is not our purpose and reason for living, but rather living together as a community has a greater level of validity in purpose. Helping each other supporting ourselves, finding ways of cohabiting on the planet seems like a more likely purpose for our existence.

But then you have to ask yourself why you would bother with all that hassle, surely at some stage we had an opportunity to just refuse to be part of that first town or settlement and live our lives separately, but we didn’t. And there is a very good reason for this, we are social animals, we thrive when we are part of a larger community. The social scientists would have you believe that there is a tradeoff of security, shared burden etc that we give in return for this type of life, but we can see what happens to the human spirit when it is deprived of other human contact. We can reduce a perfectly healthy individual to a babbling wreck who would rather die than continue living by just placing them in solitary confinement for long enough. So we know that there is something about being human and in the presence of other humans - what is it, what is it that makes us want to be with other humans?

You would be forgiven for wondering where all this is leading but it forms a foundation to the answer of who were are and why we are here.

The oldest texts we have speak of reincarnation. The idea behind reincarnation is that we are souls, or energetic beings, we belong to the universe as a higher form of consciousness. We choose to live our lives on earth and to do this we inhabit our bodies so that we can experience physical reality. Our bodies are a bit like a car that we hire out so that we can go for a drive in this place we call earth. All of these ancient texts are quite clear that the soul is separate from the mind and body.

We will have come across expressions such as “I am the captain of my soul”, or “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” or Keeping body and soul together” so common is the reference to this duality in us that is supports the idea that we have always known that we are not just our body and mind, we must be something greater than that.

This is important because it means that we are more than just our physical bodies, we are in fact a form of universal energy. If all of this sounds a bit far fetched you would be surprised to find that modern science has been studying this phenomenon for over 50 years and has concrete proof that we are energetic beings. If we were to accept this on face value, it would go someway to explaining why we enjoy living as a community and why we need human company and interaction. We are in some way connected in another way that transcends our physical bodies a very elemental way that if severed causes us huge problems. Just look at the devastation the Covid lockdown rules have created in peoples mental health, never in the history of mankind have we managed to cause suicide levels that we have witnessed in the las 12 months. Men were better adjusted in the trenches of the 1st world war and the atrocities that put up with their simply because they were together, something about being together allowed them to cope. It is clear to me that being part of humanity, part of community, part of the each other is a fundamental part of “being” a fundamental purpose in our lives. Without it we suffer terribly.

It is perhaps for this reason that some of the oldest knowledge we possess in the world that gets passed down year after year for hundreds of thousands of years relates to how we can improve our lives by living together harmoniously. These laws go together to form what some people call the Golden rules:

do no harm, be honest, be kind, work for the common good, do not covet material wealth and the other many many golden rules that exist across all religions and texts that predate religions are supremely important to us. 

A great truth and a golden rule that I think is one of the earliest laws is the something called Ahimsa

Ahimsa  is the idea to not wishing harm to any living creature—not even to any lifeless object. Ahimsa is about the intent, rather than the action itself. It is an attitude of universal benevolence. The Jainists pioneered this Idea over 6,000 years ago. You will probably have come across it more recently if you have ever read anything about Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi practiced Jainism.

Gandhi said the following:

“Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.” 

If we are “one” consciousness , “one” form of connected intelligence a form of advance energetic being, then the knowledge we have from hundreds of thousands of years must be important. We are not the poor little humanoids that we have been told we are, we are in fact an advanced life form. The fact that this might seem fanciful has more to do with what we have been taught than the actual reality of our situation. 

If you doubt that last statement ask yourself if you tell yourself that truly you are only here to work and bring up children and have a few days off a year - does that truly resonate with you or are you left thinking “that can’t be it? surely there must be more to it”, the truth is we all know that there is more, the difficulty is that it’s not easy to see it.

How can we have tens of thousands of years of knowledge and living examples of transcendence amongst us as living proof of this knowledge and yet at the same time have people telling us that this is all hocus focus and rubbish. If it was rubbish and no one believed it it wouldn’t be there, we would have lost it thousands of years ago. But we haven't, it persists, it exists and it continues to grow. Why is that? well I believe that when we come face to face with truth, we cannot deny it, no matter how hard we try, there is something about internal truths that resonate and that is why almost all the greatest thinkers of the last 500 years have all eventually returned to these seminal texts and knowledge reservoirs. No matter how clever you were as Heidigger, or Neitche or Einstein and hundred of others, in the end you realise that you have talked yourself in a big circle back to something we have known for hundreds of thousands of years.

So how does that help us answer some of these really difficult questions of who we are and what our purpose is.

Well I believe we are here enjoy the physical experience of earth so adopting the principle of Ahimsa is about protecting and increasing the health of the world around us. In other words our first law is to do no harm, this way we can enjoy life on this planet and everyone else our shared human energetic presence can all enjoy living in a peaceful and non harmful environment. By doing so we ensure that the future generations of energetic beings that hire out a car for the journey also have a nice place to come.

You would be forgiven for pointing out that we don’t seem to be very good at living according to these ancient fundamental truths - we have played waste to our environment and consumed a large share of the planetary resources and we seem to spend most of our lives fighting. Well all of that is true and to a large extent we are still trying to find better ways of living with each other. Many of us don’t know we are connected energetic beings, many of us have bought into the material world around us and have lost touch with the ancient wisdoms as well as who we are and in this modern world it gets harder and harder to do so. In the west we are driving people to be more individualistic as if this is some sort of fantastic thing, but it is not working, it is starting to fail. We can see it in the starvation, the poverty that exists the mental health crisis. Many visitors to Western Europe and the USA from other parts of the world are appalled and dismayed that these rich wealthy countries have beggars on the street and poverty on the scale that we do, they cannot understand the pace of life and the stress everyone is exhibiting. Our way, our western ways are failing, they no longer work and in those quiet moments when we have time to really question these things we know this to be true, we know that moving further away from each other is not the answer.

The answer is as old as mankind and it is about community and shared consciousness, it is about serving each other, living peacefully, gently and playfully on this earth. It is about engaging with the eternal cosmic energy that fuels us as energetic beings.

So my advice to you is to go in search of ancient knowledge look for the lessons of our forefathers, trust in the wisdom that exists and seek to connect with the energy that exists around you, in you and in others. The reality I am describing is infinitely bigger than anything you can conceive of. Once you experience the infinite, nothing else on a human plain in the physical world is relevant. It is only then that you can start to live your life meaningfully and only then that you will understand you place in the universe.

I will leave you with the words of Gandhi 

“I offer you peace.

I offer you love.

I offer you friendship.

I see your beauty.

I hear your need.

I feel your feelings.

My wisdom flows from the highest Source.

I salute that Source in you.

Let us work together. For unity and peace.”