In other words: What is the purpose and meaning of life?

I’ve written a detailed post on life purpose, and that post is still good, but let me reiterate the issue from a new angle because this is a big, important issue. (photo credit)

Soul’s purpose to enjoy

Yep, this is the main thing. We wanted to enjoy this physical world. We wanted to feel the love and abundance, our power to create and manifest, in this tangible world.

Are you disappointed? Does “enjoyment” sound unimportant or petty? Were you expecting something holier?

Then let me ask you, what is more holier than enjoying, which is synonymous to praising and appreciating the creation (whether you see the creator as God or yourself)? If you think enjoyment is something worthless, you may be caught up with the “Value must come from sacrifice” and “We are no good and we must suppress ourselves” myth.

But, you may say, this world is full of horrible things. We don’t get to enjoy much.

Well, I’m writing another post to show you that perception is misled.   (It’s published now here.)  All the things in this world are good. But even if we accept there are bad things in life, does that decrease your enjoyment? If you believe in bad things, you enjoy the good things even more, don’t you?

If not, it’s probably you not allowing yourself to enjoy — it’s not the bad things preventing you from enjoyment.

And by saying “Our soul’s purpose is to enjoy this life,” I don’t mean we should all spend the rest of our lives lying on the beach. Lying on the beach is enjoyable some of the time, or all the time for some of the people, but not all the time for all of us. I, for one, will be completely bored after a week or so. (Yes, I actually prefer the cool Oregon weather, and most of the time, I like typing up my articles rather than doing nothing.)

Okay, so enjoyment. How do we really enjoy living then?

Soul’s purpose to express itself

By fully expressing our unique gifts and strengths. You enjoy yourself and your life most when you are fully yourself.

If you try to become someone that you are not, your effort is wasted and you feel bad about yourself. Even if you get money or people’s attention this way, you just feel like a fake and you don’t get to enjoy them really. This is the mistaken way to enjoy “love and abundance.”

To really enjoy love and abundance, we first need to love ourselves completely and unconditionally, and to see the abundant and supportive nature of the universe.

We, each one of us, have unique gifts, and the gifts get even better as we go through our unique life experiences. Recognizing our gifts and figuring out how to express them is one of the most important work you do in your life.

So we can say our soul’s purpose is to express ourselves in an authentic way. Which brings true enjoyment.

Soul’s purpose to learn and to help others learn

When we incarnate, we receive the “veil” that make it difficult to know ourselves. It’s a way to enjoy this life game more. It adds the fun of discovery.

So, to get to the place we fully express ourselves and enjoy this life, there are learnings to do. This is often called learning the “life lessons”. Learning the life lessons is part of the soul’s purpose.

I don’t see this learning process goes on indefinitely, however. With Ascension, many souls are completing the “this is the life lessons, here is a plan to learn them in this world, let’s work on this program” style learning.

Sometimes, we volunteer to help others learn. Our souls are so generous! I’ve seen these souls in my Akashic Record Reading — they’ve been relaxing in the spirit world for eons of time, and then decide to come over. Apparently, there is no big reason they “need to” incarnate, but they volunteer to be here.

How specific your soul’s purpose can be

Some people want to be told something like, “Your purpose is to go to Africa to save the starving children.” And they are afraid they’d “fail” in life if they don’t do it. Well, in order to do it, they need to know what their specific purpose is, so they go to psychics for readings.

This is a very poor way to use a psychic. Because, if the psychic (and their spirit guides) is a good one who respects free will, they see the problem of telling clients their specific purpose. We are not order takers and we define our specific path of life. There are many ways you can express yourself and therefore contribute to the world. Choosing which way you want to take is up to your free will.

For instance, if you are told that your purpose is indeed to go to Africa to save the starving children, would you do it? Well, you’d better, right? And if you fail to do so, you live feeling bad, fearing the judgment? Do you really think the loving God, who is the very one who gave you free will, would do something like this?

So let go of the idea that there is a life purpose statement hidden somewhere in the sky. Also let go of the idea God is a mean superintendent tracking your progress against the life purpose plan. And while you are at it, let go of your friends in the spiritual circle who make you feel bad because you are not contributing enough money, time, etc for greater causes.

Instead open up and enjoy your life. Be yourself. Praise the miracle of life and create more miracles yourself.

Do you know your life purpose? Are you living your life purpose? How are you making progress in fulfilling your life purpose?

So many of us are waking up to realize we do have purpose in our life, that life is not some random accident but we came here for certain reasons. But many are also frustrated because, as much as we sense we have life purpose, we cannot figure out what it is.

I know the frustration of not knowing the purpose of my life

I certainly know that frustration – I lived in it for years. In my early years, I thought I could find my purpose in higher education. I studied hard and was admitted to one of the most prestigious universities in Japan. Boy, it disappointed me. There was also a time in my life when I thought I could find my purpose in a relationship. Nope. And I did my share of corporate life in America.

Since I left my corporate job last year and put my full attention in my spiritual development, I now feel I have a better perspective on this issue of life purpose. I have the sense of direction that I am making a progress in my life purpose, and this gives me calming satisfaction.

In fact, this was the very reason I started this blog. I want to help you live your purpose. (And if that involves starting a business – which is not necessarily the case but sometimes is, I want to help you in that effort, too) Yet I realize I haven’t written a core post on what life purpose is, so here it is.

General and individual life purpose

In the most generalized level, we all come to live in the physical life form for one common purpose: to experience life in this physical world and to learn and grow through the experience. Steve Pavlina puts it this way in his recent interview with Hunter Nuttall:

“. . . So if consciousness is the only potential common element to this life and the afterlife, then we get the greatest possible long-term gains by developing our consciousness in this life. And what’s really fascinating is that by focusing on the development of your consciousness now, you’ll enjoy an incredible life while you’re here. You’ll lose your fear of death because you’ll know you’re doing the very best you can to prepare for it. And once you lose your fear of death, you’ll live much more fully in the here and now.

For starters you’ll be less timid about taking risks such as quitting your job to start a new business. After all, if you accept that you’re going to die, how you can be afraid of minor stumbling blocks like going broke? Those things are just part of the expansion of your consciousness.

Consciousness develops through expansion, through exposure to new experiences . . . We’re here to have the greatest growth experience – the greatest adventure – any conscious being could ever wish for. . . You’re here to develop yourself as a conscious being.”

So true. I would like to add to this, that there is a reason why each of us are unique. In addition to the big general purpose, each of us have more specific purpose, or set of purposes. Knowing the big purpose is helpful, but I think it’s also helpful to get more personal.

Expression of your uniqueness is one of your life purpose

Have you ever stopped and thought why each of us are different? Our uniqueness is a gift for for ourselves and to the whole world.

Large part of our unique strengths (and challenges) come from our soul origins. Each of our soul (what Steve calls consciousness) has origins. Is this surprising to you? If our soul can survive the death of this lifetime, it has survived many previous lifetimes. Go all the way back when it first incarnated in the physical body on Earth. Where was it before?

For many people, life is meant to be simply lived. There is nothing wrong about this – these people are the salt of the Earth. Their souls know only this Earth, and in the early stage of development.

If you are reading Steve Pavlina or this blog, however, you are probably not one of them. Deep down, you know you have higher aspiration and more specific purpose for your life (or for your many lives). Your soul originated in other sources to make certain contributions to this Earth.

Soul group and life purpose

The origin of the soul (sometimes called soul family) defines your soul level gifts. And you wanted to incarnate on this Earth so that you could make your contribution with your gifts. This is your group level life purpose.

When you express your wonderful soul gifts, when you offer your gifts to improve this Earth, you are fulfilling your life purpose. You are also growing spiritually yourself.

For example, some of my Akashic Record Reading clients’ souls come from outer space (the exact location is not identified at this time) and have firsthand expertise in the blueprints of this Earth and our souls – they really know how things were originally planned to work. Some know this into technical details. Because there have been many corruptions in the blueprint codes, they came to work on the restoration of the blueprints. They are working on the soul level to correct the negativity with their great technical abilities.

On the physical level, they may be working as engineers or program managers. Or economic analysts or medical researchers or even philosophers. These are all different ways they utilize their soul gifts, their analytical and well-organized thinking capabilities, and they are restoring the original blueprints. (I haven’t read his Akashic Records, so I’m not 100% sure, but I think Eckhart Tolle, author of A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (Oprah’s Book Club, Selection 61), belongs to this group. See how meticulously he works on the technical accuracy and perfection.)

Another example is Dr. Eric Pearl of the Reconnection. He is considered to be a Pleiadian. (In this case, we know the location of his home.) Pleiadians are here to bring changes (and entertain us along the way).

Souls also take trainings, like taking college majors, that further define their gifts and purposes. I’ll write about this into details later in another post – this itself is a huge topic.

If you are interested in learning more about various soul groups (soul families), there is a book called Soul Mastery: Accessing the Gifts of Your Soul. It doesn’t include several soul groups somehow, and it doesn’t explain the critical steps to identify and straighten up the energetic issues prior to reading the Akashic Records (sometimes, the “book” may have the wrong cover, etc.), but it’s an interesting read.

Life purpose and life lessons

Each individual soul chooses a set of life lessons prior to incarnation. Dr. Brian Weiss’ Many Lives, Many Masters explains this important issue. So working on the life lessons you yourself chose before incarnation is part of the life purpose. This is your life purpose that is specific to this lifetime.

By the way, this is another thing I check in my Akashic Record Reading, and it is such a joy when the client says something like, “I knew this! This XXXXX has meant so much in my life! So I’ve been learning this all my life.”

Then there are some additional purposes, such as healing the energetic wounds you still suffer from previous lives. Along the way, we intend to fulfill some soul agreements we made with other souls.

Your life purpose is NOT a must-do list given by someone else

I hope you are not getting overwhelmed. It is essential to realize that living your life purpose is more about being than doing. I know it looks like we have to do so many things. But our soul’s expansion does not correlate to the quantity of experiences. We can learn so much and make huge progress in our life lesson from one experience. And expressing your soul gifts is more about offering that special energetic quality through your existence than doing something with it.

Your life purpose is definitely NOT an order from heaven that says, “You must do this, or else.” (True divinity doesn’t use this kind of fear tactics.) You, your soul, chose your own life purpose. Let me summarize:

• You chose your origination and training, and you came here to offer your special energetic qualities.
• You chose to come to life each time you incarnated to experience this physical world and to grow and evolve.
• You chose your own life lessons for this lifetime.

Look, aren’t you a beautiful soul? So ambitious and so generous. You chose all these with joyous expectations – otherwise, you didn’t have to incarnate.

How do you feel about life purpose? Do you have a sense of direction that you are living your life purpose? (Photo by Kjell)

Your money or your time

Recently I had a serious confrontation with my inner child. She was upset.

My inner child: You lied.

Me: What!?

My inner child: You lied. You said when your business grows, you’ll have more money, and we’d go out playing.

Me: Um, yes. I really mean so. Why is that a lie?

My inner child: Well, your business is growing, and you are busier than ever before. We don’t have time to play. We don’t even have time to sit down and chat. You’ve been ignoring me.

For the sake of clarity – my business is growing, thanks largely to my friends’ help, and I’m sincerely grateful. And I love and am proud of what I do. My inner child’s complaint has nothing to do with the satisfaction level of my work.

Me: Well . . . it’s taking off, but it’s far from success. We just made it past the break-even line and when we pay the quarterly self-employment tax for the first time in January, we won’t have so much left. Actually not really enough to pay all the bills yet. It’s very important to build a solid foundation of business at this time. And . . .

My inner child: SO WHAT? We have some money now, right? So we don’t really need to worry about becoming homeless. Then we can play, can’t we?

Me: Umm . . .

My inner child: I don’t really care how much money we have. What I want is to do what I want to do when I want to do it.

What do you really want in your life?

I could see her point. I thought money would buy me the time to enjoy life, and maybe when I have plenty of passive incomes, it can work that way, but right now, the more I work, the less time I have. I don’t have time these days to do things just for fun. I hardly have time to care for myself.

I have financial responsibility to provide secure residence and enough foods to myself (I mean, to my inner child) but it’s also true that I’ve gotten myself in a growth dilemma.

So I realize it’s not money that I really desire. I want freedom, I want love, and I want to further my spiritual growth. Money as numbers doesn’t thrill me – it’s so abstract. Money as a means to get what I want is good, but then, it’s easier to desire the very things rather than the money.

How about you? Do you really want more money, or is it something else but you are substituting it with money?

My Law of Attraction Dream Money Project

This Dream Money Project has been a fun way to stretch my wealth consciousness. But I feel I’ve done enough of that. Also, beyond one million dollars, I think it’s more about paying back to the society rather than using it for myself.

I guess I have a bit different attitude about money. Many people seem to dream of big houses and shiny new cars when they use the Law of Attraction. I don’t quite get it. I own a beautiful 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 2 car garage house back in Tennessee (anyone want to rent it?), but when I was living there myself, I was only using half of the house. I felt kind of stupid. And car? I just don’t get what the big deal is about Lamborghini or even BMW. I want a safe reliable car that is reasonably good looking. I currently drive 2006 Civic and quite happy about it. Maybe one day I will get a Prius, but that’s about all I want.

How about things like dresses and jewelry, you may ask. Well, I love looking nice, but my preferred dress code is casual or boho. It can be expensive but not pretentious. I hate pretentious. And I hate boring. To me, certain brand goods just look so boring. I do like jewelry because I love stones and pearls. For me, they are more like arts and crafts to be appreciated than personal show of wealth.

For the Law of Attraction to work, the target of my desire need to be something (or people or events) that get me excited and happy. Money and material stuffs (without personal meanings) don’t do that to me. Things that signify freedom and love do. Like seasonal flowers. Time to enjoy music and arts. Time to read and learn, time to write and share my passion. Time to hit the road to see the ocean when I feel like it. Organic foods, and time to cook. Or the fun to dine out occasionally. I want to try ayurveda spa. And aromatherapy (or just playing with some flower essential oils). And . . .

Okay, I think my inner child is getting happy again.

So my Dream Money Project is put aside for now. From next edition of Gratitude Friday, I plan to start “Intention Game” to practice the Law of Attraction further.

Link Love

Well, even though I’m getting off the Dream Money Project, I know this is a great way to stretch the mind. My friend Mokihana just started it. Have fun with this, Mokihana!

Recently I’ve had the honor to be interviewed by two great bloggers. Davina’s interview focuses on intuition, dreams, and spiritual guidance. It also includes fascinating topics such as déjà vu and out-of-body experience.

Alex at Someday Syndrome interviewed me on a more personal side.

Additionally, I had the opportunity to guest post at Pick The Brain. It’s about how spirituality helps entrepreneurs – very important topic. Please check them out, stumble, digg, whatever love you can share ^_^

Update: Looks like the aforementioned post at Pick The Brain went to be posted at The Huffington Post. Cool.

Today I’m grateful for the coffee and the chocolate biscotti, Amazon.com that make it so easy to get hard-to-find books, Burt’s Bees Almond Milk Hand Cream, and even the rain (it’s been raining daily for two weeks here, but it’s finally clearing up!).

Okay, this is it for this week. I’m going to have a bit of R&R this weekend. Got to keep the inner child happy . . . (Photo by Mr. Greenjeans)

Are you addicted to the quick and easy answers?

We live in the world of instant gratification. Huge questions of love and life are solved usually within 90 minutes in the movie. There are numerous websites that offer answers of all kinds. Or you can just type a question like “What is the meaning of life?” in Google search box. (Seriously – if you haven’t done this yet, try it and see what you get.)

I’m afraid so many people are getting conditioned to this quick and easy answer system that they have largely given up their right and responsibility to seek answers themselves. I was alarmed when I did the key word research for my article The One Word That’s Sucking Up Your Energy Right Now. Here are some of the questions people often ask to Google using this dis-empowering word SHOULD:

• Who should I vote for?
• Where should I live?
• What career should I choose?
• Who should a Gemini date? *
• Should I stay with my boyfriend?
• What should I do with my life?
• What should I make for dinner?
• What should I write on a headstone?

(* Apparently, Geminis ask this “Who should a (zodiac) date?” question most often, followed by Sagittarius. I’m a Gemini myself, but I have no idea why this is so. Do other Geminis really think the internet can answer this question?)

How the quick and easy answers steal your joy and peace.

Let’s say you ask “What career should I choose?” and Google or your career counselor tells you, probably based on some personality or talent tests, that you should become a teacher. So you become one. Do you think you will be happy and confident with your career? Teaching, like any other professions, comes with lots of challenges – your teenage students are distracted and rebellious, administrators are demanding, and there are so many things to do – and the pay isn’t very good. So?

I’m not saying the teaching is not a good profession. The problem in this example is that the foundation of your choice to become a teacher is so weak. On the other hand, I know several people who left high income jobs to go back to school and became teachers. They chose the teaching career because, through their own experiences and search for the meaningful life, they came to realize they wanted to teach. They are happy with their choice because it is a choice they made consciously. And they have peace in them.

My friend Ken beautifully wrote about the joy we find in our life journey in How I Traded My Life For Future Security And How I’m Getting It Back. Again, the search for answer is as valuable as arriving at the answer.

The more challenging the game, the more fun.

There are cases for quick and easy answers. When I buy an electronic gadget, I want to start using it right away. Reading the long manual is no fun, and I really like it when it comes with “Quick Start” instructions. I can learn about additional features later. For now, I want to get things done with this new gadget and then go out for a walk.

But our life is not like stuffs we buy for consumption. We are in life – where do you want to go after you save time and energy by getting the quick and easy answers on critical questions of your life?

Further, just like certain games, life is more fun with challenges. Ask yourself – do you enjoy a game that you know so well and are 100% sure to win, to the point that you know exactly how you win and finish the game? Would you even bother playing it?

Enjoy bearing the big questions.

Recently, I was exchanging emails with Steve at Brip Blap about I Have A Dream . . .. This article did fine as a blog post, but as a meme, it was a total failure. No one sent me articles. Steve asked me if it’s too late to submit his article, so I replied, “You are welcome to participate any time, but let me ask you – do you think the project was too grandiose? Or did I not market it enough?” He says that the project is great but it does take some time to write because it requires good thinking. And in this busy world, few people takes time to think even when they know it is something worth thinking.

Hmm. . . How can I make sense of this? I conclude it was great if the post inspired some people to think about the big dreams of life. It’s okay they didn’t get the answers quickly. Keep asking yourself the big questions.

It’s not just the question of your dream. Find and embrace big questions that are worth spending your life for. Carry the questions, check back often, while you live and enjoy your journey.