Where it all begins

If you are like most people, chances are you strive for a life of meaning, yet again if you are like most people, chances are you are struggling to figure out what it means, how to achieve it, where that feeling of living a life that means something deep and profound originates from.

Meaning comes from purpose, purpose comes from passion, and passion comes from love.

That’s where it all starts, from love, but not any kind of love, only the most unselfish kind of love will do, complete unconditional love. And again, most people don’t truly understand what that means, otherwise everyone would love unconditionally, everyone would be connected to their true passion and purpose, and everyone would be living their own ultimate life of meaning, and it is clear that that is far from the case, from where we find ourselves in our societies today.

Living like lost children

Most of us are roaming about like lost children, getting by with whatever means we are capable of, mostly satisfying our very basic needs and desires, feeding our senses with what we can, while we can. Indulging our senses can help to get us from one day to another, it can help to enrich our lives when done in a healthy way, but it does not contribute itself to a life of purpose. Yet most of us are stuck there, satisfying our basic needs of shelter and food, and indulging our senses when we need to take a break from the drudgery of daily chores and work, and often ending up living this way not by choice, but by lack of opportunities. As described in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, certain elements need to be fulfilled to move upwards to greater pursuits. So for many, options are limited to go beyond this “normal” life, but if you are reading this, odds are you not only have better options, but you are also seeking them.

So, by observing how most people live their lives, we see that so few of us are really connected to unconditional love as so few of us truly feel that we are living an uncompromised and meaningful life, why is that?

Well, for one, we live in a complicated world, and we are also complicated beings. Maybe not at our core, but superficially complicated, yes indeed. All of our emotional baggage, trauma, preconceived ideas, judgments, selfish desires, needs for material success… They all create separation upon separation within us, all kinds of compartments, fractures, reflections, and those all contribute to pull us further and further away from our true selves, our deepest essence, which is the source of unconditional love. Add to this the ego, thinking too much, rationalizing too much, planning too much, any kind of feeling and intuition getting sucked into the blender that is our mind, leaves very little connection to our deeper selves to work with. And without that, it becomes impossible to live a life of meaning and purpose, as you have no clue what “you” are about, who you are, what you truly need from life, so how can you aim for what you don’t know?

The interconnected threads of you

It all starts from a balanced place within, as free as possible from conflict and confusion, and that can only be achieved with inner healing of everything that creates barriers inside of yourself. As those barriers block you from your true self, they also block you from unconditional love, which then blocks you from your purpose and passion, the only path to an authentic and meaningful life. Those are all interconnected, one thread that cannot be separated. Our biggest error is to look on the outside for what can only be found on the inside, it is not about looking at what other people are doing and trying to do the same, or simply choosing from a list of majors for what is either most lucrative, or most likely to land you a job. It is about you, what you need from life, and that answer can only be found within your deepest self, and you can only reach that answer once you have peeled all the layers, all the barriers that act like prison walls confining you, that lock away the true you from the superficial you.

There is so much to say about how we can break the barriers in between the superficial us and the real us, to get at the life of purpose we all ache for, too much for this article. But another way of considering how you can go about it, is to consider that as living a meaningful life is ultimately linked to unconditional love, which is the most unselfish of energies, then finding meaning in what you do must also be derived from unselfish pursuits.

To key to helping yourself, is to help others

Research has shown that finding something to do that contributes to the well-being of everyone is paramount if one wants to feel really purposeful in what they choose to do with their time, and that is where real, lasting passion comes from, happiness in making other people happy. And this is also another way of breaking down those barriers within you, as unconditional love dissipates anything that isn’t of love, everything that is based in fear, including all trauma and selfish needs and desires, then the more you work with it, the more all of your efforts towards living a meaningful life will be achieved. That is the path to the lasting feeling of purpose and passion, beyond simple “feel good” feelings when certain goals and targets have been achieved, that always keep you in repetitive patterns, always moving on to the next challenge to get that high again. Unconditional love, and the purpose you derive from it, never needs to be replenished, or goals met to achieve it, or need to overcome anything or anyone to feel it, it just is, and has always been.

When our basic needs are met, we all seek a higher form of living, some call this higher form of living spiritual, others meaningful or purposeful, either way, human nature strives to expand beyond its own physical confines when it has an opportunity to do so. That expansion can only be achieved when we find what we personally need to expand into, our own thing, and that is the journey of discovery within each and everyone one of us, the mystery to our own puzzle…