How to act in the world from a place of true purpose
Teaching A Course in Miracles and spirituality in general, means first and foremost, to make people aware of the meaning of purpose.
Purpose is an all encompassing topic and ACIM tells us, that to know anything, we have to first ask: „What is it for?“
This means practically, that you don’t look at your specific life situation, but instead what is your primary purpose in this situation.
So for example, if you are in a fight with someone and you want to resolve this situation, don’t look at the specifics, e.g. who is right and who is wrong. This is contrary to what we normally do. Be aware of this.
We always try to resolve challenges by finding a way to navigate through them through very specific action steps.
Instead dare to ask the deeper question of „What is my real purpose?“ and focus on that.
What you truly want
First you may think, that your goal may be to be right. Going deeper, you may find your wish to have justice restored. Don’t stop there and go even deeper. What do I really want, when I experience e.g. justice?
You should take your questioning further, until you find your real goal being love, joy and peace. This is the holy trinity, that is your real wish behind any life situation.
In fact these basic „needs“ are the true purpose everyone longs for and they are summed up by the word „Oneness“ (since peace, joy and love are different words for Oneness). So we can say, that all we truly want is Oneness expressed as the holy trinity. This is true for everyone and in every life situation. We all have this part in our mind, that primarily longs for Oneness.
You may ask, if this is true, why we still are not aware of it and struggle in so many life situation? The reason for this is called resistance.
Resistance is, how the ego wants to avoid Oneness – peace, love and joy.
The ego fears these states as its very end – it fears to lose its job in a way – and Oneness is the end of separation and individuality.
It fears to get destroyed and will do everything possible, to distract you from your real goal, coming up with endless states that you want instead, and reasons, why you want them.
Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?
The first step is to be clear what you truly want and then, you look at all the reasons your ego will bring up, why this is a bad idea.
Just watch, listen and smile at them.
The moment you lash out on someone to prove your point and wanting to be right, you are acting out of a wrong purpose – the purpose of the ego.
When peace is your goal, how can attack be an appropriate answer?
When love is your goal, how can hate be an appropriate answer?
When joy is your goal, how can anger be an appropriate answer?
So purpose is everything…
The next step
Before you begin to act in the world, there is another step. Consider this an advanced step, although it is only important to get the basics behind it and (again) its purpose. Once you understand it, it will become automatic.
You don’t want the world being the reason for joy, peace and love.
There are several reasons for this. One being, that appearances are always changing and are not Truth. They change, as fast as thoughts do and with them interpretations of these situations.
Also the world is not where joy, peace and love are found. It’s not the source of them and can never be, because there is no world outside of the Mind.
Instead you want to reach the state of peace before you act in the world.
This is crucial and in the beginning very strange and foreign to us, because we are so used to listen to our egos thought system, that always tells us, that the source for our happiness is outside of us.
Once this becomes an experimental knowing, that you are a Mind and not a body – you can decide for Peace inside of it.
Our Mind is split in two parts – one holds the egos thought system of sin, guilt and fear and one holds the divine thought system of joy, peace and love. Each and every moment you can decide for one of them.
Conclusion
When you know that the purpose of anything is either defined by the egos thought system or by the holy trinity, and that you are free to decide between them, you can decide for your purpose before you act in the world.
Let’s say you decide for peace, it can be fulfilled before you even say a word to someone. It doesn’t even matter what you will say then, when it comes from a place of peace.
The same with love. If you decide for love, you don’t expect your partner to give you love and don’t act out of neediness. All you say and do will automatically be loving.
Where this leads us, is to be 100% independent of the world. Nothing there can threaten or provide you anything. The world by itself becomes a place of meaninglessness that it is. YOU give it the meaning – this was always the case already, but now you do it with your right mind.
We are all the same. We all have a split mind and the power to decide between the two options. Once you know that, life becomes simple and your only „job“ each moment is, to remember your true purpose.
How you act afterwards, doesn’t matter at all.
Love and blessings,
Atmos
Posted from my blog https://atmos.black/how-to-act-in-the-world-from-a-place-of-true-purpose/
This is something I have recently come across and I want to study it. But just reading this blog i've come up against some brick walls.
What if you experience anger and hatred from seeing another being, human or animal, who cannot defend itself being mistreated, and you're in a position to say something or take action.
I can make sense of what you're saying on a personal level, but i react extremely strongly to injustices on others and have been in situations where love just is not going to work, you have to tackle somethings fire with fire and i struggle to ponder it on a larger societal scale. I have not read it, so that would help i know. I have been reading about it, and lots of blogs written about it to help me decide if i should get it. But there are things that i have not seen anyone discuss, for example, children kidnapped into a sexual slavery- in order to be rescued often violence and brute force is needed to help them, you have to be the kind of person who is willing to deploy that force to save the life of another, are they wrong to do so?
Here it is important to differentiate between what is called in A Course in Miracles "content" vs. "form".
This is a recurring topic, that leads to many confusions for spiritual students. Your question is focused on the level of form - what is right to do and how to act. This is never the real problem. Just do, whatever you want to do. You can fight for childrens rights or just be upset about the injustice you perceive in the world. From the spiritual perspective it makes no difference - even though we love to think, that if we care about the level of form in a "spiritual" manner, we are more advanced. On the level of content however, we are invited to look at all the ways we want to feel special in how advanced kind and caring we are and how a good person we are, because we "fight for a good and just cause". This need of our ego to feel special in fighting for good causes is the real spiritual topic that we are invited to look at.
I already wrote an article, that will talk about this deeper spiritual stuff, that I will publish here end of next week - you may want to read it - although I warn you, because it has the potential to hit your spiritual ego hard and after that you may hate me and everything I write. We have to take this risk 😉
So in other words: On the level of form it doesn't matter how you behave - just do whatever you are guided to do, but watch yourself, whenever you begin to feel guilty about any decision of doing or not-doing something - this is, where you can really advance on your spiritual path. 🕊
Thank you for taking the time to comment. I would not hate you for writing something i did not agree with, this is a crux in itself, people can't differentiate an opinion or view point from the identity of another person. They can start to attack the character of another because they have different stances on a topic, I have actually lost life long friends because of some things I have tried to discuss on facebook, and it's the most ridiculous thing ever. I will jump in and debate until the sun goes down, but still enjoy a drink with them after! Most people don't share this premise though. I would love to read it, and just from what you've explained above there is a lot of truth in what i can perceive is going to be discussed.
Ego can mean different things to different people, and you may think this is typical of what someone would say when they want to feel 'different or special'. But if you have the time and are interested, no worries if not, i have 2 Empathy blogs, part one and two. I only have a handful of blogs so they are easy to spot- but this will highlight for you the paradox i often find my self in. The desire to help does not come from the need to satisfy my ego, the desire to help comes from the necessity to keep my sanity and to alleviate my own suffering, or try to understand it, as i quite very literally feel all sorts of pain from people, animals and the world around me which has driven me to the point of suicide more than once. In the quest to understand why this is, why i experience this, i often land upon writings or teachings of similar ish nature, but it doesn't really give me the answers i seek. It's almost like i don't have a choice.
Anyway, those blogs will give you more insight as to where i am coming from, but you're probably very busy so no worries if you cant. I will keep an eye out for your post and jump in if i have something to say :)
I understand your issue with "feeling other peoples stuff". I struggled with that my whole life. What helped me were the teachings of Matt Kahn. I wrote a lot about it in my "Healing the empathic heart"-Series. It may be easier to find them on my blog https://atmos.black/tag/empath/. Also I wrote some articles about relationships between Empaths and Narcissists.
Even though these teachings are very deep, they should not be confused with what I'm writing here. A Course in Miracles is only about content and not form. It has nothing to do with making this world a better place, but only with waking up.
In the Course everything in this world dream - even empathy - is seen as equal and "meaningless". There is no hierarchy of illusions, is one of its basic premises. This goes way deeper than how to handle empathic depression etc. - so we shouldn't confuse levels here.
If you want to handle your empathy issues, I really recommend to check out Matt. This won't help you waking up, but it will make your dream much smoother. He has lots of free videos on YouTube about this topic.
I wish you all the best on your path and my ❤️ is open to all the suffering you are feeling. I will publish my article I talked about here on friday, but you can already read it on my blog - it's called "Let me sleep! I enjoy dreaming!" and it may be a challenging read for an ego.
Aww thank you so so much for this! Ill be checking his videos out all day now! And ill take a look at your blog links. I am in the process of trying to heal from it and actually start to use to properly rather than just feel like it's this thing leading me around in circles in my life. So any real down to earth assistance I will chase up for sure, there are a lot of people talking about 'empathy' etc who really don't seem to understand the suffering it can cause so don't offer much more assistance than the usual 'woo' doing the rounds online. So thank you so much, i am excited to check out your information!!
Ill definitely read your upcoming blog if not Friday then over the weekend, everyone of us whether we want to admit it or not will have some ego resistance, be interesting to see where mine triggers in the blog.
You've given me that extra step in understanding as to what the ACIM is, and i am very intrigued now.
Been a pleasure chatting with you, im sure we will chat some more :)
Listened to quite a bit of that Matt Dude! He talks a lot of sense! Thank- you :)
You are very welcome! I think, that especially his teachings for empaths can be helpful for you.
e.g. "feeling = clearing stuff out of the collective". Dig for the gold nuggets! Much Love! <3