Lesson 3 presented by Marc Allen (in his book The Millionaire Course) is about discovering your vocation and purpose.
Vocation, Purpose, and Attraction
Well – this is fascinating! The majority of people I have met in the field of personal development over the years have in one way or another been searching for a way to understand their life purpose.
It seems that everyone has, at the root of their soul, some questions about their purpose in life. If you don’t work towards a sense of purposeful existence – well, what are you doing instead?
Sidebar: It’s wise to have these questions sorted out before midlife, because the men (I work mostly with men, just because that happens to be my field of expertise and knowledge) that I have met who don’t understand what their life purposes and get to the age of 50 or so generally have some fairly major crisis of self belief or conscience or even dysfunctional behavior.
With all heard of the middle-aged man who has a midlife crisis, and runs off with his secretary or buys a Harley-Davidson.
But it’s no joke.
A midlife crisis is a serious sign of spiritual emptiness and it can lead to disaster for the man or woman concerned and everybody around him or her.
Yet working to achieve a goal or objective is the easiest and simplest way of preventing any kind of emotional or spiritual crisis midlife.
Indeed, those who have taken the trouble to follow the suggestions outlined on this website or in other wise works about manifestation or law of attraction will generally feel much happier and more fulfilled than those who are living an almost random existence, in which they respond most powerfully to the latest demands made upon them by other people.
Allowing your life to be controlled by what other people want is not an approach likely to end up leaving you very happy.
So, as Marc Allen says, vocation and purpose are indeed powerful words. But do they actually mean anything in a spiritual sense, or is this just about something “to do” which makes us feel more useful?
The truth of the matter is that none of us knows that, but we can draw certain conclusions from observing the world around us.
Why Are You Here?
First observation: almost everyone at some point in their life begins to wonder about the question “Why am I here?” It seems deeply written into our genes, almost in an archetypal fashion, that we need to know why we’ve been put on this planet.
It’s not unreasonable, I think, to assume that if we are asking that question there must be something within us that prompts it – which clearly could be a fundamental human need to have a sense of purpose about life.
Everyone of us is different, and although we are born into the world innocent and simple, we very quickly become complex creatures because no matter how good our parents or the environment around us may be, we are, inevitably, emotionally wounded.
And also, even though we are born with certain natural gifts, we accumulate other gifts, talents and emotional wounds that make us a highly individual person.
After developing in a certain way, we then attract to us those things which reinforce our self-image or beliefs about ourselves, and we go on doing that for as long as we DO NOT embark on the road of self-development. It’s called the repetition compulsion.
And for me, what self-development means is recovering who we truly were when we were born – in other words, if you like to put it that way, achieving our own destiny.
And one of the ways in which that can happen is by us finding a vocation or purpose on the surface of this planet which broadly speaking matches up with the most effective way in which week we can reclaim who we were. So in other words vocation and purpose become adjuncts to a reclamation or recovery of self.
It follows therefore that if you can actually find a job or vocation which helps you travel this path faster, then you’re going to feel more fulfilled, sooner!
One way to do this is to ask yourself some serious questions: How are you creative? How are you unique? What are your deepest fantasies? What do they tell you about yourself? If you fantasize about being someone else? Who do you envy?
The last question is based on the proposition that we could actually become the person whose qualities and values and achievements we envy.
Some other questions that you can ask yourself center on any kind of spiritual yearning you experience or how you feel for most of the time, and what excites you.
And two particularly powerful ones are “What is most important to you in your life today?” and “What would you look back on from your deathbed with regret if you had not achieved it?”
Of course, all of these questions are supposed to help you to elucidate your passion, the thing that makes you who you are, and the thing that excites you the most.
Law Of Attraction & Finding Your Purpose
So – you have a purpose on this planet. I don’t think that there’s a better way of expressing the purpose of your life than to have a vocation which enables you to express it wholeheartedly.
And of course it follows that if you want to achieve great wealth, then following a vocation which expresses your purpose on this planet is going to be a great way of doing that.
In fact, Marc Allen has accurately said “When we live and work in harmony with our purpose, we are taking care of the inner work, and the outer world and folds easily and effortlessly, bringing is the fulfillment of our greatest dreams.”
Law of Attraction – A Sacred Purpose?
I don’t think saying that our purpose is sacred is particularly meaningful.
It’s certainly important, and it’s something that we need to understand and somehow express if we are to be fulfilled, and it is certainly highly important to each of us as an individual – but I don’t think it’s sacred.
As far as manifestation & law of attraction are concerned, it makes a great deal of sense to assume that if you can find your purpose and then express it in some way you’re going to be a lot more successful and happy than if you don’t.
One simple question which might give you some insight into your vocation and purpose is to consider what you would do if you had won the lottery, and had all the money that you could ever want or need.
What would you do with that money? What sort of life would you lead? And what sort of person you be?
Using that information, can you come up with an affirmation that would express exactly what you wanted to be when you had suddenly got the means to achieve everything that you wished for in life?
Out of interest, I imagined what I would do if I won 100 million dollars on the lottery, and the immediate answer was very clear.
I’d give at least half of it away, including helping people who needed financial support to buy a house. With some of the rest, I’d buy a holistic health center where therapists and healers could offer their workshops to the world at very low prices.
With the rest of the money I would personally form some business which would give people employment. That might be a publishing business, publishing books on self-development and self-improvement. Or a vineyard, making great wine.
And obviously I would put enough money away to ensure that I could earn enough interest every year to provide financial security for my family and myself.
What I also know to be true about myself is that with this level of financial security I would spend time on self-development pursuits such as vision quests and shadow work. These are ways of delving deeply and endlessly into my subconscious mind.
You see, doing that would help me become the truly powerful and magnificent human being I know I am. That is a state of being currently hidden under the baggage from childhood which I carry.
Law of Attraction Means Different Things To Different People
Marc Allen speaks of the doing the same exercise and realizing that he believed, at some level, that having $20 million would bring him peace and power as well as grace, ease, and lightness.
This, he said, was masquerading under the impression that material stuff would bring him a life of ease and peace. Yet he knew from experience that achieving financial goals “doesn’t bring any kind of lasting peace at all”.
And Marc is correct in one way. As he says, money takes care of some of these problems. And most people use the Law of Attraction to get money (or love).
However, he also says money creates new problems of its own and, essentially, your emotional experience in your life doesn’t change when you get great wealth.
But I don’t believe he’s right here. I think money can make you happy if it allows you to do the things which make you happy and emotionally fulfilled.
What about winning the lottery, say? I could use the money to open a personal growth center for the benefit of all the people in the world. And the passive income from a lottery win would help fund workshops to heal not only my emotional wounds but other people’s too.
You see, healing emotional wounds is entirely in line with both my vocation and my purpose on this planet. (Which is to promote reconciliation between men, women and children, by facilitating healing circles.)
So to say that money has nothing to do with any kind of lasting happiness is simply inaccurate – it smacks of a personal belief rather than the universal truth.
Where I do agree with Marc Allen is that he quite rightly says that you don’t need to be a millionaire before you can be at peace, or even before you have the power to do, be, and have what you want. The Law of Attraction gives us all this ability.
It is true that finding what is meaningful has little to do with how much wealth you have. But the Law of Attraction does not work at that level. And once again I make the point that money can enable me to do things that help me to feel happy and to grow and develop psychologically. And in that case, money clearly is a route to happiness, peace and satisfaction.
I totally agree that money is not in itself a route to peace and reconciliation – they have to be intermediate steps along the way. And Law of Attraction is neutral in how it operates. It does not make value judgements.
So what if you want to find your purpose in life? Well why not use the universal laws to find out?
We’ve all heard the Bible quotation “Ask and you will receive, seek and you shall find.”
And the truth of the matter is, that if you simply ask, in a calm and meditative state, you may find that the answer comes to you immediately.
And you may find that it comes to you in some more subtle and mysterious way, as the universe passes a message to you through a book or magazine, or via the Internet, or on the radio or TV… or in fact from anywhere.
There are many other ways of finding your purpose. You can take a personal growth and development course which will begin to make it clear to you. Or you can go on a vision quest, or you can seek spiritual direction and counseling.
But the truth of the matter is that a sense of purpose only really emerges from deep and committed personal work, even if that personal work only takes a few minutes!
And the benefits of knowing what your purpose may be in life are profound. Knowing your purpose can change everything for you: not least by infusing you with vital energy, love, and creative power.
And it can give you a sense of focus and purpose that you never dreamed possible, and it can make your emotions attuned to your spirit, and your body attuned to the power and energy of the universe.
There is no greater emotional power or spiritual power than knowing that you have identified your purpose and you are manifesting it on the planet as you live. Perhaps, ultimately, that is the true purpose of Law of Attraction ideas.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others, including Deepak Chopra, has said that we would not have our desires in the first place if we didn’t also have the means to fulfill those desires.
Which means that you, right now, right here, can identify not only what your purpose in life might be, but how you might fulfill it.