Everyone yearns for — and needs — a purpose that can be embodied, a meaning that can be lived. Our mortality demands it of us. Our love for our own life, for all living things, and for community pours itself into the world, like a prayer, through our deepest purpose. But what we mean by and
experience as “purpose” depends on our stage of life and our depth of psychospiritual development. In the contemporary Western world, when people speak about personal life purpose, most everyone means a mix of social, vocational, political, and/or religious goals or intentions. A much smaller group means a desire to awaken to the divine, nondual, or the
universal.
But there’s a third variety of purpose that is very rarely considered, that has no place or presence in mainstream Western consciousness, that is completely absent from contemporary maps of human life, even among specialists who study and write about purpose and human development,
including those who write about and guide “integral” development. And yet this is the single most essential realm of purpose, especially in our current critical and liminal moment in the unfolding of the world’s story.
In this material, Bill Plotkin is writing about the third variety of purpose. A purpose coming from our depths.