Purpose is not what you want to do. It isn’t what you want to do. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to do this,” to follow your bliss, right? Well okay. Purpose is what life calls out of you to do more innately. 

Marshall Vian Summers here speaks about how important being in reality is for the purpose seeker. The more you’re engaged with reality, the greater the calling. This is a clip taken from a teaching given in Boulder, Colorado on relationships and higher purpose on August 17th, 2019.

We came here to do certain things. If we’re not doing that, we are restless. We are ill-at-ease. We are trying to find meaning through other things. We’re trying to make what isn’t meaningful meaningful. We’re going to great lengths to do that: romance, hobbies, sports. Whatever the indulgence, the level of indulgence is, I mean, we’re trying to fill that void of meaning, which can really only be filled by engaging with Knowledge and focusing on purpose.

Because purpose is not what you want to do. It isn’t what you want to do. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to do this,” to follow your bliss, right? Well okay. Purpose is what life calls out of you to do more innately. And that’s why the more you’re engaged with the reality, the more likely that calling will be either gradually stimulated in you where you feel increasingly I’m here to make a difference; there’s something I need to do. You don’t know what it is yet, but that’s the orientation, rather than, “I want to be happy. I want to be happy. I want to be happy. I want to be stimulated. I don’t want to have to face these things.”

So I mean, to live outside reality is to doom your life basically. You probably won’t survive. Or you become helpless and hopeless in a chaotic world. But a lot of people take themselves out of the picture, you know, even in free societies. Of course, you go to societies that aren’t free and then that’s a whole different panorama.

But nonetheless, wherever you are, whatever culture, to seek purpose and a deeper experience within yourself, you can find ways to do that, though it will be more difficult. You have much less personal freedom, personal space.

And so it’s really important to go out into the world and to be careful and watchful and see things that…whatever it is to be seen.