A Spiritual Perspective
Spiritual conversations have the power to divide people more than many other topics I am afraid. It even repulses some. If that is the case for you, I would still encourage you to take a change and read the following paragraphs, as spiritual perspectives tend to answer questions on a more holistic level. The next chapter “Psychology and Mental Health” focuses more on research, studies, and the words of mental health and mindset experts.
The Soul Perspective
Caroline Myss
I was lucky enough to meet Caroline Myss. For those who don’t know her, Caroline is an American mystic and best-selling author in the esoteric literature. Her answer to my question “Do we all have a calling that can be translated into a job, a profession?” was deeply insightful. As I explained at the beginning of these writings, there are a few different attitudes towards Meaning and Purpose, and there a few different answers that, at first, appeared to me as incompatible. Caroline Myss managed, in the blink of an eye, to give me an answer that suddenly joined many pieces of this puzzle together. And she did so by bringing into play two important concepts: Personal growth and Power.
This is the conversation we had:
Cyprien
Caroline, do you think we all have a calling that can be translated into our work, into a job?
Caroline
No, of course not, that’s ridiculous. Stop with the “everyone” myth because it’s never going to happen. Get rid of the “everyone” stuff. There’s no such thing as “everyone has this”. That’s utter nonsense.
Does everyone have a calling? Absolutely not.
Power is the fundamental ingredient of the human experience. That’s a big thing to understand. Everything is a negotiation of power: how you dress, where you sit, what you eat. You don’t do one thing at all in which you are not doing a power equation. Will this dress make me powerful or disempower me? Will this car make me feel powerful?
In a job, what you’re doing is saying “I want the system to have more power over me, over my choices and their consequences, I don’t want to be held responsible”… or you’re not yet old enough or skilled enough to be held responsible for the consequences of your choices. So you’re “Eau de Toilette”, “Cologne” or “Perfume”. For a lot of people, “Eau de toilette” life is their content. They do not want to be accountable for their power. A calling is the last thing they want.
But there are people who within that begin to think “I want to be able to have an impact”. These are the people who start to think “I gotta get out of this place”. And they’re the ones who begin to feel the itch to say “what have I got to give?” Their inner self wakes up. They start to individuate. They want to become Cologne. They want to have their own fragrance. They don’t want to be toilet water. They have to develop something to give. They go and find a crew. They think “what is unique about me?” They are out to find their power. “What kind of power do I have?” So they start the journey to discover themselves, they have to break away from the tribe. So they become Cologne. They get a career. Now they have a little bit more power, so they can influence their world, whatever that world might be. And then, among them, for some will come the moment where they say “Is this all there is?” There will come for some that moment where they exhaust that path and they’ll utter this: “what reason was I born for?” They’re pull the mystical lever. And they’ll ask the question that’s not a question but a prayer. Only they don’t know it. They think it’s a question. But if I was there and say to them “who do you think is going to answer that?” Who do you think knows the reason you were born? A doctor knows how. Your parents (on some level) know why. But who do you think knows the deep reason? Do you get that you uttered a prayer? Do you understand you just called upon heaven and said “will you call me by name now? Am I ready?” And the moment you uttered that prayer, you changed the rules of your life but you don’t know that. […] What you’ve done is you’ve said “I want my soul’s map over my Ego”. The Ego says “what can I take? have? mine!” The Ego says “I was born for something special”. What? Who says?
Cyprien
Even if you have the best of intentions of doing something grandiose for the world, you’re saying that is still Ego?
Caroline
Oh Yeah? But the Soul says “how do you know what Grandiose is? or where it will unfold?”. The Soul’s life unfolds… in some mysterious way. You’ll say to me in 5 years, I had no idea. And the Ego says “But this is what I want!”. And the Soul says “Screw what you want. THIS is your assignment.” First, take away what you think you want, because you’re going to screw it up, because you’re going to think it’s “my way, my way, my way” and it’s going to come out of your wounds and your fear of being humiliated and all that BS. You’ll be stubborn and you’ll be stuck on things, and you’ll be insisting that you know how things should turn out. God knows how things should turn out. Get out of the way! You have to lose everything. We got to humble you up, rub your face into it, and when you’re finally broken and smashed into grapes, heaven will make you find wine. That’s a calling. Do I think everyone has one? Hell no. It usually breaks people. And you only get through it when you finally can say “What do you want?” And you wait and wait through the dark night. You wait without screaming and yelling and crying. Shut up and wait! Get a backbone, get a backbone like titanium. You may wait one year, two years, you may wait ‘til the time is right. You may wait so much than you think there is no God. One day, when you’re not looking, the door knocks: “would you come with me and pull? A path is waiting”. And the next thing you know, you don’t even realize it, you’re on your path. You won’t even realize it, you won’t even recognize it and then somehow six month later you think “what the heck?!” and the light goes on. This is it. “I would never have chosen it”, you think.
That’s exactly right, you would never have chosen it.
Whether or not you agree on the content, I think you’ll at least agree that this was a deep and intense statement. It got me captivated! Caroline’s way of perceiving a human being’s journey through life is at least thought-provoking, if not brilliant. I find the way she nests concepts like power, ego, personal will, divine calling and life assignment quite insightful.
In particular, I find interesting the two pivotal moments she describes:
- The moment when one develops the desire to individuate and experiment their power in the world.This resonates with Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how one can at some point in his journey develop the need for self-actualization (more on Maslow’s work in the chapter on Psychology).
- The moment when one exhausts that path and starts asking “Why was I born?”A quote mistakenly attributed to Mark Twain (no one actually knows the real author) perfectly fits Caroline’s point of view on this. It states: “the two most important days of a man’s life are the day on which he was born and the day on which he discovers why he was born”.
It strikes me as evident now that in order to study a topic such as Meaning/Purpose, one cannot avoid inquiring into the forces that drive us. Caroline Myss’ take on this question is that Growth and Power are the driving forces behind it all. And her conclusion is that growth is a journey towards real power and that, contrary to popular belief, real power is only met when surrendering, not when trying to control. It is indeed the teaching of most – if not all – spiritual teachers, although the details vary from teacher to teacher.
Table Of Contents
- Prologue
- Definitions
- A Wide Horizon
- A Spiritual Teacher's Perspective
- A Psychology and Mental Health Perspective
- A Business Person's Perspective
- An Artist's Perspective
- Conclusion
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