Philosophy on Purpose

The definition of purpose, depending on which dictionary you use, defines purpose as the reason for which something is done or created and to give an examples of this; the purpose of this meeting is to discuss the potential of merging businesses or the purpose of this post is to philisophically explore whether or not there is such a thing as purpose.

Purpose: noun: the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists.

On a weekend not so long ago, in a suburb far far away, I was staying at a friend's place for a weekend and one morning, right before before I woke up, I could see myself giving a lecture on the topic of how people need to let go of titles as a method of purpose and to begin spreading the message that any form of identity, such as a "Light Worker" and making it out that having some sense of special purpose needs to be discarded. That when it comes to what the term purpose represents is more about objectives & goals and can be achieved in any manner at all.

Later that day, we were attending a crystal supplier with friends and they began talking about purpose. It must be my purpose for helping people in this situation, it is my purpose to do this and without any hesitation at all, I blurt out "BULL S**T, Purpose doesn't exist". But why did I say this?

The scientific research on human purpose has origins and this originated from a Holocaust survivor's experience in Nazi concentration camps. The psychologist observed that when a prisoner whom had a sense of purpose, they showed greater resilience to torture, slave labor and starvation rations.

Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear almost any ‘how.’ - Friedrich Nietzsche

In the study of psychology there is a definition in which purpose is a stable and generalised intention to accomplish something that is at once personally meaningful and at the same time leads to productive engagement with some aspect of the world beyond the self.

The Adolescent Moral Develop Lab, Claremont Graduate University produced a document titled and can be viewed here: The Psychology of Purpose

So what we discussed on this day, was how purpose has played a role in psychology practices, as giving a sense of meaning to someone that is experiencing depression or lack of motivation could be beneficial. What I have begun to see tho, especially in the self-help & spiritual industry, a complete commercialisation of something that indicated to me that justfying the very need for human existence to have a purpose actually has a mental health concern its own right.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the other things that I have also begun to see in this field, as mentioned above is the mental health concerns with people using purpose as a method of complete identification or a form of mission which does not exist again.

It is only the human race that uses purpose as a definition of existence. - Amy North

When I look into one Facebook Group for Perth, Western Australia and search for "Purpose" there are multitudes of listings that have this keyword. These are some of the phrases & headings used to promote events, workshops, webinars and so forth;

• These portraits align my clients with their purpose
• What is YOUR purpose? How do you 'find' your purpose so you can live more authentically aligned?
• Join us for a live chat on the importance of purpose
• I speak to so many men who want more purpose and fulfilmment in life.
• How much are you tuned in to your purpose? What is your mission? What's your purpose?
• Stepping into purpose
• Discover your soul's unique purpose and reconnect with your own innate wisdom
• The greatest purpose - motherhood
• Need gong mallets that offer purpose and difference?
• We will recalibrate your systems alignment with your purpose
• Two day workshop into peace, presence and purpose
• Are you ready to live your purpose as a lightworker?
• The purpose of your life, how are you going with that? How is your sensitivity evolving?
• Have a session with this person and have a new found purpose
• We are passionate to offer our Mastery & Purpose Women's Course
• The remembering: unlocking the codes to your purpose
• Time to do your 'purpose' work
• If your intentions for this year is to live with more purpose book a session
• A great spiritual awakening is happening and this comes with a search for purpose, why are we here, what is your souls purpose
• What are the secrets to your bigger purpose? A purpose that will energise you and bring you real joy and fulfillment all through your life
• Open to life and your purpose
• Learn Numerology and open to your life purpose
• See a Light Language Healer and open to your life purpose
• Learn how to make powerful shifts within a cellular level that aligns with passion, purpose and power.

and I'm going to stop there...

What you see above, is just two months of posts in one single Facebook group and they are REAL events that have been listed in Perth, Western Australia. Everyone's news feeds that have an interest in some form of spiritual wisdom by being in this is group is saturated in advertising & marketing of finding your purpose. With so many people talking, writing and sharing how it is so very important to have purpose, they are actually creating a collective consciousness.

The collective belief: in order to have a happy & prosperous life, you need to have a sense of purpose and a mission. That your self-worth and self-esteem is infused with the need to have this purpose because if you DO NOT your life is then worthless. If you DO NOT pay for these sessions, you're life is not worth living.

This is the mental-health concern that I began to see when all I saw for months were posts on 'purpose' and that the saturation of such marketing practices is reinforcing this belief that you must need one.

As mentioned above earlier, the conversation that was in the car was quite a lengthy one and it caught everyone by surprise, including myself. I began to explain that the issue with having a purpose is that there is the trap of the mind that one must have a form of justification for their experience, they MUST explain why they are alive. They MUST have a form of identity in order to explain to others what their purpose is for being on this planetary system. It did not make any sense as to why there was this uproar in the justification to define one's own existence.

Yes, I understand that when going through depression or gunk, that we look to having goals to work towards; goals like, Today, I'm going to walk around the block, I'm going to get out of bed, I'm going to the shops and believe me, I know what that is like when life feels like it is kicking you in the balls without any form of mercy, but is it really? Is life really kicking you in the balls or is it standing still and not doing anything?

This conversation went on and I explained that my perspective is that it is not healthy at all to look for some form of justification of existence (purpose) and there are people leveraging off of that vulnerability in people. The below quote is what I said and I shared it with Amy's Spirit Guide Group on the 3rd of November 2019.

"Let's look at a tree, does this tree think it is living its life purpose or does it think it is wasting its life. What happens if you meet your life purpose? Does that mean that you die instantly once it has been achieved. Why is that the only thing that needs purpose to justify their own experience is the human?" - Steven North

What was so fascinating on this day and I will admit that I surely felt surprised in the very moment this happened. When I got the thought, "You need to document your thoughts RIGHT NOW!" that when I grabbed my phone to begin documenting my thoughts to explore it in an article. A newsletter was received with the title "The Game of Purpose with the Ascended Masters". So I got confirmation in that very moment that I was on to something and Amy goes... "Did you think your message would take forever, did you not tell them to go share it, and your surprised it happened because...?"

Amy's Spirit Guide Group consists of six people, three in the Spirit Guide Realm and three in the Physical Realm. The conversations that we have are in-depth and we strive to communicate with our Spirit Guides more in order to improve our connectivity. We are all one team. When I shared my experience, the conversation went quickly from "PURPOSE" to "LIFE PURPOSE" and these are two completely different things and the Life Purpose mentioned below is NOT the purpose that people are marketing or advertising.

Jocelyn Joy Thomas from Joysreadings.com, with over 20+ years in readings & channelling, said that "Life purpose depends on the level your perception is at. If you are identifying more with higher consciousness, you may see beyond this one life and any one purpose. If you are identifying with the physical, the life purpose is a kind of an inner compass, and from what I see in readings, we don't ever achieve it entirely, it's more like we realise different levels of it. Like, I'm a Way-Shower and I have been doing that all my life but in very different capacities. Etium (Jocelyn's Spirit Guide/Twin Flame) says the life purpose is there to help the Spirit Guide as well, kind of like a mutual goal. But again, if we go to higher consciousness we can go beyond the illusion and our perceived purpose here."

Following on with the conversation with Jocelyn afterwards, I explained that I had a similar perspective but I wasn't sure if it should be called "Life Purpose" as I have seen so many people commercialising purpose. There is self-empowerment but I don't see purpose being a part of that. For example, we chose to incarnate on this planet, we chose our life path, we chose knowing that we will forget all, we chose who we are going to meet, we planned our entire incarntion and this takes, on average 30 human years. We CHOSE to be here!!!

If we then incaranted with choice, we didn't incarnate with a purpose because at the incarnate level, we still have choice, we can choose whether or not we want to listen to our Spirit Guide and do what ever we want. There are Spirit Guides that have not incaranted since the Dark Ages because they're too scared to incarnate. So if a Spirit Guide will refuse to incarnte, how is there purpose when we have so much choice available to us?

I see that I'm here because I want to be here, I chose to take on roles, I chose to do these jobs, I chose to experience hardships, I chose everything. I chose all of this because I want too... Therefore, I see it as "because I chose it" not because it is some form of purpose and that for some reason, takes me out of being a victim of life's experiences but to a postition of empowerment knowing that I have choice. It is like a completely different language.

Janine Keall, psychicartbyjanine.co.uk shared her personal experience and gave approval for this to be published on the page.

I'm in the midst of an exploration at the moment. I suppose this could be connected to purpose or more for a better word, focus that is fulfilling the urge to inquire into the nature of things, be it that of other worlds, dimensions or aspects of self through art. In a reading Jocelyn gave me last year it was mentioned an aspect of my purpose was to bring harmony into the world. I created this mix media piece quite a while back now which I'm using a healing mantra for myself at present. I've been pondering on harmony and I suppose this is something all of us are moving towards experiencing in one way or another. For me personally I realised in order to fulfill this purpose it is not really about anyone else but more about my relationship with myself. To align with who I am beyond identity and in doing so this in turn will have an impact on the collective. As you are aware Star has been encouraging me to explore so the way that I choose to align myself is through exploring where I try to manage, manipulate, control and resist life in some way through creating small art pieces. They differ from what I normally create in that they are more playful and childlike using very simple art techniques that can be done in a spontaneous manner. I've found when I just let go and play in this way faces still appear in the image. In this particular image of the woman I used a resist technique using salt. The resist technique is a form of metaphor for exploring my resistances in life and I'm currently creating more art pieces with other resist methods. So in this one the guidance that I received was "do not add salt to the wound". This means I add salt to a wound when I resist what is arising within me, particularly if it is a heavy dense emotion needing to be faced. It is fun whilst being a cathartic experience at the same time.

A few days later, on the 8th of November... I saw something, it was my own flyer... Jocelyn channelled Amy some years ago and Amy said this about the Heart Activation Music

Heart Activation Music engages Life Purpose, True Love, Compassion, Walking A Higher Path and Raising the Vibration of the Planet - Amy North

At that moment, I thought to myself... Oh heck, I just disagreed with my own Amy. I shared it with Amy's group and Janine writes "Looks like you may have to change this" in which I replied: "Well, in my experience... Amy's always right, so there's something that needs more investigation". This took some deep reflection because I did not come back ot the group until the 13th of November in which I said: "Well, I've come to the conclusion that yes, there is a "Life Purpose" as Jocelyn mentioned but this is not the purpose as to why we incarnte, this is not the soul purpose, this is not the purpose that numerology talks about." I began reading over my Life Purpose reading by Jocelyn from 2015 and when reading it, there is a wide variety of different life purposes, it is not just one. There is the activatior, getting people excited about working with spirit, channelling Metatron, and and and, and in which I can choose how I want to do it, in any way I want to do it and I don't even have to think about it because it just happens, it just is happening because I exist.

So yes, the Heart Activation Music does engage Life Purpose but it is not the purpose that we have been led to believe. It activates our hearts in order to allow us to be free from the restrictions of the gunk and heavy emotions so that we can be ourselves, and it is by being ourselves that we can engage with it. There's no methodology to it, you don't need instructions, you don't need to do anything, you just need to exist and that is how you engage with Life Purpose. Amy typed that! 

Does a tree have purpose?

I want you to ask yourself that question and look at the answers, if you replied with "to produce oxygen" like everyone else did, you'd be wrong. If a tree's purpose is to produce oxygen, then why is there more than one tree? If humanities purpose is to consume, then why is there more than one culture? To give the answer that the sole purpose of a tree is to produce oxygen indicates that we don't necessarily understand trees at all or we are implying that trees are worthless because we tend to knock them down, chop them up and do massive clearings for residential developments. So there had to be more to this.

I took great pleasure in presenting this question to be honest because it allowed me to get people thinking about it. Every single person I came across all said "to produce oxygen" and I could see that they never really considered whether a tree had a purpose or not. What I got to see was that purpose was heavily connected to a function, a job, a role, a service that is being provided. As a tree producing oxygen is merely just a function that occurs because of its existence, a byproduct if you wish to call it that then a tree's purpose has nothing to do with oxygen, therefore... the purpose of a tree is to just simple exist. A tree exists because it can.

In the group, on the 18th of November, Janine provided this statement.

So this morning, I woke up with thoughts of failure and was it worth me being here. I could feel these old stories wanting to pull me in then I was reminded of what RD had said in a conversation. "I am here, I exist". It got me questioning what was the root cause of me believing I'm failing? The very point of me existing here is not about what I'm doing but rather my very presence. I can see that my worthiness was depending on what I was doing rather than who I am at the core. It brings me back to purpose and how I can so easily fall into the trap of pressurising myself to meet some so called reason why I'm here. In truth I exist not because of the incessant need to be seen as being productive and fulfilling something, but more about me grounding myself in my beingness. This allows any doing to come from inspired action rather than to satisfy my ego that wants to be seen making progess, meeting targets or goals etc, etc. I was reminded how much my existance matters from an experience last week with a customer whose orders had been lost in the post. Fortunately this customer is so lovely and she graciously took the copies of the portraits I'd taken before posting thank goodness! However, there were Self-love stones included in this parcel that I was willing to re-do for her. Despite the misfortune of the lost parcel something good came out of it. I was inspired to do the stones slightly different to the first batch and created these images on digital that look really effective. Anyway the customer went onto to tell me the Self-love stones had inspired her to share with the primary school children she does meditation, yoga and Reiki with one day a week, getting them to create their Self-love stones for christmas presents. This just brought home to me if I did not exist then this may not have come about. (Please note this is not to try and bolster my ego but to see that I've not failed. Through inspired action as these stones were, it goes to show the more I'm grounded in my beingness the more I'm able to be used as a conduit for birthing something new into being.)

On the 21st of November 2019, the international channel Rebecca Dawson (RD) www.rebeccadawson.net presented her seminar on the "Game of Purpose" and I admit, I did this because I was settled on the fact that the entire meaning of purpose was to merely exist. Nothing more, no special meaning, to experience, to express, to exist. I had the biggest smile on my face for the entire seminar... Why was I smiling? #nailedit

Essentially, humanity uses purpose to measure actions. If I have no purpose, therefore I have no value. Begin exploring things as if they have no purpose. Do the dishes without purpose. There is freedom to be found in having no purpose. ~ Rebecca Dawson with the Ascended Master realm.

In summary, after walking through that exploration into "Does Purpose Exist" the answer can be simplified into one simple equation.

Purpose = Exist