The Purpose Driven Life: Day 1

Friends!  In this post from June 23, a friend and former colleague, Brett, recommended that I read The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren, calling it “the best book on earth.”

Well, I’m taking the challenge, and I invite you to read it with me.  I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the book here, and I would love to hear your thoughts on it, as well.  It’ll be like a virtual book club.  This particular book is broken into 40 main chapters meant to be read one day at a time to be pondered, digested, and reflected upon before moving on to the next chapter, so that’s how I’m going to post about.

Before we get started, I feel the need to preface this first post by letting you know that this book is written by a Christian, for Christians.  That’s an fyi observation, not a judgment, and is not to suggest that those who do not identify as Christian shouldn’t read the book.  I do not identify as Christian, but I’m reading the book.  Rather, it’s to prepare you for what you’re going to encounter when you do – personification of God, worshiping of Christ as a personified God, and bible verses out the wazoo.  For you non-Christian spiritualists, in place of “God” and “Christ” you might use “Being,” “Love,” “Light,” “Presence,” “God-self,” or “true Self” (somewhat akin to Freud’s concept of “super ego”); in place of “self,” you might use “ego,” or “false self.”  Atheists and others who believe in no power greater than their own rational mind are going to have a harder go of it.

If you cannot either accept or get past the Christian vocabulary and bible verses, if you cannot find a way to make references to God and Christ meaningful for you in your own terms, if you cannot consider the veracity of the words for distaste of the theology espoused by the author, then perhaps you should not read the book.  I’m not interested in carrying on arguments about whether God is real, whether religion is good or bad, whether the authors of the Gospels were even alive when Christ lived, etc.  That’s not what this is about.  This is about whether you (and I) find truth in the life lessons described in the book; whether we have experiential knowledge of the “truths” asserted by the author; whether we know the truth voiced therein not only in our minds, but in our hearts, where true knowledge resides.

Okay, on to The Purpose Driven Life…

Warren begins his book with the assertion that “It all starts with God,” and “It’s not about me.”

This is why I said atheists and worshipers of the rational mind were going to have a hard time with the book.  To try to alleviate some of the mental block to the concept of God, I’m going to refer to It as Good.  Let’s dig in…

You know that Good (however you conceive of that concept) exists when you experience Good moving in your life first hand.  However, experiencing Good is a choice.  Let me say that again – whether or not you experience Good moving in your life is a choice you make on a moment by moment basis.  Before you can experience Good, you must first believe in the existence of Good.  Believing in Good, you must look for Good’s guidance in your life.  Having felt Good’s guidance (yes, felt, as in “in your body”), you must follow that guidance in faith.  Having followed Good’s guidance, you can reflect on your decision to do so (it’s a choice, remember?) and see the good It has wrought in your life.

A couple points of clarification:

First, what does it mean to “feel” Good’s guidance?  It’s actually pretty simple and we each feel it every day, but we may not realize it because we identify the feeling as our selves, not as Good (which is really fine since your truest Self is Good – what else could it be, after all?).  An example is when someone asks you a question that you don’t want to answer honestly because you’re afraid of the reaction you’ll get – Did you like my presentation?  Are you coming home for Thanksgiving?  Where were you last night?  You have two choices:  you can be honest or you can lie.  In the fraction of a second it takes you to weigh your two options, how does each one feel?  The thought of telling the truth evokes a feeling of relief, but may be accompanied by a fear of the future – how is the other person going to react?  Will they hurt me in some way?  The thought of lying brings a feeling of discomfort, perhaps even nausea, but we may think we’ll avoid future conflict and discomfort by swallowing our discomfort in the present moment.  Notice that what moves us to lie instead of tell the truth is a focus on a future that exists only in our mind rather than on the present moment, recalling Eckhart Tolle’s words on the importance of living in the present moment.  The relief we feel when we contemplate telling the truth is Good.  The unease we feel when we contemplate lying is not Good.  That’s a simple example, but that’s how it works.  Take any situation in your life that’s causing you difficulty or pain and bring it to Good for guidance – the guidance will be there.  You may have to be patient and listen for a long time to feel it, especially if you are in the habit of ignoring your internal guidance system, but the guidance will come when you are ready to receive it.  There’s a reason most American Christian denominations talk about having a “personal relationship” with Christ – in these religions, baptism literally brings the Holy Spirit into the body, into one’s heart, where you can access Christ’s guidance by feeling it any time you need to.  It is my personal belief that Good resides in all of us all the time – you don’t need to be a Christian and be baptized in order to access that guidance.  That’s what “ask and you shall receive” is all about – ask for Good’s guidance, get Good’s guidance.  Whether you choose to follow that guidance is another story entirely.  Which brings me to point 2…

If allowing Good to guide your life is so great, how come everyone doesn’t choose this path?  The short answer is because it’s scary.  Because allowing Good to guide your life means not allowing your mind to guide your life.  It means entrusting your life to a force that can’t be seen, touched, tasted, smelled, heard or even fully conceived of and understood by the human mind – it can only be felt.  Which of you would like to volunteer to let your heart take the driver’s seat for a while while your mind enjoys the view from the backseat?

It’s also painful, at least in the beginning.  Entrusting your life to Good’s guidance means leaving behind what is not Good in you, and this hurts.  In my example about lying, if we are honest with someone with the expectation that they will value our honesty and appreciate us more for it, but they attack or abandon us instead, that hurts.  It may hurt so much that we retreat from Good and go back to lying to spare ourselves future pain.  Or, we may recognize that that pain is merely the ego crying out in anguish over having not gotten its way and begin to relinquish our desire to use our words, whether lies or truths, to control others.  Entrusting your life to Good’s guidance means embarking on a journey of spiritual growth, and the price of growth is pain.  Khalil Gibran described it this way in The Prophet:

When love beckons to you, follow him, though his ways are hard and steep…  Even as he is for your growth, so is he for your pruning…  Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.  He threshes you to make you naked.  He sifts you to free you from your husks.  He grinds you to whiteness.  He kneads you until you are pliant; and then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast…  But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure, then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor, into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.

My first real experience of Good came when I was 30 years old.  That’s when I first chose to experience Good in my life.  I was married and I was miserable.  I also felt stuck.  It was the summer of 2008, the economy was tanking quickly, and I had just graduated with my MBA and hadn’t yet found a job.  I knew I no longer wanted to be in my marriage, but I didn’t know how to get out – staying for economic security felt awful and unfair to him, yet I didn’t feel I could leave until I was able to support myself.  I found myself in a chicken-or-egg scenario and my mind went round and round – do I stay until I can find a job, or is my choosing to stay in an unhappy marriage what’s holding me back from finding employment?  I struggled for months, my mind not knowing what to do.

Good’s guidance came in the form of the Serenity Prayer:

Good, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I had my answer.  I couldn’t change the economy, I couldn’t change my employment situation, and I couldn’t change my marriage, but I could leave.  I didn’t have a lot of money, and I didn’t know how I was going to survive, but that didn’t matter – I had accepted what I couldn’t change and was going to change what I could.  The rest would work itself out, of this I was sure.

So, in October, one month after the market crashed and a couple of the big investment banks had gone belly up, I left.  I was talking on the phone with a friend, crying, despondent, and she asked why I didn’t leave.  I replied “where would I go?”  She told me to come to her place, so I did.  I never looked back.  My friends were incredibly generous and took wonderful care of me, a debt I hope to pay forward some day.  Within 2 months I had a job, an apartment, and a car.  More importantly, I now had experiential knowledge of Good.

Are you still bristling at the idea of placing some remote, unknown, unseen deity above yourself?  I get it, and this is where I think the Abrahamic religions do a disservice to spiritual seekers – personifying Good and making it an entity separate from human beings.  It’s difficult to appreciate Good when you’re made to feel fundamentally defiled and unworthy of Goodness.  Who wants to sacrifice their own will in the service of a distant, judgmental deity?  Not me.

But, that’s not what Good is about.  Good is about healing the internal divide between our false self/egoic mind and our true Self to become fulfilled.  Everything we do, every choice we make, either deepens our internal divide or heals it.  This is what sin is about – deepening our internal divide.  Sin is not about “badness,” it is not about judgment, shame or guilt.  Sin is about following the guidance of your false self instead of that of your true Self.  Buddhists say that attachment, or desire, is the source of all suffering, and I think the Christian equivalent to that is sin – we suffer when we sin, when we go against our true Selves, when we seek fulfillment – or numbing – of spiritual needs in worldly things (even unconsciously, which is how most of us live, in my observation).

Good is about leaving behind the ego’s will (sin) – the agenda that says you’ll be good enough or happy when…you lose weight, get the job, get the promotion, get the new X you’ve had your eye on, get that boob job, get married, have kids, buy a big house in the suburbs… – in favor of your true Self’s will.  Pursuing the ego’s agenda (sin) never leads to fulfillment.  Anticipation of getting what your ego wants is always more satisfying than actually getting it.  Fulfillment comes from pursuing your Soul’s agenda.  That’s what Good is about.

Truth?  I look forward to your comments 🙂

TL;DR:  No tl;dr for virtual book club posts.