The Power of Purpose
As I sit here writing on Friday the 13th of March, I can’t help but consider the appropriateness of this day of supposed bad luck being the day the White House announces a National Emergency over the Corona virus. I suppose it’s a sad commentary on the human condition to note that it takes a disaster to shake us out of our complacency to sit up and take notice. It not merely management hyperbole to discuss the volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous (VUCA) world in which we live any longer. To think that a month ago, Italy had a handful of cases of the Corona virus, and now the entire country is quarantined. Stunning…and disturbing.
But this uncertainty only underscores the Power of Purpose. In times of turbulence especially, in life and in business, we need our North Star of purpose to guide us. As I often share with leaders, we all will die with stuff in our inbox left undone. So how do we show up each day, engaged, pointed in the right direction and able to choose wisely where we put our attention. The answer, counter-intuitively perhaps in an increasingly complex world, is to keep it simple. Remember first principles. Realign with our North Star, take stock and then take action. Then “surrender the fruits” of your labor. Wash, rinse and repeat. Much is made in business about its agile ability to “pivot” when necessary. The ability to flex and flow with the changing tides is critical to navigating a volatile world. Yet, it is our deeper purpose which provides the rough guardrails to guide us in the turbulent waters. We aren’t suggesting pure chaos and disorder, but rather a flexibility within the broad confines of the direction provided by your deeper purpose.
Dharma—what we can do, we must do
We come into our lives with certain capacities, proclivities and some would say dormant destinies, written our hearts as our birthright. This birthright, or birth obligation perhaps, in Hindu and Buddhist thought is our Dharma. Dharma has the flavor of our destiny, but is sometimes translated as the “law”.[1] In other words, on the path to authenticity, as we are graced with the capacity to see and feel our true purpose, we have a kind of responsibility to enact it. There is no putting that particular genie back in the bottle, choosing to play small, at least without causing irreparable psychological and spiritual harm. As Jordan Petersen, psychology professor at the University of Toronto in Canada shared in his How to Live a Meaningful Life video on YouTube says responsibility gives life meaning. Taking ultimate responsibility gives ultimate meaning.[2] Once we know what is possible, we recognize the biggest game we can play, we have a kind of cosmic and karmic obligation to accept it. There are no guarantees of success, but take action anyway. Better to be working on solving a challenging problem..better to be engaged in solving a challenging problem, than to be doing nothing at all. There are no guarantees. Do it anyway. Take action anyway. That’s faith. It’s our destiny to find out what’s true. But it’s a false choice really. We’re all all in anyway. It’s ultimately binary. We’re either alive or dead. While alive, the injunction seems to be play the biggest game we can, based on the truth revealed from our highest perspective. Peterson adds that …the answer to the problems of humanity come from the integrity of the individual. Aligning with your own North Star of purpose and taking action accordingly becomes the key action building block of change within society.
It sounds a bit ominous and daunting. And it can be. But the good news is that we are not alone on this journey.
Indra’s Net of Jewels
Buddhist philosophy introduces the concept of all of us connected in a cosmic net. It’s called Indra’s Net of Jewels.[3] So as nodes on Indra’s Net of awakening, shimmering jewels, we are not isolated, independent islands of consciousness. We are woven into the cosmic fabric of the universe, both literally and metaphorically. We covered this in our discussion of Joanna Macy’s despair and empowerment work briefly earlier in this section. As subtle level science matures, we will likely be able to measure that energetically we are actually, radically interconnected. As our identity expands to include all that is, we find ourselves increasingly at home in a loving universe, finding refuge in the cosmic sangha or spiritual brother/sisterhood, pervading space and time. So our identity is bigger than we thought, centered outside ourselves, as is consciousness itself. My consciousness may not exist in my own body, but this body-mind is something of a transducer of consciousness plugging into the larger consciousness of the universe. We might characterize our work in waking up then to refine or clean our transducer, to enable more consciousness to flow through our being. It’s important here to allow the mind to quiet itself naturally—no forcing as that would be like the Zen proverb of trying to wash blood with blood,[4] futilely attempting to clean the screen of our mind which only exacerbates the problem. This is the value of a variety of reflective practices like meditation that create a practice of allowing our awareness to settle back into its original pristine state. As our consciousness clears, our identity expands and our goals shift in kind to a deep desire to care for the whole and serve it.

[1] https://www.yogapedia.com/definition/4967/dharma
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xmr0OrcFCE
[3] https://www.learnreligions.com/indras-jewel-net-449827
[4] http://www.positivehealth.com/review/blood-washing-blood-a-zen-perspective-of-psychotherapy