The Importance of Purpose ($)
Being co-creative means accepting all the things that bug you.
“Make your work to be in keeping with your purpose.”
— Leonardo da Vinci
We Are Tainted By Wisdom
I draw inspiration from my dreams, and this inspiration centers on finding my purpose and things purposeful. Like many things that come from dreams, the ideas feel clear but are unconsolidated. Ideas that are unconsolidated spin in many directions and follow an undisciplined narrative. Dream ideas are like a person with many faces.
The first epiphany is that wisdom is unconsolidated. It is multifaceted and laden with what appear to be contradictions. Wisdom appears in dreams because dreams are honest and complex. That is why dreamwork is important, and dreams can provide more useful guidance than rational conclusions, but you have to study them.
Wrestling insight into sound bytes sounds good, but accomplishes little. For example, Mahatma Gandhi's memorable quote, “Be the change you wish to see in the world," sounds wise but tells us nothing. If you didn’t feel this way to begin with, this admonition would not change you. It encourages anything. In addition, Gandhi didn’t say it. What he said was not even close (Morton, 2011).
The Feature Film is Your Life
Managing life is a project in managing your mind. Your experience is a projection of your perceptions of which you are the author, cameraman, and editor. There appear to be many lines of control, many actions you can take that will change how things work out. It’s your motivations that lie at the root of things. Changing your behavior has a limited effect without changing your motivation.
Logic, reasons, and explanations come to mind after you’ve decided what to do. Your reasons justify the outcomes you aspire to. Forget being reasonable. You live a life of fantasy. And while this may make you nervous, since it may contradict the facts, it is the truth. You will want to do what satisfies you, and if you want to do better, explore your motivations. Not only those that represent the change you wish to see in the world, but all your motivations!
Purpose fuels your motivations, and it is not disciplined. Neither are your dreams disciplined, and that’s why they are important. They are a more honest reflection of your authentic feelings than your trussed personality, which is conflicted. It is better to be honestly confused than destructively consistent unless, of course, destruction is the change you need.
In my recent dream, I felt aligned with my sense of purpose, and my purpose was clear because it was undefined. This is the lesson that emotion teaches us: you can be emotionally resolved without reason, and reasons are unnecessary. It is healthier to be emotionally resolved without justification than it is to contrive reasons for the emotions you would like to have.
Consider a purpose we all share: the purpose to live. There is no reason for this. You can make up reasons and you can espouse them, but they are superficial and hardly provide motivation.
With that same insight, you can examine other senses of purpose that guide your life, and you won’t find much reasonable foundation for them, either. That does not mean every purpose is right, only that it is real. Like minerals that have erupted from the earth, your purposes define your landscape. They are not made more or less by your paying attention to them.
If you’re ready to find greater purpose, schedule a free call using the link below.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Stream of Subconsciousness to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.