Shards of Consciousness

Your mission in life, if you choose to accept it...

Though I briefly discussed your mission in life in How to Reach Your Goals, I think a few more words about it are in order.As I said there, your mission in life is the theme of your life, what your life shows that you value. In developing your life mission, the first step is to find your current mission in life. You have one, even if you've never thought about it or consciously expressed it to yourself.To find your current mission in life, look at what you spend your time doing. Do you spend all of your spare time watching TV? Do you spend hours a day playing video games? Do you work at a social service agency? Are you a salesman for an insurance company? Do you like to garden? Do you spend as much time as possible with other people, or would you rather be alone? Do you read science fiction, romances, detective stories, westerns, or another story type on a regular basis? Look at how you spend your spare time, what type of work you do, what type of family life you have, what type of friends you are attracted to, what type of hobbies you have. I am not going to say any particular activity has any particular meaning. That is up to you to decide, because two people can do exactly the same thing, and it will have two entirely different meanings to them.

The objective of this examination is to bring into conscious focus what you are expressing in your life. Your life can be interpreted like a dream. Every little detail isn't necessarily important, but the events, people, and activities of your daily life are the exterior expression of your beliefs, whether you are conscious of them or not. Looking at your life, you discover what is important to you.

The next step is to tease out the themes being shown by your activities in life. This brings into sharp focus in your conscious awareness your current mission in life. In doing this you have accomplished something very important. From a vague, amorphous sense that this is the way I live my life, you have brought into sharp awareness this is what I believe and consider to be important. You have expanded your awareness and taken the first step of growth. Look at what you have found and decide if you are happy with it. Only if you are not happy with the mission in life you found through the previous activities do you need to go further with this exercise.

Now, if you are not happy with what you have found to be your mission in life, you need to develop a new one. You can't just pull something out of the air, though. If you do, as time goes on your life will show that this new, bogus mission isn't really yours. No matter what you say, your life will show the truth of your mission.

It's more work than that. Change is the hardest thing we do in life. If it wasn't, past behavior wouldn't be the best predictor of future behavior. To change your life, to develop a new mission, you have to do some internal examination. You need to find what you think you life should be expressing, what your highest beliefs are. Once you have found these, work out the common theme that they express, and then write it down. The writing is important. Again, just as examining your current life brought into sharp focus your current mission, the act of writing will focus what you want your new mission to be.

This statement of your mission in life will become the touchstone that you use to change your life. Look at it each day. As you go to sleep at night, repeat it to yourself. Use it for an object of meditation. As you do this, you engrain the new mission into your mental programming. Then as it becomes a part of your mindset, you will find that it is easier to shape the activities of your life in accord with it and to develop goals that further the new mission. Gradually, you will see changes in yourself, and in your exterior life, which are reflective of the internal changes you are experiencing. One day you will wake up and find yourself, and your life, changed. You will look around you and your world will show the impact of the mission you have chosen for yourself.