Your Purpose in Life

Close your eyes and take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing most clearly in the body. Focus your attention there and see if you can keep it there. One good way of trying to keep it there is to ask yourself, “Is long breathing comfortable?”

Well, watch it. Observe it. If it feels good at that spot, fine. If it doesn’t feel good, you can change. You can make it shorter, more shallow, faster, slower, deeper, heavier, lighter. There are all kinds of ways you can breathe right now.

What you’re trying to do is get the mind in the present moment with a sense of well-being, a sense of ease, because once the mind has a sense of ease, then it can look at itself a lot more clearly. Otherwise, its sense of what it’s doing is pretty blurry because we’re running to this thing out there, that thing out here. It’s as if we’re in a big house with lots of windows. We go running to all the different windows, looking outside, looking outside. We very rarely look inside at ourselves, to stop and ask: We may know what the world wants out of us, but what do we want out of us, ourselves?

People sometimes ask, “Why are we born? Are we here for somebody else’s purpose?” Well, the Buddha said there’s no one in charge. And whatever purpose you had when you came here, you can decide whether it’s a good purpose or not. Now that you’re here—you’re a human being—you can decide what purpose you want in your life, what you can do. This is why it’s good to have the Buddha’s teachings, because he expands our understanding of what things are possible.

He himself had to fight against a world that was pushing against him. He wanted to find something that wouldn’t die. He saw that his pleasures were subject to aging, illness, and death. He, himself, was subject to aging, illness, and death. And if he sought pleasure in things that could die, too—could change, too—what would be accomplished by that? So he wanted to go out and find something that didn’t die.

People would tell him, “This is impossible. It doesn’t happen. It doesn’t exist.” But he was insistent that life has its meaning when you fight against restrictions like that. If you don’t explore the possibility of a deathless happiness, what are you going to look for?

He explored and he found that it is true, it is possible: Through our efforts we can attain something that doesn’t die.

So expand your awareness of what is possible in this lifetime. And take the Buddha’s discovery into account and see what that does to all your other possible purposes in life. He says you should put that purpose first. He himself did, and he found a happiness that doesn’t die. Keep your mind open to that possibility as well.