Your Higher Purpose

Excerpt from Finding Your Way in a Wild New World by Martha Beck:


"...Usually they end up describing the same ultimate purpose as Alonzo's, something like "I want to live as long as possible, provide for my family, and be comfortable.

...This is a beautiful articulation of the ultimate purpose locked into the evolutionary programming of every living creature:  algae, tapeworms, even politicians.  Countless humans have put every ounce of their puzzle-cracking skill into living long and comfortably.  As a result, today a record number of humans are living long, well-fed, comparatively luxurious lives.  Yet many of us spend our time and money taking more antidepressants to boost the effectiveness of our current antidepressants.  We have what every living being is programmed to want -- enough food and shelter to survive and reproduce -- but it doesn't fulfill all the needs of our true nature..."

Playing Works

According to Martha Beck:

"...So despite our pathetically infantile teeth, claws, skeletons, and musculature, we dominate other species the way Peter Pan dominated Captain Hook:  simply by refusing to grow up.  We've proliferated and thrived because we never stop playing, and the way to cope with the increasing complexity of the wild new world is to play more.  Yet most of us adult humans tell ourselves that playing is "leisure time" activity, not to be confused with "productive work" nor taken to excess.  This will have to change as we adopt a new, Earth-healing consciousness.  In fact I think we'd be far better off if we did virtually nothing but play.  When I train coaches, I suggest that they eliminate the word "work" from their vocabulary and substitute "play" instead.  What I'm doing now is wordplay.  I try to play hard, and sometimes I play long hours.  Some people would say I play too much, but what can I say -- it plays for me..."

-- from Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, by Martha Beck

The Ancient Way of Healing

I've been reading this book called Finding Your Way in a Wild New World written by Martha Beck, the ultimate life coach.

She writes:

"...I also knew that the true nature of humans -- indeed true nature broadly defined -- has always been limited by survival pressures, including those the sociologist Max Weber called the "iron cage" of rationalization.  As long as people keep making money by rational means, Weber wrote, society's iron cages will keep imprisoning them, obliterating their desires and differences, turning human workers into mere components of the great financial machine of society...

...The fluidity of our civilization is creating the opportunity.  The means you'll use to realize your "right life" may not be as obvious.  I believe they must come from ancient traditions, created and used by wise healers in many different cultures and places.  These ways of mending were developed to fix any precious, complex, broken thing.  Our culture, while zooming far past previous societies in its ability to manipulate the physical world, has lost or deliberately discarded these ways of repairing what is broken in people and in the world..."


Try out this concept by Martha Beck.  Go to Youtube and look for videos about ancient/aboriginal cultures that still practice their way of life from a long long time ago -- whether they are singing or dancing or performing some kind of drumming ceremony, for instance.  Your brain has memories of the past, even way back to the time of the dinosaurs.  It's in your DNA.  You can ask them for help, for healing.  Go to the American Museum of Natural History and meditate on the dinosaurs and images of former tribes.  You can look for images of ancient China for example, and just be quiet for a few minutes.  Your heart will recognize the images that go back in time, lodged in your brain for thousands of years.  You are in essence accessing the ancient way of healing.  Back then, humans had the capacity to heal without medication, and their wisdom was based on the healing powers of plants, animals and the sun and the stars.  They practiced oneness with the universe and believed in the collective consciousness of humans.  They were very connected with their environment; and the plants, animals and planets were sacred to them.  Their relationship with earth was very respectful, whereas modern society is based on humans competing with each other and doing everything in the name of money without regard for nature and the well-being of others.  The balance between nature and humans has been disrupted in epic proportion.  And humans, like us, feel that destruction within us, because we are not meant to live the way we do today. So it is our goal to go back in time, internally, and ask for help.

Don't worry.  The goal is not to totally give up the present, but merely to balance the imbalance.  In fact, cross-pollenation of the past and the present is what creates magic.  Dig up old photos of your grandmother or great grandmother when she was still young and use it as a book mark while reading Forbes magazine, and notice how it rearranges your brain.  

Happy experimenting!

The World According to Beck

Here is the state of American society today:

"...Nancy believes that she will never make enough money to truly relax. Although she performs her job with desperate intensity and makes a very high salary, every time she gets a raise or a bonus, she manages to incur expenses that keep her financial situation at exactly the point that matches her expectation of "not quite enough.

Gerard has a similar issue with time. He's always so busy he has little time for personal pleasure, family outings, or even sleep. Though he complains about this every day, his underlying unarticulated expectation is "I am worthwhile only if I'm constantly doing something." He won't Form a more open schedule until he correct this use of his Imagination.

Polly feels isolated, unable to find a romantic partner or even friends who really "get" her. Though she works very hard at connecting with people, her expectations were set duing a childhood that combined her loneliness as the only child of a hard-working mother with high academic achievement that meant few of her classmates could keep up with her. Her expectations, not her deliberate thoughts, are dominating everything she Forms..."

-- from Martha Beck

The Shallow Part of Life

"...The real reason we feel so starved in the shallows is that we [as humans] aren't made to be satisfied with material possessions or with concepts of ourselves as famous, noble, smart, handsome, righteous, influential, blah, blah, blah.  What we really want is the peace of the Stargazer.  The irony is that this is already present in every single one of us, though it's obscured by the dense matter of our lives at their shallowest.  Clinging to the shallowest sphere of existence, losing touch with our cores, is the primary cause of all our unhappiness.  So why does almost everyone spend enormous energy doing it?

To avoid the ring of fire, that's why..."

--excerpted from Steering by Starlight, by Martha Beck