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Reader Survey: What Does the Site Logo Mean to You?

Celes — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:45:33 +0000

Today’s post is going to be a little different from the usual ones Today, I’m going to do a little fun survey among all of you readers. As you know, the site went through a branding overhaul last month, getting a new domain name, new tagline and totally new layout in the process. With that also came a new logo, as you can see on the left of the header on the top of every page.

My question to all of you readers is: What does the CelestineChua.com logo mean to you? (Comment here!)

There are absolutely no right or wrong answers, just individual interpretations. It will be interesting to see what each person’s perspective will be – I already did a quick test through my facebook and got some pretty interesting answers Also, I have a as-of-yet unproven hypothesis that pessimistic people can only see a blob of black in the logo, which I’m eager to test out

Comments are specially open for this post and will be moderated before they are published. The comments option will be closed after a week, when I receive majority of responses. So, post your answers away!

Update: The survey is over! Thanks everyone for participating and sharing your thoughts! Feel free to browse the user comments below and read the follow-up post here.

Living in Alignment with Your Purpose

Celes — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 01:31:31 +0000

This is last part of a 7-part series on how to discover your real purpose in life.

Photo by emdot

“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin–real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”

- Howland, Bette

Now that you have discovered your purpose, it does not just end here! This is when life truly begins . The next step is to define your life goals laddered down from the purpose, is discussed in Part 3: Establish in the 7-part Goal Achievement series. This is a very important step as goals ensure you are getting the best out of your defined purpose and your accountability to your own purpose.

Managing disparity in your current life with your purpose

Depending on how consciously you have been living your life before discovering your purpose, your current life may be entirely at odds with your purpose-derived goals. Perhaps you have a goal to advocate for animal rights, but you are working in an industry which manufactures animal-derived products. Maybe you desire to create wealth abundance for everyone but you are in the line of debt collection.

Instead of feeling liberated with your purpose, the paradox of your situation may leave you feeling disjointed and dejected. Even though you have found your real passion, you are seemingly bound by your circumstances. At this point, some people may start subscribing to a ‘Ignorance is Bliss’ belief. They start to block off their purpose, believing that they are better off blinding themselves to the truth of what their true passion is compared to the alternate scenario where they have full awareness of that passion but are not able to realize it.

This belief is a fallacy, at best. Notice the root word of ignorance is ignore. In choosing the path of ignorance, you are ignoring the real you inside, ignoring that better life you can be leading, ignoring what your true worth is. You start becoming subjected to mental fears and saddling in the false security created by superficial possessions. Over time, you are living the life of a timid mouse rather than being the bold, fearless lion you are meant to be. In choosing to be ignorant, you are living a life of denial. You may obtain happiness from denying the truth, but it is merely a temporal concealment. The truth will continue to blowing like a wind storm against the weak flimsy layer of denial – in time, it will collapse and you will be left to pick up with the shambles. Would you rather learn to deal with the truth now than be forced to do so later on?

Just because there are great odds against achieving your purpose-driven goal does not mean it is impossible. The best things in life come with perseverance and effort. In financial terms, the greater the stakes involved, the greater the reward. If your goals can be so easily achieved, what is the point behind having those goals then?

Recognize that your current life right now has been built by yourself in the past. After all, if you have not been aware of your purpose before, why is there any reason to expect that you are miraculously living it out right now? All the physical creations, from your job, your friends, your relationships, are a product of your thoughts, decisions and actions from the past. They represent who you used to be, but not who you are right now. Detach yourself from them. Just as you have created everything around you in the past, you can also remove them away and create new structures in your life to reflect the new you. Nothing in this reality permanent. No matter how dense the physical creation may seem to be, it is all a matter of time and effort before they start shedding away and become replaced with new creations which accurately reflect the new you.

Transitioning to your purpose

There may be huge gaps between where you stand currently and your goals. Maybe you do not have the skillsets required in the goals you are looking to pursue. Maybe you are not able to immediately make a living with goal. That is totally okay – nobody said that you have to jump and be at your end goal point immediately. No matter where you are, start off by building the bridge to link your current position and your desired end point. Identify commonalities between the two points which can help to facilitate the move. Build mini-steps that you can undertake every day. Do what you can, within your abilities, within your situational contexts, in the most effective way possible.

Because life is not about reaching and attaining your goals. Life is about living in alignment with your purpose every single day, to your best of abilities.

For example, say your purpose is to touch people’s lives and inspire them. Your passion lies in music and your goal is to become a full-time pianist. However, you are currently working as an IT programmer. While these two states may starkly contrast each other at first sight, start by identifying the gaps that stand between where you are and where you want to be. Perhaps you do not know how to play the piano. Maybe being a pianist is not a realistic job to make a living. While your end goal seems like a castle right up in the air, it is up to you to build the ladders up to the castle so you can reach it. Don’t expect to quit your IT job and become a successful pianist immediately, because that is not logical.

Develop your strategy and action plan. Start taking up piano lessons after office-hours. Read books by pianists and their experiences in forming their careers. Listen to music from your favorite pianists when you have the chance. Remind yourself of your goal by placing relevant imagery and stimulants prominently in your work desk and your room. Join the community of musicians in your local area. Look up related resources on music and pianos. Showcase your skills by playing in front of your friends and in parties. Start making your own compositions and sharing with people around you. When you are good enough, start playing (pro bono or otherwise) in lounges and bars. Even at your workplace, you can be true to your purpose via other ways other than music. The most important thing is to live to your purpose every day to your best ability within your constraints, because there is no better way you can do it.

In time to come, you will find that you have shed majority of the old life you have built around. People start associating you as a musician. People start paying you to play at various events. All of a sudden, becoming a full-time pianist does not seem such an unreachable goal after all. By this time, you would have taken enough baby steps to your goal such that there is just a final step needed to reach your final goal.

How I transitioned to my real purpose

When I first discovered my life purpose to help people in 2006, I had just graduated and was about to start working in a marketing company. It was conflicting for me because my passion was in development of people, whereas the industry I was going to work in was rooted in consumerism. To me, consumerism perpetuates a detrimental phenomenon in the society. I felt disjointed inside.

Instead of taking drastic actions to change my job, I contemplated and realized that being in the job puts me I was in a better position to help people – simply because it allows me to first grow through learning the best-in-class practices in a multi-national corporation. After I started working, I focused all my efforts on accelerating my growth curve to the maximum. I was constantly asking for more projects and responsibilities from my managers, while performing to the best of my abilities on the things I was given. I took both formal and informal training very seriously in the company. At the same time, I would read up on personal development during my recreation to better myself.

And in line with living to my purpose of helping people grow, helping people in issue resolution and capability building is always my priority, over work deadlines. I always made it a point to understand my teammates as individuals and friends rather than colleagues, which allowed me to build very meaningful relationships with them.

After two years of learning and growing, I took a break from corporate life so I could reassess my life and plan my next steps ahead in accordance with my purpose. I decided to start this blog to reach out to other people online. I started to form official mentor-mentee coaching relationships with a couple of my friends to bring the best out of their lives, while continuing to offer a listening ear and advice to all other friends.

Every day, I live my purpose to my best abilities. While it is a matter of time before I become a full-fledged life coach, reaching that end goal does not have a big significance to me because I am perfectly happy living my purpose as it is, today. I learnt that it is not about reaching the end, but living in the now. If I were to die now, I can do so with absolutely no regrets because there is no better way I could have been living my life right now.

As you start pursuing your purpose, remember that it is about living in alignment with it as best as possible, within your abilities and within your situational contexts. As long as you are doing that, take pride in knowing you are living your life in the best manner possible – Nothing can shake you away with that knowledge.

This is last part of a 7-part series on how to discover your real purpose in life.

Download Your Free Ebook: How To Discover Your Purpose

Has this series been beneficial for you in any way? I’ve compiled the entire series into a 40-page ebook which you can download free here and read in your own time . Feel free to share this with anyone whom you think may benefit from it.

Subscribe to The Personal Excellence Blog for free via RSS and email newsletter for more articles and free ebooks on personal excellence. Signing up for the newsletter gives you instant access to 101 Things To Do Before You Die, free ebook guide on how to create your bucket list and a list of 101 things to do before you die. Please enjoy.

Two Important Things that Led to My Discovery of My Real Purpose

Celes — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 12:00:57 +0000

This is part 4 of a 7-part series on how to discover your real purpose in life.

Image © mikebaird

(First posted on Dec 20 2008. Updated on 21 Feb 2010)

In this article, I will be sharing my experience on pursuing imposed purposes by others for over a decade, what happened along the way; how I eventually realized that they were fallacies and how I finally came to discover my real life purpose. It is a long article (over 6,300 words!) which chronicles the various segments of my life and my actions during those stages. In the process, I found there were two important things which led me to my real purpose, which you will find out as you read on.

The article is so long because I want to ensure that the essence of what led to my discovery is properly encapsulated here, so that you, the reader, can get the most value. I could have written a 500 word article and made it short and snappy, but the effect will never be the same. This article is for those who are truly looking to discover what their life purpose is, not for people looking for a quick read. The crafting, writing and refining of this article took me a span of a few days, so I truly hope it will be beneficial to you.

As you read, bear in mind that these represent my opinions – I am not trying to subject you to my way of thinking and I have no underlying agenda except to share with you my personal learnings in helping you be a conscious creator of your life. To be able to live your best life, I urge you to adopt an open attitude towards everything you see in life, develop an inquisitive, questioning mindset and evaluate objectively in order to discover the best possible truth for yourself.

Inculcation of imposed purposes as a kid

When I was growing up, I was constantly told by peers, teachers and parents alike that our objective in life was to be successful and be financially abundant. People who have achieved such statures were aspirational figures which we should model after. Not doing well in school was associated with jeopardizing that end outcome – it was linked with failure and our eventual downfall. Students with poor results or in less reputable schools were generally frowned upon and regarded with shame.

Among us students, our conversations generally circled around studying, preparing for exams and doing projects. Life’s biggest highlights were finishing exams, scoring well and having holidays. During holidays, some of my friends who were more competitive would be studying ahead for the next semester. Almost everyone had private tuition, on top of the extra tuition that school teachers were already providing. Life as a student was about studying and doing well in school.

The equation was simple: Get good grades => Get a good job => Earn a lot of money => Success.

Since I was too young to assess what was a route of real meaning, I trusted in the judgment of others around me and followed suit in the path. So that’s what I fixated myself with. Get good grades, so I could earn lots of money. Earn lots of money, because it was the key indicator of success in our society. These goals became deeply ingrained in me.

It became kind of like a mantra over time.

While I was set on achieving these material goals, I continued to wonder about the question on the meaning of life. I would think deeply about it, but since I could never quite find an answer, I would just park it aside. That was just a temporary fix though, because the question was always somewhere floating in my mind. It would arise every now and then, only to be parked again because I couldn’t find any answer to it. And since I didn’t have any real answer, I would continue to seek recluse in what I had known by others to be the purpose of living – monetary gains and success.

My first experiences living out my imposed purposes

Throughout my schooling life before university, I was regarded as a top performer by peers and teachers. I was consistently the recipient of many scholastic awards, one of the top students in my standard and a model student. If people were to extrapolate my results as a kid to adulthood, it would be safe to say that I was on my path to living out my intended purpose.

When I was 15 in 1999, I had my own computer and internet access for the first time. At this point, one of my friends told me about this guy online who was earning money through his website. I was immediately intrigued since I knew earning money was an important goal we needed to achieve. I started picking up website and graphic design by myself and developing a site on the same topic (desktop enhancements), since it was already a proven success model. I created the content from scratch, learned about internet marketing and monetization online. As traffic started to pick up, I started creating sister sites to ride off the success, including a competition site, rankings site, webring, etc.

At that point I noticed Neon Genesis Evangelion was the most popular anime (still arguably is), so I created a fansite to capitalize on its booming market potential, even though I had never watched the series before. Basically, getting traffic and earning money was my key objective and I was doing everything to attain that.

By 2000, I had become the owner of a huge network of no less than 5 sites, with each site being highly successful and regarded in its own genre. At its prime, my sites had half a million visitors a month, which were very high in the early days of the internet. I was getting regular checks in the mail from my advertisers. If earning money and being successful were supposed to be my purpose, I was definitely achieving it in my own way online. Where peers around me were busy studying, I was already earning money and partially living out the purpose I set myself out to do. I was very satisfied with my achievements.

Increased alignment with my imposed purposes

When I was 18, I made an arbitrary goal in the future to earn $1 million dollars and get a convertible. In Singapore where I live, a car is seen as a symbol of luxury and success, due to the high prices. The limited land area in Singapore resulted in hiked prices for cars and turned them into luxury goods. Convertibles are in a different, higher league of luxury goods compared to regular cars. There was a time when my friend drove me in his Toyota Celica – a slick car which inspired me to get a convertible when I grow up.

The education system in Singapore, like that of other countries, is segmented into different parts. The conventional route is to move from nursery, to kindergarten, to primary school, to secondary school, to junior college (if grades permit), to university, and finally to the work force. That is a whole stretch of nearly 2 decades of schooling. The objective of each stage is to graduate with top results so you can enter into a good school in the next stage. The ultimate objective of the education system, which many people would agree is to get a reputable, high paying job.

When it was time to choose my university course, I decided to enter business school out of all possible specializations as it represented to me the pinnacles of wealth and success in the world. I wanted to be in whatever leads me to the most success and money, in alignment with my purpose.

After entering business school, the importance of wealth and success was further reinforced if anything. Everyone’s focus was to get a high CAP (Singapore’s equivalent of GPA), build resumes, secure internships and ultimately employment with top companies. The common buzz among teachers and students was on how to secure a position in a top company – preferably a MNC (multi-national corporation) – that had excellent growth opportunities, attractive benefits and a aspirational reputation. In campus, there were plenty of recruitment talks, career seminars, networking events, company-sponsored competitions and what not. All of them were invariably linked to preparing for employment in a MNC.

I kept myself pretty busy in my university years. Studies-wise, I focused on what influenced the results, spending time on assignments, tests and projects and skipping lectures which I felt were a waste of time. I was a dean’s lister (I eventually graduated as the top student in Marketing, which was my major, and was honored with accolades for being the most outstanding Business student). Within the school, I was actively involved in core-curricular activities. Outside school, I was running my own graphics and web design business. I was also giving academic tuition to kids, as part of my drive to earn more money.

When I was a 2nd year, I applied for a summer internship with the most prestigious Fortune 100 company for brand management – also touted as the dream job for marketers. Because of how highly coveted a placement with them was, I was vying with hundreds of other candidates for that internship. After 6 rounds of different qualifying tests, including an interesting 2nd interview, I was awarded the internship. After the internship, I received a pre-placement offer from them due to my strong internship performance, 2 years before I was supposed to graduate.

Overall, I felt I was living to my purpose of earning money and being successful. I became more and more confident in my abilities and knew that as long as I drive towards my goals in life, I’ll definitely achieve them at some point.

Taking a step back from everything

As I felt that the learning curve in school was already plateauing, I decided to drop my 4th year of honors and graduate 1 year earlier. Since I had already achieved the widely inoculated purpose of school (which was to secure an employment), I wanted to spend the last year of school relishing in life. I discontinued my graphics designing business and tuition assignments at the same time.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t being looped in any chase or pursuit. I was basically given the gold pass to sit back, introspect and watch as people around me lead theirs.

Everything was seemingly in the right place – yet interestingly, I felt that I was a missing bigger picture. Sure, I was completing my education, which was regarded as the first major hurdle of life. I had already secured a promising career with the best company for marketers. While the achievement of these goals gratified me hugely at first, they felt strangely empty after a short period.

Have you ever thought about your future before? Not just a simple 1-5 years. Not just 10 years either. I’m referring to 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years later – even to the point of death and beyond. If you have tried to do that before and put serious thought into it, you probably would find it an extremely consciousness-raising experience.

My free time by myself left me with a lot of time to think about myself. I first started off thinking about the present. I looked at what I had carved out so far – in school, in the early beginnings of work, in my other endeavors such as my designing business – and felt satisfied. There were things here and there which I could have done better in, but overall I was happy. I felt that the past 22 years were optimally lived on the whole and my parents would be proud of what I had accomplished. Proper foundations had been laid for a better life in the future.

I thought about 5 years later. Where would I be if I continued on my current path? In 5 years, I would probably be excelling in my career, raising up the rungs of the corporate world, earning a sizable sum of money, gaining material goals (big house, nice car) and enjoying a comfortable life. I started speculating the amount of money I would be earning then, and the thought of earning a lot of money was quite inspiring. It was an indicator that I was meaningfully leading life.

I thought about 10 years later. In 10 years, I would probably have earned a few millions and be living luxuriously. I would be even more well-off – snuggled in a multitude of different material possessions. Career-wise, I would be well ahead, in a high, leadership position. I would want to have traveled across a large part of the world then, whether as part of my work or in my own recreation. I might possibly be married then. Given my material wealth, I would be able to give my parents an early retirement.

By most standards, the scenario looked pretty good. It fitted the society’s picture of an ideal life to a tee. I wondered what would be needed to take it at a higher level and largely drew up a blank. I didn’t know exactly what else I should aim for beyond that. Maybe I could switch industry, to consultancy or a different corporation, to expose myself to a different environment. Consultancy was a highly aspirational career due to the high perks, the exclusivity and the intensive challenges. Maybe I could set higher goals to earn even more money, since wealth was a measure of worth and power. Maybe I could start planning for kids too as a next step beyond marriage.

Then I projected 20 years into future. What if I had achieved those goals then? Worked and thrived in a consultancy, earned even more money, gained socially-conferred statuses, had kids? What was next? I thought my focus could be switched to my family. Perhaps my family and I could migrate to a quiet, country side where we could enjoy a peaceful, relaxing lifestyle. For some reason, I had always thought I would migrate to a western country at some point in the future and this looked like a perfect time to do that.

With that in mind, I projected 30 years into the future. What would be in store for me here? My children would be teenagers by then. What would I be doing? What should I set myself to do? I couldn’t think of anything much. The only recurring goals were to earn more money, gain recognition and build a loving family. These seemed like safe and reliable goals to pursue, since they were endorsed by largely everyone in the world.

Then I thought about 40 years later. More money, more success. Possibly would have grand kids by then. Enjoying the bliss of family togetherness.

50 years later. Relishing in a life of luxury, surrounded by symbols of success.

60. Same thing.

70.

At the point of death.

After death.

That was when the whole picture looked different.

When I started to project beyond death – beyond the physical world, everything which I had been inculcated as important – money, nice apartment, luxurious car, material possessions, career, status, accolades – suddenly lost their significance.

A missing bigger context in life

When I looking at life beyond the context of death, it made no sense to me that our purpose was to create physical possessions and human connections which would ultimately cease to exist after death. I explored many purposes I have been inculcated with before but they just crumbled when put in the context of the bigger picture of life and death.

For example, to earn money and be successful. Money was clearly important to me at that moment. It would be even more important in 10 years, 20 years, as I pursue other goals, such as traveling around the world, starting a family or buying a house. It was also good to have a stash of money to safeguard against rainy days. Having money was somewhat an indicator of the quality of life I would lead.

But when I thought about the future – beyond physical existence, money stopped to matter anymore. No matter how much money I visualized myself having, it could not be taken to my afterlife. It did not matter if I had $1 million, $5 million, $100 million, $10 billion dollars – they would all be worthless after death. All the money I had spent my life earning and surrounding myself with, would be nothing more than a fluffy accessory that looked good, but served no deep meaning. Its impermanence made me realize how hollow of an end goal it actually was.

It was not just with regards to money either. It also applied to other commonly expounded goals, such as gaining fame and recognition or acquiring material possessions. I simulated different scenarios in my mind, where I pictured achieving pinnacle success in them. Each time, the situation looked good in the physical life, only to totally change when it came to after death. All the things which I had spent so much time and energy building up stopped mattering beyond physical existence. I wouldn’t care if I was CEO of the largest consumer goods company, earned $100 million dollars annually, lived in a huge 4-storey mansion or owned a Ferrari when I transgress death because all these would be virtually meaningless then.

Another example was in the area of social relationships – such as being filial, starting a family and fostering strong relationships with friends. A relationship is essentially a dyad made up of two individuals. When the individuals are gone, the relationship itself is lost as well. I will die someday, and so will the people I forged the relationships with. Why should we forge strong social bonds and relationships if they are going to disappear when we die?

In addition, it made no sense to me that we are part of continual life and death which seemingly has no end to itself. Why are we brought into this world, if we are to die? Why is new life constantly being created only to end at some point? What is the real objective of life? What is the end point to this cycle? The more I thought about it, the more bizarre and confused I was. Everything was bringing more questions, not answers.

All this made me realize that there is possibly a much bigger context to life than what people around me were painting. The purposes I had been pursuing in the past decade of my life seemed to be flawed. I do not deny that there are merits behind those inculcated purposes, but they clearly do not stand by themselves as single purposes. It seems that there is a bigger framework in the background that holds all these together, a bigger framework which I was not privy to yet.

I started sounding out my friends around me. I tried to share with them my revelations about the hollowness of the goals we had been pursuing. I tried to trigger them to think further on about our lives. Everyone was too busy studying, sending resumes and securing interviews. While some intellectually understood what I was talking about, there was no emotional resonance behind that.

Suddenly, I felt I was all alone in the world and in my thoughts. It was a kind of loneliness I had never experienced before.

Pursuit to discover my real purpose

On hindsight, it was only when I stopped getting caught in the whole frenzy that I realized how drone-like it was. As I observed them on the sideline, everyone was just caught in a race of some sort. They were busying themselves to achieve a certain outcome, but did not really stop to think about whether that outcome was something they wanted. They were worrying day-in, day-out about their results, their interviews, their job placements. Nobody so much as thought about their life beyond that. What kind of life were they looking for after school? What kind of life were they looking for in 5, 10, 20 years? No one really thought about that. Their objective of life seemed to have been simplistically narrowed down into 1) getting a good GPA (or CAP by the Singapore system) 2) getting a job offer. It was if they were just sleepwalking through their lives.

Ironically, that was probably a very adept descriptor of myself, before I turned inward to think in depth about my future.

Interestingly, despite all the time we spent at school, there was never any formal education on purpose. Despite all the time we spend living, the fraction of time people spent contemplating on their purpose is miniscule compared to the time they spend doing other things. Like say, studying, eating, making money, chatting, watching tv, going out and sleeping. Surely something of such fundamental importance in our lives deserves more attention than anything else! Everyone seemed to be more involved in going through the motions everyday than finding out why they are actually here.

Reading books on purpose

I tried reading self-help books on purpose. Many of them give half-baked answers without tackling the question at its core. Instead of helping the reader to discover his or her purpose, the authors declare what their purpose is (along the lines of ’serving the highest good of all’, ‘unite with god’, ‘be happy’ or ‘live life to the fullest’) and assume it to be the reader’s purpose as well. Their purposes have their own merits; but I was not looking for them to ‘tell’ me what my purpose was just like everyone else in life, I was looking for pointers on how to find it. I was running into another dead end.

Reading different sites and materials

I also started becoming an avid reader on various consciousness-raising sites, such as Zaadz (now known as Gaia), Steve Pavlina’s blog and Global Mindshift. One especially noteworthy piece I read was of this winning essay from World Bank. World Bank winning entries are essentially inspiring essays that detailed the writers’ passion and conviction towards serving various world causes, stemming from their real and heartfelt life experiences. The piece which struck me was from this writer whose whole life changed when best friend died in a terrorist bombing. While I had intellectually known there were a lot of mortalities in this world that needed addressing, to read the personal account of someone who had lived through it was totally different.

Seeking meaning in religion

How about my religion? I was born into Buddhism; my parents are devoted Buddhists. I would go to the temples whenever I was expected to do so by my parents. But beyond that, I did not have any understanding or strong emotional attachment towards Buddhism. A funny thing I observed was whenever I tried to make any comment or ask any question regarding Buddhism, my parents deemed me as being deviant and would immediately shush me up. It was bizarre and made no rational sense whatsoever. I have no question of doubt that my parents had personal experiences which strengthened their faith but I felt that they are overall unconscious followers.

As I was growing up, I remained largely a detached Buddhist. Most of my friends were like me; they were born into their religions and adopted it as part of their lives; versus it being a choice made consciously. I assumed religion was as an outlet for people to seek solace in life.

With regards to other religions, I never paid much attention to them since it was a widely known fact that religious texts have been written, rewritten and modified over the ages by people with their own sets of agendas. I was also not able to reconcile with how all the different religions claims that what it advocates is the single truth. Shouldn’t there should only be one single truth in the world? Which religion represents the real truth? Who is right and who is wrong? If there can only be a religion that is correct, how can all the people following a different religion be blind to the truth? Since there were only questions but no answers, I kept the topic of religions in the back burner and never thought about it much.

Over time though, my curiosity for the truth started nagging at me. The need for an answer became even stronger when I was trying to figure out the actual purpose of our life. While it is easy to just write off religions and claim that the followers are unconscious or disillusioned, there are way too many people in question for the assumption to stand (for example, we are talking about at least 400 million people for the Buddhism (5th largest religion) and over 2.2 billion people for Christianity (the largest religion)!). For a certain religion to survive and withstand the test through the ages, I truly believe there has to be a certain level of truth behind it.

I started examining different religions and their beliefs. When I compared them, I observed many commonalities and same underlying themes such as existence of a certain larger power we can tap into, avocation of values like love, compassion, selflessness, wisdom and courage, use of meditation to attain a peace of mind, observed affirmative phenomena arising from positive beliefs, etc. While the religions come under different names and had different practices/rituals, they are really the same in essence! I started to conclude that there is one single universal truth, with each religion being the product of viewing that truth with individual cultural lens.

Instead of writing off religions, I finally realized that everyone in this world with their own sets of faiths and beliefs are all essentially believing in the same thing. They are just doing it in a different manner and with a different interpretation.

Subsequently, I found out that there is an existing movement (New Age) which is in alignment with what I had concluded (New Age is about seeking the universal truth and the attainment of the highest individual human potential) as well as everything I have experienced in life thus far.

With that, I broke away from being a Buddhist, since it no longer reflected my new understanding of the world. Me being a non-Buddhist does not mean that I do not believe in Buddhist teachings – in fact, my revelation made me more closely connected to Buddhist teachings, as well as beliefs of all other religions, than when I was a Buddhist. We are really all believing in one and the same thing.

Discovering my real purpose

While my revelation above on religions shed light on one of my big questions about life, it still did not answer my fundamental question – What is the point of (human) life and my life?

I started examining on what would last through time and space. The answer that continuously came up was this – our consciousness. Our consciousness is the state of our awareness and essence of our existence. To put it in layman’s term, consciousness is our soul. When we die, we lose our physical bodies. But, our consciousness remains in this universe and move on to a different plane. Depending on your beliefs, you may or may not agree with this – discussion on this will take quite a lengthy article, which is outside the scope of this.

So if consciousness is the one thing lasts through time and space, it will also be the single thing that is worth developing in our life time. And let’s say we keep developing our consciousness. What is the net outcome of its evolution? We can’t keep growing and growing, can we? There has to be a certain end point to it. There has to be a certain tangible result which we are striving for.

I imagined myself evolving to a higher level of consciousness. I also imagined everyone else doing the same thing. The highest, ultimate point I could fathom from scaling up on the goal is unity of the world. This goes beyond the normal ‘world peace’, ‘utopia’ and ‘uniting the world’ proclamations you typically hear. This is the pure unity of the consciousness of everyone – of every single person in the world.

For us to achieve that state, the individual consciousness has to first be at its pinnacle level – probably Enlightenment. It isn’t enough too – Beyond that, we have to enable others around us to reach the highest level of consciousness. When everyone attains that, that’s when our consciousness can then ultimately merge and become one single whole. As to whatever happens after – we will probably know when we reach there.

(To read more about consciousness, check out Map of Consciousness where I share the 17 different levels of consciousness.)

This made me realize that perhaps the reason why we are trapped in the loop of life and death is because everyone is still vibrating at different levels of consciousness. Many are still stuck at lower levels of consciousness such as fear, apathy, anger, guilt and grief. The average consciousness level of the world now is at Courage, which is 8 levels below the highest possible level of Enlightenment. If all the individuals in the world are to attain our highest level of consciousness one day, the cycle of life and death can probably then end, since we are all united as a single whole.

So this was it. This was when I realized my purpose of life and my life. It was to reach my highest level of consciousness and to help others do to same (i.e. achieve our highest potential, which is the vision of The School of Personal Excellence, my school) – so we could eventually be united as one whole one day.

It was quite an ironic realization too: When I was young, I always thought people who proclaimed about uniting the world, pursuing humanitarian causes, helping other people, etc were ambitionless. Discussions on helping people, giving back and contribution never deeply interested me. Yet by an interesting twist of fate, I now realize that helping others grow is actually the core reason for my being and my existence, because it is fundamental to achieving the end goal of unity of the world. There is nothing of higher meaning than to be able to pursue this in full fervor and passion.

To crystallize my purpose into a mission statement:

“To touch others’ lives, help them achieve their highest potential and live their best lives”
“To achieve my highest potential and live consciously and freely in truth, love and power”

A new found meaning and passion in life

From then on, I started to embark on my new purpose. This purpose gives me such rich clarity, passion, joy and fulfillment that I cannot imagine living without it. Everyday, I live life with such incredible energy and zest, single-mindedly driven on this path. The thought of being in action, committing myself to helping every single person in this world achieve their highest level of consciousness just fuels me to no end. It is like an internal energy reserve that never runs out.

Whenever I see people living lives that are less than what they are really capable of, I would be so charged up with trying to wake them from their trance. I would be looking to release the mental shackles they place on themselves, their abilities and their worths. And whenever I do that, there would be a sheer sense of unadulterated joy, passion and satisfaction that swells up inside of me and overflows through my being.

As simple as these two purpose statements are, they guide me in my everyday actions and decision making. Whenever I am faced with a dilemma, I look back to my purpose to renew my clarity. For example, when I resigned from my job in Oct ‘08, people around me reacted with varying levels of resistance and shock. Some could not phantom why I would ever make a decision like this. But when I look at my purpose, it was a very simple and easy decision – my purpose was to help other people discover their purpose and achieve their highest potential. The career I was in was not in direct alignment with that. Even when I eventually decided this month to return to corporate work next year, it was based on a conscious assessment that this is my current best option which will enable me to live my purpose most fruitfully.

I personally believe that one day, when everyone achieves their highest consciousness, the world will unite and we will move on to the next level of existence. It may not come in the near future, but I believe we are definitely starting to reach there. Just look at the increased in global movements and mind shifts that has been taking place in the past decade – it’s undeniable that humanity as a collective has reached a new level of consciousness and maturity. A recent poll ‘Is Humanity Growing Up’? on the perceived social maturity of humanity points that we are at the adolescence stage right now – no doubt this will come to change in years to come.

Note on Apr 2010 – Today, almost 4 years after originally discovering my real purpose, I continue to live fiercely in alignment with my purpose. If it is even possible, I’m more passionate about it than I was in the past. And this passion increases with each moment. The journey in these past few years has helped me to realize on many different levels that this is indeed what I want to do. It has driven me on to do things I would otherwise never have done. I wrote about this in my end of 2009 posts:

Two Most Important Things That Led to My Discovery

As I look back, I realized there were two key things which enabled me to discover my real purpose.

1. Discovery of Real Purpose <-> Discovery of Self

Firstly, I was able to discover my real purpose because I had achieved a certain level of self-awareness. The discovery of our purpose, is really tied to our discovery of ourselves. Without first knowing yourself, you can’t discover what you want to set as the meaning of life. You have to first know yourself to gain answer to your questions in life.

Since the early years of my life, I have been actively embarking on my personal growth. I would set and pursue many goals, be it academic, business, recreational, financial, etc. I opened myself to learn and explore. No matter what I was doing, I would set the highest standards for myself. I would go all out in everything I did. Of course, I metwith different obstacles along the way, but I would overcome them in the matter of time with persistence, hard work and faith. It was these obstacles which were the real growth enablers. If it had been a smooth sailing path, I wouldn’t have too different of a person today.

Even the active pursuit of my imposed purposes were lessons in growth. As I started living in line with them, it made me realize they were not what I wanted. If I had not been actively pursuing them, I would not have found that out. I would still be seeing them as the meaning of life.

It is all these experiences which helped me discover who I am. What I want, what I believe in. By knowing myself, I was then able to discover what I really want to do in life.

2. Your Purpose Should Be Timeless and Universal

Secondly, I learned a real purpose is universal and stands true across the context of time and space. Time, meaning it should hold true whether you are looking at your purpose 10,000 years ago or 10,000 years later. Space, meaning it’s still what you want to do no matter where you exist in the universe.

Things like money, material possessions, recognition, etc are only relevant to our present, physical reality. They lose significance when we start seeing life as something that exists beyond our current physical plane, and our current lifespan. Say, if I were to die today, all the money, material possessions, recognition, statuses, etc would no longer matter, since they don’t exist outside of this reality. To relentlessly acquire them as ends in themselves would be the equivalent of just building a candy fort around you – one which would crumble sooner or later. This made me realize my previous purpose to earn money and gain success were not my real purposes.

By viewing life through an entirely different lens – in its own entirety – I was able to identify my purpose which was timeless, ageless, limitless. My now purpose of achieving my highest consciousness and helping others achieve their highest consciousness will never be obsolete, because at the end of the day we are all consciousness. This makes my purpose one that is permanent, unshakable and impervious to anything, and thus makes it empowering to live in line with.

In the next part, we will go discuss in detail on about the 6 important guidelines to consider when identifying your purpose. Your purpose is going to your motif which will guide you through every act in life, so it is critical that you define it accurately.

This is part 4 of a 7-part series on how to discover your real purpose in life.

Discover Your Purpose in the Next 30 Minutes

Celes — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:07:45 +0000

This is part 6 of a 7-part series on how to discover your real purpose in life.

There have been many exercises out there to consult your life purpose. Out of these exercises, I found the exercise to consult your consciousness the most effective. I’ll be sharing how you can do this exercise in detail in this article. (Thanks Steve for first starting this!).

Set aside at least 30 minutes, with no distractions, before you start. If you feel that you are too busy to spare even 30 minutes, consider that 30 minutes is a minuscule investment for an output that will turn your whole life around. Seriously, it is from consciously taking time out to think about my life purpose that I live with clarity today. Shave off those time from what you spend on surfing, chatting, watching TV or any random activities.

Step 1: Consult Your Subconsciousness

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.” Rumi
“Decide upon your major definite purpose in life and then organize all your activities around it.” Brian Tracy

With this exercise, we will be consulting our inner self. Instead of looking towards the world or other people, it involves us looking within and consulting your own subconsciousness.

Steps:

Before starting, clear your mind of any clutter. If you feel bogged down, then do the brain dumping exercise first. Do this for as long as it’s needed to get your mind clear. Meditation also helps.
Generate a very intense desire to discover your purpose. You have to want to discover your purpose. Tell yourself ‘I want to discover my life purpose‘. This is necessary to generate the most optimum results during the exercise.
Equip yourself with a pen or paper, or sit yourself in front of your word processor. You can do this with either your eyes open or closed (if you can type with your eyes closed). I prefer closed as it allows me to focus/concentrate better.
Clear your mind and relax.
Ask yourself the question ‘What is my life purpose? Why am I here for?’
Start writing down all thoughts that pop in.
Keep writing and press on until you finally reach the answer that evokes your strongest emotions and resonates with the depth of your soul.

As you do the exercise, remember that…

Be persistent. Half-way through, you might get the nagging feeling to stop and do something else. Or maybe your mind is drawing up in a blank. Press on; this means you’re getting somewhere.
Do not overthink. It does not matter if your thought is a short phrase, a long sentence, repeated or seems irrelevant. The point is not to let your logical mind interfere and filter out anything.
Do not filter. Filtering will affect the progress. Just write down everything that comes to mind. Even if you come up with answers like ‘I want to just do nothing’ or ‘I want to laze away and sleep’, write these down and keep going. What you type here is not important; it is the final answer you reach at the end of the exercise that is your real purpose. In order to get to the final answer, you have to first get out all the irrelevant answers / thoughts.
Get past the socially conditioned flakes. If you have not experienced any clarity on your purpose in life before, you will find that your answers start off as imposed purposes. These are the flakes of social, media and environmental conditioning that are accumulated in your mind over the course of your life. Just write down them anyway because it helps to get them out of the way. Your liberating purposes will soon start popping in.
Get down to the core of your passion. As you keep typing, you might find yourself writing a lot of activities and tasks, such as ‘watching television’, ‘hanging out with friends’, ‘exercising’. You might get to certain activities you are extremely passionate about, say, dancing. Get down to the root message behind that. What is it that dancing allows you to achieve that makes you love it so much? Is it because it lets you grow and become a better self? Is it because it lets you utilize your creativity? Is it because it lets you become in unison with your body and soul?
The answers in the middle don’t matter at all actually. It’s about the final answer. That’ll be the answer where you hit resonance. (next step)
Keep going till you hit the point of resonance. As you move along, you will start uncovering answers that hit a resonating spot in your heart. Keep moving in that direction and refining your answer along that direction. Get to the answer that evokes your strongest emotions and resonates with the depth of your soul. This final answer is what you are looking for – not the ones in between. It can take as short as 30 minutes, to as long as 2 hours if need be. Just keep typing and get the answers flowing until you get there.

My Experience With This Exercise

When I did this exercise 2 years ago to discover my purpose, my first set of answers were social-conditioning junk, like earning money, becoming slim and pretty, becoming successful, etc. They started to disappear as I progressed through the exercise.

The first signs of my purpose started popping at #20 and I finally arrived at a full answer that fully resonated with me at #80. Some of you might take longer or shorter. For me, I was doing a lot of introspection on my life and flushing out mental waste for the few days before I did the exercise, so it helped facilitate the exercise.

Your Results

Here are some possible outcomes from this exercise:

The answer truly connects with your heart and soul. For some, you might be so overwhelmed emotionally that you cry. (I did.)
Your answer is a “pop” or an “a-ha!” and connects on some level
You might get an answer that’s like “uhhh… okay. What does this mean?”
You might not get any answer that connects at all

When you reach #1, you’ll know. If so, proceed on to the next step.

If you got #2, then continue on with the exercise. There are layers deeper that can still be uncovered.

If it’s #3 and #4, you have not gotten the real answer yet. Take a break and try this exercise tomorrow when you are fresh. Follow the instructions above and keep probing and questioning beyond what the answers you are getting. Your mind is like an ocean, and the answer lies at the depth at the ocean. All these answers are the water we are scooping out in order to get the resonating answer at the end.

Note that whether you get to #1 depends on the following:

a) Your breadth and depth of life experiences up till this point

The more contexts you have been exposed, the more likely you would have come into contact with what really stirs up your soul on the inside. As I have shared in my personal life story on how I came to discover my purpose, it was the active pursuit of growth and exposure to different contextual stimulants that allowed me to eventually realize what I truly want to do in life.

If you were unable to generate something tangible from looking within yourself, try looking towards the world on the outside – what have you not explored or seen? Go wild and open yourself to the widest latitude of contexts possible.

The more situations you expose yourself to, the higher the chance of finding what really sets you off on the inside. This is the same as the concept of heuristics – it refers to the process of continuously searching to find the optimal solution to a problem. In a matter of time, the process of trial and error will eventually lead you to your real purpose which clicks within you.

b) Your consciousness level

The level of your consciousness is represented by your knowingness of yourself and the world. This is extremely important because it sets the stage for defining your purpose. If you have a warped understanding of reality, you will have a warped purpose. Read Map of Consciousness for more about consciousness and the 17 different levels.

By properly understanding the landscape of the entire universe you are in, you will be able to more accurately identify your purpose and build it on an unshakable foundation. It’s like getting a bird eye view of a maze, where you have a higher perspective of what’s going on.

Here are some ways to increase your consciousness:

Adopt a world view of your life (both time and space)
Continuously challenge social constructs and beliefs
Drilling into root cause vs. dealing with effects in life
Meditation and Brain Dumping Exercise helps as well

At the end of the day, remember that there is no right or wrong answer. Seriously, there is only the answer which is the most true for you. To date, I have never had any client with the same purpose statement as another. Some of their purposes are: “To love myself and others unconditionally”, “To live my best life via being persistent and taking continuous actions on my goals”, “To do the right things right”, “To be my best and touch others’ hearts”, etc. All of you are unique individuals and thus your purpose will be totally unique to you. It is what matters to you.

Step 2: Write Your Mission Statement

Now that you have gotten the answer to your life purpose, now it’s about tidying/crafting it into a proper mission statement. There are no hard and fast rules on how to do this, but below are some good pointers:

Simple; 1-2 statements. It should convey 1-2 key points. Keep it within 1-2 statements. Your purpose should be long enough such that it means something to you and concise enough so it’s easy for you to remember.
Action-form. It should be framed as an action, such as “To live to my highest potential and be the best I can be”, “To bring love and joy to everyone in the world”, etc. Your purpose is trigger you into action continuously.
Use words that resonate with you. All the words used in your life purpose statement should ideally resonate with you.
Direction, not destination. Just like how you can never ever reach north, your statement should be an action which is an ongoing journey.

My Life Purpose

After doing the writing exercise with my subconsciousness and consciously evaluating my purpose, I arrived at my purpose below (which I have mentioned in my article on my personal story). The purpose is two-fold:

1) “To unite the world as one single consciousness: To touch others’ lives, enable them to achieve their highest potential and live their best life.”

2) “To reach my highest level of consciousness: To achieve my highest potential and live my best life; To live consciously and freely in truth, love and power.”

Please do share with me your experience and the output you generate from this exercise – I would love to read about it.

After Defining Your Purpose

The most important thing to realize is even after defining your life mission statement, it will change in the future. Just like you evolve as a person throughout the journey, your perceptions of life’s meaning will change too.

Make sure to review your purpose statement periodically (e.g., every 3 months at the beginning, followed by 6 months, then yearly) to ensure that it resonates with who you are. It is possible that you have undergone changes or obtained new revelations in your world beliefs which makes your purpose irrelevant to you. This is just like how companies need to regularly review their mission statement to ensure that it has not been made obsolete.

Now that you have discovered your new found purpose in life, it’s time to integrate it in your life. In the last part of this series, we will discuss on how to reconcile your current life with your new purpose.

This is part 6 of a 7-part series on how to discover your real purpose in life.

How To Find Out If You Are Living Your Real Purpose Now

Celes — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 14:40:27 +0000

This is part 1 of a 7-part series on how to discover your real purpose in life.

Image by Eleaf

“The biggest threat to our well-being is the absence of moral clarity and purpose.” -Rich Sherman
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” -Socrates

How do you know if you are living your real life purpose right now?

Simple – If you are not living your everyday life full of exuberation, energy, passion and love, you are not living your real purpose.

What is your purpose in life? What is the meaning of our existence?

Depending on your upbringing, you will have different answers to this question. These answers may have been inculcated in you at some point by other people, or you may have arrived at the answers yourself in your own ways.

If you are an average output of today’s society, your purpose may be to be a good person, get married, stay out of trouble and contribute to the society at some arbitrary point in life.

If you are generally just jaded with life, your purpose may be to take whatever life throws at you everyday and ultimately wait to physically die.

The purpose of life is a perpetual question which has eluded mankind since our existence. What is it? Why are we here? As lifeforms on earth, do all of us have the same singular purpose or do we have different purposes? If there is one true purpose, why are there different religions advocating different purposes? Is someone wrong then? Who is right and who is wrong? But how can so many other people be wrong?

Do you know your purpose? Why are you here on earth, right now? Have you ever lived life in a flurry, only to look back, wondering the meaning of your existence?

Discovering Your Purpose

If you

are looking for your purpose,
don’t know if you have a purpose,
don’t believe in a purpose or
are not sure if your purpose is your real purpose,

This series on purpose is targeted at you. Even if you believe you have crystal clear clarity on your purpose in life, read on! It might serve as affirmatory material or spark off additional perspectives for consideration. My objective here is to share with you my personal learnings which I have acquired in my pursuit to live my best life – to help you get the best out of your own life as well.

In the next-part on Why Should You Have A Purpose? Here’s 5 Solid Reasons Why, we will look into why we need a purpose and its significance in our lives.

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Discovering my real purpose

A new found meaning and passion in life

Two Most Important Things That Led to My Discovery

1. Discovery of Real Purpose <-> Discovery of Self

2. Your Purpose Should Be Timeless and Universal

Related Posts:

Discover Your Purpose in the Next 30 Minutes

Step 1: Consult Your Subconsciousness

Steps:

As you do the exercise, remember that…

My Experience With This Exercise

Your Results

a) Your breadth and depth of life experiences up till this point

b) Your consciousness level

Step 2: Write Your Mission Statement

My Life Purpose

After Defining Your Purpose

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How To Find Out If You Are Living Your Real Purpose Now

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