Original Purpose

By Kelly Tobey

Whether fact or fiction, imagine that before we were born we were still formless energy plugged into loving spirit. Imagine that we look down on planet earth and decide – wow these humans could use some support – a lot of them tend to get lost in patterns of hurt and have forgotten about the love that is available to them.

Some of them seem to be able to open themselves from time to time to receiving love directly from source, some seem to be able to receive love through nature, some through creativity, others are reminded of love through their connections with other people. And how sweet that looks to see them connecting to love and sharing that experience with each other. As we observe, perhaps we get curious about what it would be like to be able to experience love while in a body. What would it be like to have physical sensations responding to love?

Imagine that while still in the state of formless energy, plugged into loving spirit, we make a choice to ground our loving energy by being born into form as a human. Perhaps we noticed how people responded to being loved by other people and so thought that coming in as a loving human would be a good way to help people that were getting lost, reawaken to love. Reminding people of love seems like a purposeful action to take!

Because it is so easy to feel the connection to love while in the state of formlessness it is likely that we would step forward towards humanness with lots of confidence in the idea that we will be able to wake others up to this wonderful feeling of unconditional love and of feeling valued.

Yet in the process of coming into form we get introduced to lots of new experiences. Some of them are not so wonderful.

While still in the womb we may be lucky enough to hear and sense that we are wanted, or we may find out that our parents have fears about their capabilities of raising a child. Perhaps we hear and feel them dealing with their struggles in life. Regardless of whether our parents are capable of sending loving, welcoming, messages to us or not, at least at this stage things are going well at a physical level. It is nice and warm here in the womb. Feels wonderful to be floating around freely and having all food needs taken care of.

Time passes and this womb home changes from comfortable, into snug, into restrictive, into imprisoning. Perhaps this is our first introduction to pain; and there is more to come as we take action to break out of this home that has transformed into a prison. The only way out of the prison is through a narrow opening much smaller than our body. We may want to get out but it looks impossible. Then this body that surrounds our own body, this body that used to be gentle and nourishing, starts to push at us trying to force us through that tiny opening. Now we are really getting an experience of pain as our body is crushed into temporary distortion as it is forced through this opening.

Even if we are lucky enough to have nurturing loving people welcoming us as we come out, we are starting to find out through the birth trauma that there is no erasing the fact that this human experience is going to be challenging. We may have gained some self-confidence in our survival of the birth process, but whew, it has hard earned. How confusing to have mother go from being the source of nurturing to being a source of pain. Even if she is loving to us when we get out of the womb, how do trust that she wont be the source of pain again?

As well, during the birthing experience we have picked up on the pain Mom is going through. We may be feeling that we are a cause of her pain. How confusing that we came here with the intention to bring love and yet we end up being the receiver and giver of pain!

We have just had a taste of some of the reason why we saw a lot of people feeling disconnected from love when we looked down to earth earlier from our formless perspective. We have just experienced personally how difficult it is to feel the presence of love while going through experiences of pain.   

Once we are out of the womb we start to experience the needs that come with caring for a physical body. Needs for food, warmth, cleanliness, and nurturing.

As our life unfolds we shift between times of living out our purpose by beaming out with the loving energy that we are a channel for, and times of forgetting love as we get lost in the neediness that arises from being in body.

We start to discover that our idea of just coming in and radiating love to wake people up is not as effective as what we had predicted. We experience that although our radiance is received from time to time, many times it is ignored or even rejected.

What is going on? We had thought love would be so irresistible. Love feels so good, wouldn’t it make sense that people would want to drink it up all the time? Why do they refuse it?

Well perhaps it is because all these people at one time took a very similar journey to the one we are taking. They came to bring love like we did. When time and again that love is not received it is easy to start to believe that we are a failure because we are not able to fulfill the purpose of our mission in the way we had envisioned it while still in formlessness.

To compound matters at times we are the catalyst for others pain (like when we came out of the womb), and our needs become a burden for others to handle (such as our need for our caregivers to look after us a child). What happened to that original intention to bring love?

If we are in a state of duty with our purpose, we will have a demand on ourselves to ‘save’ the world. Every place we see people feeling disconnected from love and we are unable to transform it; every place we feel we add more burden to others; will be situations that will trigger us into feeling like a failure, incapable of living out our duty in the way our expectations are demanding we should.

If that original purpose changed from being a vision to inspire and encourage us to keep reaching out with love, into a sense of duty with all the trappings of having to live up to set expectations, then we are set up to feel like a failure.

If we were fully conscious of these dynamics that are playing out we could start to unravel them, but unfortunately most of us at a conscious level will have forgotten why we came here. We will have consciously forgotten our original purpose but that does not mean it is forgotten in the subconscious mind.

Consciously we may have no idea why we sometimes do not feel ‘good enough’ but in our subconscious mind, when our purpose to awaken people to love has changed to a duty and we have failed to accomplish it, we will be eating away at our own self-esteem.

If we look out at the family we were born into and see that they are still sometimes suffering and disconnected from feeling love, our subconscious agenda to save them can make us feel like a failure. With that feeling of failing can come guilt, shame and self-condemnation.

Unfortunately in this world we have come into, it is common for punishment to be doled out when someone fails at something or makes some kind of mistake. The punishment can come in various forms, from – withdrawal of approval - through to various forms of attack.

The subconscious patterns continue to build. Making our purpose of love into a duty, leads to feeling we are failing at that duty, which leads to feeling guilty about the failing, then the next layer is to feel we need to be punished for failing. What better way to punish ourselves than to block the receiving of love.

If we start to consciously understand how this pattern of blocking love gets set up, we will start to see why so many times people will refuse to receive our freely given love. They too have set up their own blocks to love because subconsciously they believe they have failed their duty to save everyone with love and so feel they need to be punished.

Lets look at the next layer that gets built into the subconscious mind. The weight of the shame that comes with feeling like a failure for extended periods of time becomes almost unbearable. In a culture that hands out punishment for mistakes there is always a search for whom to make responsible for the mistake. After a while, in order to get out from under the weight of shame and self punishment our minds will get creative about how to shift the shame of self, into the blame of others. So to attempt to shift the feeling of failure in ourselves for not being able to save people with love, we will blame them for blocking love and not giving love themselves.

Now we can judge others for being ‘bad’ and not living a loving life style. This can extend from judging people in our immediate family right on through to judging people we have never met but have only heard about through the media.

This unconscious attempt to shift away from feeling like a failure at our purpose to bring love, by blaming others, does not work. In fact it tends to add to our underlying sense of failure because to get lost in judgment and blame, we get further and further away from our purpose of being loving. This deepens our sense of undeservability and reinforces our unconscious desires to punish ourselves.

These patterns are likely the foundation to every dysfunctional behavior we play out. Examples:

Ø      Why would we try to push our loved ones into changing their life for the better?  Telling them to - read this book. Go to that workshop. Quit that behavior. Eat this way. Etc. etc. Because if we see them being anything but happy and loving it is an unconscious reminder that we feel we have failed our duty. If we do not want to feel like a failure we will try to control and push them into success, disrespecting their free will.

Ø      Why would we get caught in patterns of perfectionism, relentlessly pushing at ourselves? Because we are trying to make up for unconscious feelings of being a failure, thinking if we can reach that point of perfection we will feel better about ourselves.

Ø      Why would we block receiving abundance in our life? How could we open to truly receiving abundance when we carry an unconscious belief that we do not deserve it because of thinking we failed at our purpose to bring love. Note: True abundance comes from receiving fully. We can be surrounded by lots of things and people without ever fully receiving them.

Ø      Why would we go into rebellion against our family members carrying anger against them? It seems easier to blame our family and make them bad than to surface the deeper feelings we carry of feeling guilty for not being able to transform them with love.

Ø      Why would we dive into depths of hopelessness and depression? Because unconsciously feeling defeated at accomplishing our purpose to bring love, leads to a sense of pointlessness.

Ø      Why would we get righteous and evangelical about our beliefs, attempting to force them on others? Because of feeling like it is our duty to save the world.

Ø      Why, instead of holding a place of compassion, would we feel angst about the pain and suffering in the world and frustrated with the lack of speed involved in transformation? Again because of feeling like it is our duty to save the world.

Ø      Why would we get involved in power struggles with our partners, forfeiting happiness for the demand to be right? Because if we can prove them wrong then we can blame unhappiness on them and avoid being accountable for our part in the situation.

Ø      Why would we get lost in patterns of sacrifice, desperately trying to please others while forfeiting ourselves? Because we get to unconsciously punish ourselves for failing while trying to make up for the failure by attempting to please others. 

Ø      Why would we spend years being blocked to what our purpose is, living lives that do not feel purposeful? Because of the unconscious fear that if we rediscover our purpose consciously it will lead to feelings of grief about not having lived it. As well, living a life disconnected from purposefulness, is a great way to punish ourselves.

If we continued to explore dysfunctional patterns we are likely to find that time and again they are fed from the underlying dynamic first discussed. In uncovering this it becomes clearer and clearer why people are not readily opening up to the state of love even though it is continually available to us, and nothing is blocking it except our refusal to receive. Of course we are not consciously out to block love. The blocks to love all maintain their power over us by staying below our conscious awareness.

So now that we have spent this time establishing the ‘bad’ news, how about some ‘good’ news? Well the ‘good’ news starts with gaining more and more clarity about what is driving the blocks, which we have been starting to unravel with this reading.

Fortunately the next steps are simple. Not always easy to apply because of our tendency to slip back into unconscious patterning, but simple.

One of the underpinning keys is to get clear that our purpose to bring love to the planet is not a duty. I repeat, it may be our purpose to bring love but it is not our duty. When we fully get this, not just mentally and conceptually but get it with the core of our being, then we can start the process of forgiving ourselves for every mistake this misconception led us to make.

The list of mistakes is likely to be long, and in the time that it takes for the process of learning to correct our misconceptions unfolds, we are likely to make lots more mistakes. So the process calls for lots of compassion and mercy on ourselves.

Thankfully Spirit forgives every mistake at the same time as it is being made. Spirit never holds our mistakes against us even for a second. The only one that needs to forgive us and take us off the hook is ourselves.

Again, the process is simple even if it is not always easy:

The process of forgiveness is not about condoning mistakes, it is about having mercy on the essence of the person behind the mistake. In self-forgiveness if we stop at the step of forgiveness we leave ourselves more vulnerable to slipping back into another mistake. If instead we take the step of re-dedicating to love, we open ourselves up to the path that leads away from re-doing the mistake.

The re-dedication to love is not because it is our duty. Our free will choice to love or not is totally honored by Spirit. Love is not a state of control or pressure so it cannot be forced, rather it can only be experienced while in a state of choosing it with free will. So any pressure on ourselves or others to be loving is oxy-moronic.

To honor love, all pushing needs to change into offering. Living a purpose of sharing love comes from offering. Free will honored, no duty involved, no need to push.

Why would we want to live out a purpose of sharing love? Well for one thing it dissolves every dysfunctional behavior, listed and unlisted. Every act of dysfunction comes from forgetting how to live in love.

The journey may be long and we may be faced with many steps, some easy and some difficult but we can always rely on the following simplicity. Any problem we face can be met and eventually cleared by acting on the answer to this simple question each step of the way: What would love invite me to do in this situation?

Crucial: the question has to be asked of Spirit’s interpretation of love, not of ego’s interpretation of love.

This is accomplished by building our discernment and our intuitive connection to the messages of love.

This process leads us back to our original purpose and our life transforms step by step into the forms that best suit us as we follow a path of loving action or non-action.

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