Who and why am I?
Exploring the mystery of being human
Living life is often difficult. But understanding what is going on behind our life is even harder. Mysteries throb at the core of our being. Who are we? What are we? Why are we here? Where are we headed? How can we live more spiritually, knowingly, lovingly?
Seeking answers, at some time we have delved into the world’s greatest spiritual texts. Or we’ve sought insights from those we are more experienced than us, and who accordingly have a deeper perspective.
It has been my privilege to have established a line of communication with a group of human beings who have finished their time on Earth and now wish to share what they have learned. I think of them as guides. Because the guides say they are happy to answer questions, I asked some friends what they wanted to know. Here’s one question I received:
My question is basic. You have previously said we’re here to experience and learn, and that it’s a process that helps us grow spiritually. I can appreciate that as a general statement. But I want to get more specific. What is my purpose in this life? What should I be doing? How can I discover why I’m here?
The guides’ response is as follows:
When you are born no one knows where precisely your life will lead. There is a plan, but no one either on Earth or in the spiritual realm knows how much of the plan will be realized in a particular life. That is the reason each life keeps everyone involved on their toes. You only find out what will happen during the course of your life by living your life. That is the wonder of the incarnation. That is its mystery.
It is because people are aware a mystery beats at the heart of their life that they question their existence. We say this because, like you, we have lived many lives and so are speaking from experience when we say it is common for people to feel that a veil hides the deepest aspects of their life. Often this feeling includes the intuition that some kind of plan is in place.
Another way of saying this is that people intuit that their life has a greater purpose. However vaguely they feel it, and however their feeling is expressed, people want to know living isn’t a matter of carrying on just because they are here. People want to be assured that their life has a deeper meaning. They want to know there’s a reason they’ve been born at this time, in this body and this family, into this culture, and into the particular circumstances that govern their life. The reason people ask deep questions is to get to the bottom of it all, to lift the veil and penetrate the mystery hidden at the center of their life.
The world’s religions have addressed these questions, offering their own answers. Broadly speaking, those answers are not fine-grained. That is, they don’t address the specifics of an individual’s life. They are much more general responses, using words such as salvation, freedom, transcendence, and heaven and hell. For many this general level of response is sufficient and they stop asking further. In contrast, the question asked here seeks to move beyond the general to the personal: What is my purpose? What should I be doing? Happily, this is the level we also wish to address.
Our perspective is that before you were born you put a plan in place. The standard religious perspective is that God has drawn up your life plan. That doesn’t agree with our perceptions. Our view is that you have formulated your life plan. You have chosen your life’s purpose. What you decide creates your life’s meaning.
The complication is that lives often don’t pan out as planned. There are many mitigating factors that alter the course of a life. You may not do everything you planned to. A task may take much longer than anticipated. You might even choose to go off plan. Others who agreed — before you both were born — to meet up with you and carry out a joint task may be detained, diverted or change their mind. In addition, accidents happen. Unforeseen events may result in people turning up before or after the agreed time. Just as this happens during the course of your day, so it happens during the course of your life.
We add that devils and their cohort are not responsible for any of this. There are no evil players subverting your plans. There are just people doing what people do, intending something and doing it well, doing it poorly, or not doing it all. Life is that simple. And that complicated.
Of course, the question is asked because you are very aware that whatever the plan is, you’re not in on it. You can’t see what’s behind the veil. You don’t know why you and those you care for decide to do this rather than that. It is this lack of knowledge, this mystery, that has given rise to the question in the first place: Why am I here?
In this context, in a text for general reading, it is not possible for us to tell individuals exactly what is going on in their life, nor identify what their life plan involves. And even if it was possible, we wouldn’t say. Just as you find out what the future holds by living long enough for the future to arrive, so the only way to understand what is happening at the heart of your life is to lift the veil yourself.
If you really want to understand what your life plan involves, you have to look behind the flow of events that make up your life’s day-by-day experience.
Accordingly, we suggest that the way to answer the question of why you are here is via a process of self-inquiry. Before you were born you generated a life plan. Over the years since you were born various constricting circumstances and unforeseen events have altered how your life plan has played out, impacting on it to a lesser or a greater extent. Together, your plan, life situations, and your choices have shaped the particular circumstances of your life. By closely examining your life, by looking behind the daily flow of what is happening, it is possible to identify the key factors that shape your psychological makeup, your decision-making processes, and why you do what you do.
It is by adopting a process of self-inquiry, and seriously following it through, that it becomes quite possible for you to lift the veil, shine a light into the mysterious heart of your existence, and identify the contours of your life as you intended it to be.
We acknowledge that doing this isn’t straightforward. If you are always caught up in the process of living, if you continue to react to what is on your plate day by day, you won’t be able to see what has occurred behind the scenes to get you into the situations that now dominate your life. To answer your question — Why am I here? — for yourself, which is our recommendation, you have to learn to disentangle yourself from the immediate moment, step back, and take a wider view of what is going on around you, to you, and within you.
We propose the reason people don’t understand their life plan is because they haven’t enquired sufficiently into the circumstances of their life. They haven’t enquired into their own psychological make-up or sufficiently tried to grapple with the deep aspects of their own identity.
So we suggest that in order to find your answer to what is going on in your life, set aside your feelings of being confused, or that you’re not smart enough, or that it’s too great a mystery, or whatever other attitude or emotion that dominates your feelings about yourself, and instead get serious about your own deep nature. Do that and much that is confusing will become clear.
Our view of human spirituality is multi-faceted. You are a spiritual identity occupying a human body. It takes many lives to come to terms with this situation. Then more lives to find the spiritual core within you. Then yet more lives to learn to express your spiritual core in the circumstances of daily life.
Too many things to list here have to be learned during the course of becoming spiritual. Being religious, being an atheist, being a mystic, a martyr, a skeptic — you will adopt all these roles and many more as you work through how best to express yourself in a human world that veers between being harsh, beautiful, difficult, astonishing, loving, traumatizing and surprising. And it is surprising, despite you having organized the major events you will experience during the course of your current life.
As far for feeling your life is a mystery, that is an inevitable consequence of embodiment. Human perception is narrow, whereas you need a wide view to perceive all the complexities of interlinked factors that contribute to you being where you currently are. The psychological processes of identification and attachment focus your attention on your day-to-day experience of being human, resulting in you not being able to stand back and adopt the recommended wide view. Between lives, you can access that wider view. And as you evolve, life by life, your view becomes incrementally wider and deeper.
This means that your spiritual self sees more than you do at your current human level. It also means you can draw on what your spiritual self knows in order to understand what is happening to you in this life and how you ended up where you are.
This is what the process of becoming spiritual is all about: drawing on what your spiritual self knows and using it to infuse how you are living your life. In saying this we are addressing those who have reached the point where they seriously wish to perceive what lies behind the veil that hangs across their awareness and prevents them from understanding the who, where, what and why of their existence.
In that sense, our response here is directed towards those whose view of themselves is maturing, for those for whom living life up close and personal, as we have described it elsewhere, is no longer enough. For whatever reason, you now wish to adopt a wider view and see what is really happening in the particulars of your life. For those people, we recommend a process of self-inquiry.
This essay is a response to the prompt from the editors of the Medium publication, Spiritual Secrets, seeking pieces on the theme of mystery.
Author’s note: My response to the guides’ suggestion that we engage in a process of self-enquiry is tracked in other essays, these two being immediately relevant to the above essay:
This essay includes material excerpted from the book How Did I End Up Here? by Keith Hill. See www.attarbooks.com for further details, or check out the book in any online bookstore.
