Living on Purpose : Straight Answers to Universal Questions
by Dan Millman.

Book Description
From the Publisher:
Written by a former world-champion athlete, coach, and educator, Dan Millman's books present practical ways to transform daily challenges into vehicles of spiritual growth. In Living on Purpose, Millman tackles some of the toughest questions, and in the process, refines and expands on the teachings of his other books. Millman applies timeless principles to questions about metaphysics, destiny and free will, control and surrender, goal-making, marriage, child-rearing, money and work, sexuality, priority setting, and simplifying life. He combines hard-won personal wisdom with common sense to shed light on real-world problems

Excerpted from Living on Purpose : Straight Answers to Universal Questions by Dan Millman. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Q: We grow up, attend school, earn a living, maybe get married and raise a family, go on vacations, provide a service, and live until we die. Isn’t this enough? Why all this interest in spirituality? What’s the point?

A: Most of us agree that life is a school in the sense that we learn many lessons. But if death is the end, what is the purpose of living in the first place? Questions about death may lead us to wonder about our lives. Are we a random experiment or part of a much bigger picture? One question leads to the next and all questions end in Mystery. Some of us turn to belief and faith; others simply wonder. And in this field of wonder grow the seeds of spirituality.

At some point we may glimpse one of the fundamental lessons in the school of life: Our awareness resides, moment to moment, in one of two separate realities, each with its own truths. The first is conventional reality, which you describe in your question. The second is a transcendent reality—the spiritual dimension.

Most of the time, conventional reality monopolizes our attention with the stuff of everyday life—the challenges of education, earning a living, relationships, family, and health—everyday experience. Our dramas, played out in the theater of gain and loss, desire and satisfaction, seem entirely real and important. Conventional life involves the natural pursuit of satisfaction and fulfillment, which depends upon events unfolding in line with our desires, hopes, and expectations. In trying to make things work out, we suffer the pangs of attachment, craving, and anxiety.

Then one day—maybe through a trauma, a death in the family, an injury, or other adversity, we notice that conventional reality, even at its best, leads to dissatisfaction. We feel frustrated when we don’t get what we want, when we get what we don’t want, and even when we get exactly what we want, because in this world of mortality, we will lose all that we love.

Adversity and psychological suffering stimulate a yearning to transcend the conditional world, to wake up and find the higher wisdom that uplifts our soul even as we live in the conventional world. Life’s challenging lessons generate a willingness to make a leap of faith, to relinquish familiar truths that no longer serve, and to venture into the unknown. As Anaïs Nin wrote, "Finally the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." In the school of daily life, spirituality is not separate from this world; it allows us to live an ordinary life while remembering the transcendent truths that set us free.

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