The DK Foundation

The DK Foundation

Getting Real 9

What I am supposed to be doing?

This question, so frequently asked, presupposes that there is an identifiable plan to our lives and a plan that astrology can discern. It is a valid question and an answerable one because our personalities are a scheme, a scheme for the development of consciousness, and the horoscope charts that scheme. What we are all required to do is live consciously in accordance with that scheme. This will recommend a function (e.g., questing, teaching, serving or initiating), but never a specific task.

In the past twenty or so years, there appears to have been a loss of interest in the question Who am I? But the question of what to do is answerable only in terms who we are.

Who am I? was a question of the1960s and 70s, a time when there was such an investment in the concept of individuality. Perhaps we think it a rather a naive question now and we consider that we know who we are. For sure, a greater psychological awareness has increased self-awareness. But what the last twenty-five years have encouraged is an enhanced capacity to analyze our psyches, i.e. to discover what has made us who we are. This may be the goal of psychology but this is not all there is to us or to self-understanding.

To be fully ourselves we have to know also who we are in formation. We have to know what is our potential. This is the goal of spirituality. Our potential is something that we share with the rest of the human family but it also that which has been allocated to each of us with each new incarnation.

Each lifetime in the physical body is a package of opportunities. From past life is restored to us that which will restore familiar conditions to enable us to develop a different relationship with them; also from past life is restored a familiar way of understanding self and life, but we are also supplied with new qualities and capacities, the role of which is to provide a challenge to the familiar.

From the confrontation between past and present, which so often manifests through a conflict between head and heart, we stand to shift enough, on both the emotional and mental levels to admit the future in the shape that it is being offered us, (i.e., in the shape conferred by our identity, in any one lifetime).

The scheme of the personality is set up this way. Conflict is the grit in the oyster shell. This process takes us along the path of evolution and its aim is to gradually equip the personality to be an agent of the soul in the world of human affairs. This process serves a larger purpose than our own personal development.

We have a responsibility to develop into that which we are designed to be because each of us belongs to a soul group with its own identity and purpose: if the constituent members will be and do what they are designed to do then the soul group can better do what it is designed to be and do. This way, the balance is maintained. There are some 6 billion human souls engaged in the outworking of the plan for our solar system. This is some chain gang of which we are a part and its efficiency is diminished when there is no sense of a common objective.

For one to rise all must rise that is the reality and message of the soul to the personality. We can overlook it and focus exclusively upon ourselves, if we choose, but we will never change the subjective reality because ‘me’ and ‘you’ have no meaning at the level of the soul.

To understand both what we have been and to become what we are designed to be is true self-understanding. Psychology and spirituality are opposite ends of the spectrum of development, and like all polarities, if they will but unite they will give wholeness to each other.

In order to answer the question ‘What should I be doing’ with any precision there has to be awareness of what is the true identity because this reveals what we are designed to be i.e., how and by what means we are to transform energy in this lifetime. This is the story behind the natal chart, if we know how to read it. The key to identity is contained in the Sun Sign.

To find out what we are designed to be and to go forward into that identity has more transformative value, potentially, than trying to cram ourselves into a pre-formed mould of a spiritual lifestyle. Yet it also requires a great deal of courage to look closely at the detail of one’s life in case it does not match up to the conditioned expectations we have of ourselves or of the spiritual life.

Some seventy years ago now, the Indian teacher Yogananda pointed out to his largely American and mysticism- infatuated audience that there were many holy men in India who would need to reincarnate as humble householders in order to learn lessons of responsibility in the circumstances of the everyday.

All of us with spiritual expectations and ambitions need to think through the implications of that statement because there are, for sure, a great many spiritually-minded Westerners trying to avoid becoming humble householders at all costs because this role does not conform to their idea of what is a spiritually correct way to be.

Conditioning is never more erosive than in the matter of identity. What we are in essence

(i.e., according to the content of our personalities) transcends social models but because our essence has to be expressed in time and in a way that is relevant to the time in which we live, social models become very influential and may be a source of limitation and inauthenticity. At any one time there are always occupations and activities that are flavour of the month and command undue attention and influence.

What is a spiritual way to be and what is not? There is only one possible criterion: does it raise vibration and will it contribute towards the opening of an energy centre? If it can do that then, directly or indirectly, depending upon the activity, it can help the individual, humanity and the planet. This can be done without so much as a whiff of joss, exotic apparel, ceremonies, teachers, teachings, and without a dramatically significantly altered reality. True spiritual transformation involves consciousness and a realization about self in relation to life that in some way reduces fear and the sense of limitation and opens up possibility. Prisons and hospitals accommodate quite as much spiritual transformation as centers dedicated to spirituality, and probably a good deal more.

For sure, each culture and age has produced specific responses, rituals and techniques to the task of purposefully raising vibration, and we have assumed that this is spirituality when, in fact, they are all examples of how, historically, the matter of purposefully raising energy has been handled. They are means to an end not an end in themselves.

The transformative value in living within the design of the personality, as one truly is, dealing intelligently with the situations which arise in everyday life, is inestimably greater than that of cultivating a consciously spiritual image and getting caught up in the appearance.

The life of a spiritually aware person does not have to assume a particular shape or appearance. We can be spiritually aware without any of the trappings which will mark one out as ‘spiritual’ by contemporary criteria; and we can sit in a development circle, meditate from dawn to dusk and lower vibration through feeling complacent, superior and judgmental of others.

Is this what we want to hear when we put this question What am I supposed to be doing? Of course it is not! We want to hear that there is a specific, spiritually significant task awaiting us. And it goes without saying that it will be well paid and secure. This is a glamour! It is almost never this way. Rather it is up to us to each of us to decide how to make a contribution having first learned what we are designed for and having learned how to make ourselves reliable, responsible, consistent and effective. If we have not yet taken them, these preparatory steps are precisely what we are supposed to be doing.

In the final analysis it is neither our appearance nor even our activities that determines our level of being, but how we use and produce energy through our three bodies: the physical, the emotional and the mental.

This tendency to confuse inner and outer, to look down the wrong end of the telescope is probably as old as organized spiritual activity, but it is a very real problem wherever New Age ideas have taken root, because so many have been circulated without any awareness of first principles. The first principle of spirituality is transformation, of the lower in oneself into a higher substance. Spirituality is transformation, not simply feeling better, nor borrowing the clothes, practices, and example of people who have walked a transformative path without also taking on their values, sacrifices, struggles and commitments.

What we are all supposed to be doing now, is consciously tackling the possibilities of development open to Westerners as the twenty-first century begins and humanity faces the challenge of the years up to 2012. We will find these possibilities in the conflict within our own beings and externalized in our own everyday lives. That is where we must deal with them, with as much consciousness as possible, and awareness of the implication of our decisions not only for ourselves but for our planet. In dealing with them, in steering our own craft and keeping it upright, we will find the point of ourselves.

There is no value in trying to turn back the clock to a simpler time. This is sentimentality and it cannot help us because we are no longer simple people. We have a need to acknowledge the complexity in ourselves and in our world and to find ways of making it work for us. And what modern living is ably providing for us is a great deal of grit for our oyster shells.

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