Jonathan Gustin Transcript – Soul Purpose, Default Purpose, and Calling

Jonathan Gustin Interview

Summary

The discussion explores purpose as more than a job or vocation, distinguishing practical ways of earning a living from a deeper sense of calling. It also considers how spiritual awakening, emotional maturity, and unique contribution can develop unevenly and support one another.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can I discover my deeper purpose in life?
• Is my career or job necessarily the same as my life purpose?
• How can I pursue meaningful work while meeting my basic needs?
• Can someone be spiritually awakened without being emotionally mature?

Key takeaways

• Purpose includes waking up, growing into emotional maturity, and expressing a unique contribution in the world.
• A job can be a means of support without being the deepest expression of your calling.
• A person's calling may be expressed through many different careers or roles.
• Survival needs can take priority, while purpose can still be explored outside of paid work.
• Spiritual insight in one area does not guarantee maturity or development in every other area.

Transcript

And then the second spiritual dimension is more like growing down, growing down towards what I would call soul, and discovering how I show up in the world with my soul-level purpose as a demonstration of love. So these three all together—I ended up studying to be a psychotherapist, so that helped me with that middle-world purpose, about how to help myself grow up and help others grow up into emotional adulthood.

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done 530-something of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the Past Interviews menu. We have them all organized in several different ways.

This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of batgap.com. Some people don’t like PayPal. There’s a donations page that suggests alternate ways of donating if you don’t like PayPal.

My guest today is Jonathan Gustin. Jonathan is the founder of Purpose Guides Institute. He guides people to find and embody their life’s purpose, as well as trains those who want to become purpose guides themselves. Jonathan has been a psychotherapist, meditation teacher, and purpose guide for over 20 years. He is an adjunct professor at JFK University and co-author of Purpose Rising with Ken Wilber, Ervin Laszlo, and others.

There are some notes here that he sent as part of his bio: “Meditation asks, ‘Who am I?’ Therapy asks, ‘How do I heal and become happier?’ Purpose work addresses the question, ‘Where do I belong in the ecology of life?’ Purpose guiding breaks the spell of our default purposes of safety, security, comfort, and outward success and orients us towards our true purpose, which is to embody our unique calling within. When we have the opportunity to live our calling, we can support our collective true purpose, to become co-creators of our species’ evolution. We may, thus, give birth to more beauty, truth, and goodness in the world.”

Okay, so maybe we’ll start right out, Jonathan, talking about purpose and purpose guides and all that, and then a little later we’ll loop back to talk about you and how you got into this particular angle or niche. Somehow, as I’ve been listening to you over the past few days and reading things, I kept remembering Henry David Thoreau’s famous saying that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. That always implied to me that they haven’t found their purpose. They’re like Formula One race cars stuck in a traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway or something, just revving their motors but unable to go anywhere.

I think probably everyone has felt this to some degree at some time in their life, and maybe we all feel it to some degree because our purpose can always be fine-tuned. But I think we have a lot to talk about in terms of what we mean by purpose, whether everyone has one, whether it’s preordained before we even come into this life, and all the various things—there are so many things to talk about around this issue. So where would you like to start? Let’s start by defining the word. It’s pretty obvious, but what do you mean by purpose?

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah. Well, first I just want to say thanks for having me on your show and living what I would call your delivery vehicle. I don’t know what your deepest purpose is, but I know you do the heck out of interviews—500-plus. I’ve seen some back in the day, like 10 years ago; I was watching your show. And so, yeah, I’m just honored to get to have this time to speak with you.

Rick: Yeah, thanks. It’s always an honor for me each week to speak to someone. I’ve interviewed your wife, Kate, I don’t know, six or eight months or a year ago, and it’s like every interview for me is like opening a Christmas present or something, just discovering this whole world that exists in this guest and then this guest. It’s very enriching for me, and people say that listening to them enriches them.

Jonathan: Yeah, I can totally see what an edifying experience it is for you. If we imagine truth as this magnificent diamond, and each person, each human, is like a prism, then that truth is refracted through that prism. The truth is expressed through your body, mind, and psyche, and my body, mind, and psyche will be different. And that’s so rich. It’s just so beautiful.

Rick: To extend the metaphor, though, I mean, diamonds are valuable because they conduct light so beautifully, and each facet of the diamond sparkles in its own way. Whereas we don’t really value a lump of coal in the same way, even though a diamond is made from a lump of coal, ultimately. So the people I tend to interview on this show are like diamonds in that they’ve kind of clarified their light-transmitting ability, if you will. And it makes the whole thing interesting.

Jonathan: Yeah, no, the diamond is beautiful. One teacher that I like a lot, his name is Hameed; he also goes by A.H. Almaas.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve interviewed him a couple times.

Jonathan: Yeah, the Diamond Approach.

Rick: The Diamond Approach.

Jonathan: I’m like, “Oh, beautiful, beautiful.” Well, so to your question, what does purpose mean, at least in my understanding? The simple cosmology I use has sort of three worlds of purpose: to wake up, grow up, and show up. Just to explicate that a little bit: to wake up is the transcendent motion to what you might call the unbounded, the undivided. I can talk about that more in a moment. And then, in the middle world, we have growing up into what I would call an emotional adult, which is actually quite rare and quite difficult. I’m still working on it myself.

And then the second spiritual dimension is more like growing down, growing down towards what I would call soul, and discovering how I show up in the world with my soul-level purpose as a demonstration of love. So these three all together—I ended up studying to be a psychotherapist, so that helped me with that middle-world purpose, about how to help myself grow up and help others grow up into emotional adulthood.

Since I was 12 years old—or no, 10 years old—I was interested in classical, traditional enlightenment. It came really early for me, just like watching television, watching a nice Jewish boy in the suburbs of Toronto. Remember David Carradine’s Kung Fu?

Rick: Oh yeah, Grasshopper.

Jonathan: Grasshopper. And there were these scenes where there would be flashbacks to the monastery, Shaolin Monastery. I was just like, “That’s it.” That was a moment of calling for me. I liked the kung fu; I was 10 years old, so I enjoyed that. But that wasn’t the primary reason why I came. There was something about studying with a master, something about Asian masters. Particularly for me, it ended up being Zen, and that was like a moment of a soul calling.

These three, I would call the triple purpose of life: wake up to enlightenment; grow up into a person who can metabolize joy, who can have a high joy tolerance, if you will, who can give and receive love without any unnecessary impediment, to be a quantumist. So that’s like the middle-world purpose. But then, really, for our interview, I’m imagining, because of the nature of this show, it’s the upper-world purpose of transcendence and classical enlightenment, and then the lower-world purpose of showing up with your gifts and being in the place that you’re meant to be in order to give those gifts away.

Rick: Yeah, and of course these three phrases are reminiscent of Ken Wilber: “wake up,” “grow up,” and “clean up,” I believe. And also the notion that I find very useful from him of lines of development, and how lines of development can be quite disproportionately developed. One can be quite advanced along one line and quite stunted in others, which helps to make sense of examples we see sometimes of teachers who seem very bright and brilliant and articulate and eloquent and charismatic and radiating some kind of Shakti, and yet are really screwed up in certain ways.

Jonathan: Yeah. So that whole notion of having a person who is well-respected—in fact, you experience them as illumined with the open awareness of the undivided itself. You can feel it on them. But maybe they spent 50 years in a monastery and didn’t really get to work out their sexuality. And all of a sudden, they’re placed amongst all these disciples and, lo and behold, they’re sleeping with dozens of them. Yeah, so I don’t know that that is the mechanism by which that works, but it’s a good working hypothesis that you can have a high line of development in either classical awakening, middle-world emotional adulthood, or soul-level purpose, but not necessarily a high level in the other two.

Rick: Yeah, and what those examples have led me to understand over the years is that, well, firstly, I avoid using the term “enlightenment” because it has such a static, superlative connotation. But if I were to use it, I would have to define it as being a really holistic development, kind of a full blossoming of all the faculties that a human being possesses. And I would like to, personally, prefer to reserve the term for something like that. When somebody tells me that so-and-so was enlightened and yet was a raging alcoholic, I say, “Oh, fine if you want to use the term that way,” but that’s not how I use it.

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also, I think the word “enlightenment”—if you mean intermittent enlightenment, that’s one thing, and if you’re talking about abiding enlightenment, that’s quite another.

Rick: Yeah, and of course in Sanskrit and in the Yoga Sutras and so on, they have specific terms for intermittent versus abiding.

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, no, it’s really key. Yeah, so I think maybe of interest to your listeners is a little more exploration about what I mean by the word “soul” and “soul purpose.”

Rick: Sure, yeah, let’s do it.

Jonathan: So it’s equally transpersonal, like transpersonal meaning simply beyond the ego, beyond the everyday personality and ego, right? And so there’s one direction where we experience what you might call “unitive intimacy.” When you have a moment of “the world drops away,” or, as they say in Zen, “drop body, drop mind,” and you know the universe could disappear and you wouldn’t care. There’s this open, empty spaciousness in which nothing could possibly be harmed and no desire really arises necessarily. And so there we all experience, I would say, spirit or the great mystery or the Tao or whatever a person wants to call it. It doesn’t really matter to me.

But then there’s another part that’s unique, right? So we know we’re unique on the level of our personality, right? Like, I love—what do I love? I love organic ice cream, and I love skiing, and I love jazz. I love it. Jazz just does it for me. But it’s not my soul purpose to go to the San Francisco Jazz Center and listen to jazz. I really enjoy it. I love skiing. I was born in Canada and I raced, but it’s no one’s great pleasure to watch me ski race. I’m not an Olympian, right?

So we understand that we have uniqueness at the level of ego and personality, and we celebrate that and try to fulfill some of the desires in a healthy way, with moderation. But there’s also transpersonal uniqueness, and that’s at the level of soul. And so I found myself asking the question, “What is my place? What is my contribution?”

I was standing in the hallways in my junior high school. I guess I must have been on a break, or there was a bathroom break, and I was standing looking at the lockers. It came over me that I had to contemplate my life right then and there. And what came to me was about two things, right? All the normal things—I mean, just the regular things. I would like a girlfriend. I’d like to have a video game or whatever it is. But at the deep level, what came to me was, whatever that word “enlightenment” means, I’ve got to find out. I’ve got to experience that, whatever it is. I had no idea what it meant.

Rick: It’s so cool that you got onto that at such a young age, though. I was about 17 when it first dawned on me, and then I took drugs for a year.

Jonathan: Well, that’s pretty precocious, too, you know, happening in the teens. But then the second part of it was, “How can I contribute? How can I be part of doing good in the world?” Those were the two things. And so, you know, flash forward: I’m 53 now. So this is, you know, 40 years, 41 years later or something. And they are still alive in me.

And when I was contemplating the second question, “What do I do?” the poet Mary Oliver put it, “What do I do with my one wild, precious life?” It’s such an important question, I think, for each of us to ask. Whether we even believe in a cosmology of purpose, even if we don’t, even if we’re nihilists, you know, we still have to ask, “Well, okay, then what do I do? If there is no purpose, what do I do? And if there is a soul-level purpose, how do I find it?”

Rick: Even if we think there’s only one life, that’s another question. There could be many. But what do we do with this one?

Jonathan: Yeah, either way. If this is it, if everything that is me completely goes into nonexistence upon the death of this body, then it’s a very important question. And even if I have a million lives ahead of me, well, I don’t want to waste this one. This one’s pretty important to me.

So I was contemplating this question. I was on a meditation retreat, a solo meditation retreat. I was about 20, 21, in a little cabin in northern Ontario, Canada, just meditating every day. Between meditations, there was a couch in the cabin, and I was just lying on the couch thinking, you know, asking, “What is my place?” I mean, I was going to graduate college soon and need to earn a living. More than anything, though, I really wanted to know what my place was.

I think, due to all the meditation, I was in a pretty quiet place. And an image came, and the image was—in English, it would say, “whole person midwifery.” Whole person midwifery. And I could see myself in that kind of co-exploration role with a human being, helping them to give birth to their wholeness. And I knew immediately it wasn’t about midwifing actual babies. I didn’t want to catch babies. That wasn’t the point.

But “midwife” is a beautiful word, right? It wasn’t so much being a teacher or a guru or a professor or any number of things. It was about, how can I be a person who helps a person allow the natural process of awakening to spirit, awakening to their emotional adulthood, and awakening to their soul’s purpose?

And so for me, the image, the mythopoetic identity, as the author Bill Plotkin puts it, has that kind of mythic and poetic perfume to it, right? Whole person midwifery. And I wouldn’t put it on my business card because, you know, they’d just think, “Oh God, he’s a California freak. He must eat a lot of tofu.”

Purpose Is Deeper Than a Job Title

And so what’s interesting to distinguish, to disambiguate, is that the image is, “That’s my deepest purpose.” And though I am a psychotherapist, that’s not my purpose. I am a purpose guide; that’s not my purpose. I am a meditation teacher; that’s not my purpose. Those are delivery vehicles.

Rick: Yeah, they’re means.

Jonathan: They’re means, exactly. So, like, if you order a pizza, the pizza can come by foot or by bicycle or by truck or by car. It could be delivered in a Sherman tank.

Rick: A drone, maybe.

Jonathan: And you can envision it. Pretty soon we’re going to be getting our pizza pies by drone. And those are the delivery vehicles. But the nourishment is the pizza pie in the box.

And so that’s one of the things I help point people towards. It’s not just, “What is your vocation, small v?” Meaning, you know, “I’m a doctor, I’m a lawyer, I’m a teacher.” Great, that’s important. It’s really important to dial in your delivery vehicle, or, as Bill Plotkin puts it, your delivery system.

But underneath that, we know we have, what, 10,000 kindergarten teachers. That tells us a lot. But then each one of them has their own light, their own true gift. What’s animating them? And each one of them is a little bit different. You’ll get a very different experience being a five-year-old with one teacher rather than another.

So it’s really more about the purpose, the deep imagistic purpose at the center of our being, whether we’re conscious of it or not. And I would say being conscious of it is way better than being unconscious of it, and allowing that to shine through the delivery vehicle.

Rick: It seems to me that there must be a hierarchy of purposes. Once you begin asking yourself that question, “What is my deeper purpose?” you wouldn’t necessarily encounter your deepest purpose in the first step. But you might go through a series of steps, deeper and deeper and deeper. Like, the doctor might say—or someone aspiring to be a doctor might say—“Well, I want to make money, and I also feel like helping people.” But, okay, then why do you want to make money? And why do you feel like helping people? And then there might be a deeper realization of why you want to do those things, and so on and so forth. Do you find that? That you kind of take people through a series of steps?

Jonathan: Yeah. I’ll use an example of someone who wasn’t a student of mine. She’s my sister. So she’s a palliative care doctor, which is a pretty difficult thing to be right now in the time of COVID-19. And I asked her why.

Rick: What do they do? Are they helping people who are chronically ill?

Jonathan: Pain management, end of life, hospice work, a whole number of things. Yeah.

Rick: Okay.

Jonathan: Originally, she got her master’s degree in psychology, and then she switched to medicine. And then years later I said, “Well, so what lights you up about being a physician? Are you interested—is it the science? You have to have a good science mind. Medical school is so difficult. Do you really love the craft?” She says, “No, no, no. That’s not it.” There are people like that who geek out on the medical science. She says, “I’m not like that at all. It’s the bedside. It’s the relationships, and I wanted to do it in these critical situations in the hospital setting.”

So in a way, she could have been a psychotherapist or any number of things. But what’s important is, if you take 10 palliative care physicians, put them in a room and ask them, “Why are you here? What’s your deepest driving desire in being a physician?” you will get 10 different answers, especially if they’re self-aware.

Purpose, work, and the survival dance

Rick: The thought just occurred to me that those of you in the live audience—it looks like we have about 130 right now—some of you might want to question Jonathan through our question system here and say, “Well, I’m a such-and-such, but it doesn’t really mean anything to me.” Maybe we could probe into some actual real-life situations. It would be a little easier to do it verbally, but we don’t really have that set up.

Because I imagine that a lot of people—I mean, think of it: probably this audience has given a fair amount of thought and feeling to what their purpose is, and maybe many people would say that they’ve found it. But if you interviewed everybody who works in an Amazon warehouse, or everyone who drives a UPS truck, or, you know, does this or that, or works at Walmart or something, I bet you’d find a fairly small percentage of people who feel, “Yes, my purpose is to work in this warehouse, and it’s everything I ever wanted.”

But “midwife” is a beautiful word, right? It wasn’t so much being a teacher or a guru or a professor or any number of things. It was about, how can I be a person who helps a person allow the natural process of awakening to spirit, awakening to their emotional adulthood, and awakening to their soul’s purpose?

I think most people would have an underlying feeling that there must be something more, and yet we need people to work in those warehouses and to drive the UPS trucks and to work in Walmart. So how do you kind of reconcile all the apparently necessary jobs—and we’ll see how necessary they are now, since hardly anybody’s doing them at the moment—with the fact that people need to do these things, and with the fact that people also probably, you and I would agree, have a right to discover and live their purpose? They shouldn’t just be tools in a cog in a big machine, sacrificing all fulfillment for the sake of being able to get things in two days on Amazon Prime.

Jonathan: Yeah, no, that’s a great inquiry. So first of all, I would disambiguate. I’d separate out two different types of dances in the world. There’s a teacher named Harley Swift here, and he said there’s a survival dance and there’s our sacred dance.

So I can’t speak for everybody in an Amazon fulfillment center, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say many of them are not thinking that this is their purpose. They’re like, “This is not where I want to do my 40 years of service to the world.”

Rick: Yeah, but thank God I have a job at the moment, you know?

Jonathan: Well, exactly. So being able to think about our soul-level purpose is predicated on a couple of things, right? If you look at Maslow’s pyramid hierarchy, you need safety and security, right? We need to eat. If I’m in California right now and an earthquake started to happen, my purpose wouldn’t be to have this really rich spiritual dialogue. It would be to get under this desk and save my hide.

Balancing the Survival Dance and the Sacred Dance

So it’s a sliding scale. We don’t always have the privilege. If we were in Syria right now, with the bombs falling and so forth, I would just try to save my life and the life of my child and my wife. So let’s make a division between our survival dance and our sacred dance, which we absolutely have to do. We need to pay the rent and we need to eat. I mean, there’s more, but those are two big ones.

So it’s a sliding scale. We don’t always have the privilege. If we were in Syria right now, with the bombs falling and so forth, I would just try to save my life and the life of my child and my wife. So let’s make a division between our survival dance and our sacred dance, which we absolutely have to do. We need to pay the rent and we need to eat. I mean, there’s more, but those are two big ones.

Rick: Yeah.

Jonathan: Okay. I don’t want to be homeless, and I don’t want to be hungry. And I’m really uninterested in experiencing what that’s like. I hope I escape this life without experiencing that.

Now, once you have that survival dance mostly taken care of—not perfectly, you know, unless you’re really rich, but you’re not suffering caloric insecurity or homelessness—then there is the possibility you come home from Amazon and ask this question, right? “What is my deepest purpose?”

Now, there’s a whole lot of soul-encounter or soul-work technologies that I can discuss in a moment, but putting that aside, there may be many people working in the Amazon fulfillment center who actually do know their purpose, but they haven’t made it—they haven’t brought their purpose and their survival dance together. So they may be doing amazing activist work. They may be doing amazing—you know, a church lady who’s just doing the heck out of serving her community. She may be right in the spot, but during the day she’s bagging groceries or whatever it may be.

So I really want to disambiguate the idea that our work is necessarily our purpose. If you can make it so, that’s the gold standard to me. I do this thought experiment: if I won the lottery—I don’t play it—but if I won and I had a hundred million dollars, what would change in my life? Well, I’d drink better wine and I’d go on nicer vacations, to be honest. But what would really change? Would I continue to do the work that I’m doing? And the answer for me is yes.

So I really want to disambiguate the idea that our work is necessarily our purpose. If you can make it so, that’s the gold standard to me. I do this thought experiment: if I won the lottery—I don’t play it—but if I won and I had a hundred million dollars, what would change in my life? Well, I’d drink better wine and I’d go on nicer vacations, to be honest. But what would really change? Would I continue to do the work that I’m doing? And the answer for me is yes.

Now, of course, it hasn’t been tested. If I get the hundred million, I’ll come back and, you know, so I do need it as my survival dance as well. But there it is: if you would continue to do what you’re doing, no matter that you don’t have to do it, there’s a higher likelihood that you’re living your soul’s purpose.

Rick: Yeah.

Jonathan: And if—you can go ahead.

Rick: Well, yeah, I’ve played the same game, and the only thing I can think I would do differently is take the donate button off of Batgap, because I wouldn’t want people to donate if I had a hundred million dollars. But otherwise, I’m doing exactly what I want to do.

In fact, before I started Batgap, I had this vision: I’d like to be able to walk in the woods, listening to some spiritual thing, talking to spiritual people, and somehow have it generate passive income so that I could do that stuff and not spend most of my waking hours crawling under people’s desks and fixing their computers, which is the kind of thing I was doing before. Or doing search engine optimization, which is another thing I did for well over a decade and which was kind of tedious.

Having done those things after some decades of teaching meditation, it might have seemed like, “Oh, I’ve totally lost my purpose,” because teaching meditation was so purposeful. But I saw it at the time as a necessary phase: I had to earn some money. And actually, understanding computers a lot better and search engine optimization has helped a lot with Batgap. So it all kind of came together finally.

Jonathan: Yeah. So I think your story is really illustrative of what we’re talking about: you had a survival dance, right? You did search engine optimization; you did tech work with computers, and this gave you sustenance. It was right livelihood. You did decent work. And you also had this spiritual impulse.

Now, I don’t know yet what your mythopoetic identity is, but whatever it is, it shined through and illuminated your being a TM teacher. It’s illuminating you right now as an interviewer on Buddha at the Gas Pump, and maybe in five years it’ll illuminate in yet another way. I don’t know.

Rick: And so, what does that mean, your mythopoetic identity? I don’t know what mine is either. Maybe I do know, but I just wouldn’t use that term.

Jonathan: Yeah. So I believe the word “mythopoetic” came from—let me think—Robert Bly, and then I believe he got it from J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, right? So you have the Gandalf character and the Frodo character, and one of the reasons we remember them so well is they weren’t just, “I’m a wizard and I do wizardy things.” You could feel the deeper, soul-level purpose in these characters, like Lord Aragorn, Strider. He never actually said what his mythopoetic identity is, but you could feel it.

Then there’s this fellow I’ve already mentioned a couple of times, Bill Plotkin, author of Soulcraft. Have you interviewed him?

Rick: No. I’ve heard you mention him, but I didn’t know much about him.

Jonathan: Yeah, a wonderful teacher. I highly recommend the book Soulcraft. He adopted the idea and called it a mythopoetic identity.

We have all these different identities in the everyday personality and ego, right? I’m a father, I’m a husband, I’m a teacher, I’m an adjunct professor, blah, blah, blah. I’m a friend. In the upper world of spirituality, the undivided, I am Sat Chit Ananda. I am being, consciousness, bliss. I am awareness itself.

Now, at the level of soul, what is your soul name? What is your image? It’s not necessarily in words. For me, that whole-person midwifery means that no matter what I do, I know who I am. So here’s a little story.

Years ago, I started some of my teaching work at Kaiser Permanente, a big hospital setting. First they had me teach, I think, overcoming depression, because I was a clinician. And I got the highest feedback scores in the department. I mean, you know, big fish in a small pond. There were maybe ten or twenty of us, maybe a dozen. I don’t know.

They said, “How did you do that?” And I said, “Oh, I don’t know.” They said, “Well, teach another one.” So they had me teach mind-body medicine. Then they had me teach mindfulness-based stress reduction. Then they had me teach couples communication. Each time, I got these really elevated feedback forms.

So the supervisor said, “Well, I don’t understand. These are very different curriculums. Are you teaching those curricula as we’re asking you to?” I said, “Absolutely.” I didn’t answer the person, because it might have sounded strange. But I’ll tell you the truth: wherever I am, I know who I am and what I’m really there to do, which is to midwife wholeness.

Of course, I do that differently with groups of people who are experiencing the devastation of depression, difficulties in their relationship, and so forth. If you really know the—like, if you look at Jung or Hillman, they say that imagination is primary, right? And in nonduality, they say awareness is primary. But what if it’s Sat Chit imagines, right? Or Sat Chit imagination? It would be being, consciousness, imagination.

In this understanding, there’s a whole imaginal matrix, a whole world of imagination. In Sufism, Ibn Arabi and Suhrawardi talk about Alam al-Mithal. You can see their pictures in this little thing here—there’s two of one there and one there. These old Sufi masters—I’m not a Sufi, but I love to learn from them—talked about Alam al-Mithal, which I translate as the “imagina-matrix,” and which Henri Corbin translated as Mundus Imaginalis, the imaginal world.

When you’re in touch with that, you experience that your ego is actually in service to a greater identity, a greater name. Your parents named you Rick. My parents named me Jonathan, but that’s not real. I mean, I could be Pete, I could be Jack. It doesn’t really mean much. So, that day when you realize what your true name is, there’s a level—

Rick: My parents actually named me Murgatroyd before I was born, because they didn’t know what I was going to be.

Jonathan: They named you what?

Rick: Murgatroyd.

Jonathan: Murgatroyd?

Rick: Yeah. As a matter of fact, when I was born, my uncle sent a telegram to my parents congratulating them on the birth of Murgatroyd, and the telegraph operator was so pissed that she basically wouldn’t send it.

Jonathan: You’re pulling my leg. On your birth certificate, it said Murgatroyd?

Rick: No, no, no. They named me that before I was born.

Jonathan: Oh, okay, okay.

Rick: Because they didn’t know whether I was going to be a boy or a girl and therefore what they were going to name me. So I was referred to as Murgatroyd.

Jonathan: Okay, now I get your humor. Your parents had it. There’s a lineage of that kind of humor. That’s great.

Rick: Didn’t mean to throw you off your game.

Jonathan: No, no, it’s fine. That’s lovely. Murgatroyd. That’s great.

Well, there’s what we would call the solid world, right, the so-called material world, although no one’s ever found the material world. You can’t actually find it. You go down to the subatomic level, and it’s mostly space, right? And then there’s the so-called nonduality, which we’ll sort of call awareness or consciousness, undivided, pure being.

Mythopoetic Identity and the Soul Name

But the archetypal and depth psychologists tell us that actually the world is made of imagination, pure imagination. So I like to take both of them and say being, consciousness, imagination. And in that imagination, we can discover our soul name. That is the mythopoetic identity—mythic because it’s not just about being a therapist or a purpose guide. It’s something much larger and more cosmological; and poetic because it’s not direct. It won’t tell your intellectual, discursive mind, “Oh, he’s a doctor. He’s a therapist.” Rather, it’s something mysterious.

I had to apprentice to being a whole-person midwife to discover what it was. Waking up to it at twenty wasn’t sufficient. It was a brief kensho or satori, but then to embody it took, well, decades and decades, and I’m still working on it.

Rick: Yeah. So it sounds like what you’re saying is that, starting with the unmanifest, universal Sat Chit Ananda, pure consciousness, whatever we want to call it, there’s a kind of sprouting or individuation that takes place. I’m not talking linearly in time, but even right now, we have that level of our life which is universal and impersonal, and then there’s a very deep level at which we begin to manifest as an individual, and it becomes more and more concrete. And we can actually fathom all these levels experientially.

But what it sounds like you’re saying is that just as we look different on the surface—our physical appearance, different personalities, and so on—there’s some differentiation or uniqueness going all the way down to the point at which we’re all one. And that very initial sprouting of our uniqueness is somehow akin to our soul purpose. Our soul purpose resides there at that level. Is that fair to say?

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think soul is a really interesting word, and I don’t have the market cornered on what it means. In fact, soul generally eludes really good definitions, just as the word God or mystery does. So I’ll give you my opinion. Following the Sufis, I would say that soul is perception. It’s an alternate way of knowing. It’s not a thing; it’s not a noun. It’s more of a verb.

In Sufism, they talk about alternate organs of perception. We know, we love thinking. I love thinking. I’m a huge reader, and I’m a cerebral guy, and that’s great. Nothing wrong with that. But on the meditation cushion, it does me squat to have that.

Rick: I can just as soon turn it off at that point.

Jonathan: Yeah, in fact, it could be a little bit of a hindrance because my mind likes to go chat, chat, chat. So then the question is, what’s the right tool for the right job in discovering our soul-level purpose?

To activate soul—soul’s already there. So to actually take the backward step and allow soul to come to the foreground of awareness, then we see through soul’s eyes. You could say that soul is a way of perceiving life. Instead of just seeing a tree outside my window here and naming it—my intellect goes, “Tree, that’s a bay tree. That tree is leaning over my house and it’s going to hurt,” you know, da, da, da, da, da—you can actually be in relationship to a tree.

This can sound animistic, but actually there is a presence. There is a life force to it. If you actually spend time with anything, even just a rock, a so-called inanimate object, you will find that it has a presence. It has a life force. So I would say it’s soul, it’s soul’s eyes, that allow us to see, feel, and experience the imagination, the imaginal realm. And that’s another word I would use for soul. Soul is imagination, right? When we experience our soul image, we’re experiencing soul itself. It’s not a decontextualized soul that just sort of transcends everything and hovers. It’s very much rooted in time and place.

When COVID-19 struck, immediately soul—I mean, my personality—went, “Ah!” I’m like, “Shit, this is really serious. My elderly father is in Canada. If he gets sick and dies, I can’t fly there. The borders are closed.” So my personality has its totally understandable reaction. Then, at the level of pure spirit, I’m like, “It’s okay. It’s the play. I can’t be harmed. Nothing can be harmed, and I’m good.” And then there’s another level that says, “What can I do? How can I be of service?” In my case, I’ve done just a few things. You came to a thing I called “Pandemic is Purpose,” and I can describe that if you want.

But the idea here is that soul is the source of deep and profound spiritual imagination. It’s not the imagination of, like, “If I win $100 million, I’ll get a yacht. I’ll get a yacht with not one helicopter pad, but two helicopter pads.” Okay, that is imagination, but the grade of that imagination is clearly coming from my ego. Whereas soul’s imagination, you discover it. And this is so important: You don’t get to choose your purpose. Some people get a little disappointed when they hear that, but I actually think it’s great.

The metaphor I use—or analogy, rather—is that when you discover your sexual orientation, you don’t get to choose. When I was a kid, at some point I woke up to the fact that I thought girls were just so pretty. I was like, “Oh my God, that girl, I can’t stop thinking about her.” Had I done it intellectually, I would have actually picked bisexuality. Why would I leave out all the nice-looking young men and so forth? But one discovers their orientation, gay, straight, bi, or whatever it is. Same thing—and you’re not disappointed. You’re just happy, unless you live in a homophobic world. I’m putting that aside for a moment. You’re just like, “Oh, I am attracted. My sexual attraction is moving. It’s flowing.” You’re so happy.

So in a way, she could have been a psychotherapist or any number of things. But what’s important is, if you take 10 palliative care physicians, put them in a room and ask them, “Why are you here? What’s your deepest driving desire in being a physician?” you will get 10 different answers, especially if they’re self-aware.

Discovering the Purpose Already Within

Well, same thing with your purpose. When I discovered whole-person midwifery, I didn’t go, “Oh, dang. I wish it was sexier. I wish… I’m in midwifery. Jeez, I’m a 20-year-old man.” No, it was more like, “Oh my God, thank you, mystery. I will now spend the rest of my life attempting to be of service to that image.” So that’s why I call it “soul purpose discovery.” You discover that which is already there.

Well, same thing with your purpose. When I discovered whole-person midwifery, I didn’t go, “Oh, dang. I wish it was sexier. I wish… I’m in midwifery. Jeez, I’m a 20-year-old man.” No, it was more like, “Oh my God, thank you, mystery. I will now spend the rest of my life attempting to be of service to that image.” So that’s why I call it “soul purpose discovery.” You discover that which is already there.

Same thing as in classical enlightenment. You don’t become enlightened. You discover that enlightenment as such is always there. In Zazen, they say, “You don’t sit to become enlightened. You sit to express the enlightenment that is already there.” You’re already Buddhas, but you don’t fully know it yet. You already have your soul’s purpose, but it’s unlikely that your parents or society have helped you discern it or given you the tools. This is why I would say there’s at least three, four, maybe five forces working against discovering our soul-level purpose.

Rick: We’ll have to get into those. As you’re speaking, I was reminded of—I think the guy’s name was Rob Schwartz, whom I’ve interviewed. He’s sort of in the line of thinking of Michael Newton, if you know who he was or is. His whole thing was regressing people hypnotically to the period between lives. Michael Newton initially discovered this accidentally, and then, by working with so many people and correlating what they all had to say, mapped out a very clear and consistent picture of what supposedly happens to us between lives.

Pretty much everyone says, “All right, you review where you’ve been, and you’re working in consultation with guides, and you kind of hatch a plan for what your next life is going to be and what your main experiences in that life are going to be—even traumatic and horrible ones that have somehow been designed to help you work out karma or something. And it would also include your soul purpose: What is your ideal? What are you meant to accomplish in this life, if you can?” So, in a sense, yes, we don’t choose what our soul purpose is, just as we don’t choose our sexuality, as you were just saying. Perhaps we do if this whole picture is valid. We kind of work it out, and then we come into life, little baby, we forget everything, and then we grow up and have to kind of discover what it is we came here to do.

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah. No, I like that. So I don’t know anything about that. I won’t presume to be able to piggyback on that particular work. Either as poetry or as fact, you can take this story either way. I’ve imagined a game in the Imagina Matrix that we could call “Acorns to Oak.” Aristotle had this beautiful Greek word, “entelecheia.” And in entelecheia, he said, “Of the acorn is the oak tree.” That acorn is absolutely not destined to be a maple tree or a human or a spider or a shark. Almost, you could say that the oak tree exists in the acorn itself.

Rick: Sure.

Jonathan: Now let’s imagine.

Rick: On the level of DNA, it definitely does.

Jonathan: Yeah. But you could say the soul, it’s that full—not a thing’s full potential, but its full actuality in a sort of mystically layered way. If you sort of drop the notion of time, it’s all there simultaneously.

And so in this game, let’s say that before we’re born, we’re playing a collective, multiplayer game. Right now, there are, whatever, 7.7 billion people playing: Get an Earth suit and then get into this game. And the ultimate goal of the game, I would say, is to midwife more beauty, truth, and goodness. But it’s a very dangerous game because at some point, about 200,000 years into the game—which is the age of our species, give or take, or 40,000 years for modern Homo sapiens—we become so intellectually powerful that we can build bombs and burn carbon like crazy. And we all become carbon addicts, right? We’re burning it in our engines, we’re burning it in our furnaces, we’re burning it when we fly.

So here we are: 7.7 billion acorn-to-oak-tree, Earth-suited addicts. And so it becomes very dangerous. Will we live or won’t we? We come to this moment and there’s this pivotal decade called the 2020s, and we can go either way. We can just keep burning and global warming—we should get to that at some point. It’s really a psycho-spiritual pressure on this game.

We can continue as business as usual and let our default purposes be more comfort, more safety. And it’s not that there’s anything wrong with comfort and safety. I crave it just as much as the next person. But if it’s the deepest driving desire of your life, then we get into trouble. You get into trouble in your personal life and in the collective life.

Our avatar, our Earth suit, we wear it out after 80 years or something, and we can come back to the game. But one of the big points of the game is to remember our mythopoetic identity, our soul image, and define what the theologian Frederick Buechner called, “Find the place where your deepest gladness and the world’s hunger meets.” I’ll say that again: Find the place where your deepest joy and the world’s great ache and need meet.

When you know what that is, you are, by definition, a happier person because you are behaving organically and indigenously to your very own soul. And when we’re not, we feel some dislocation, right? Our relationships don’t seem to work as well. Our work life doesn’t seem to work as well. Our parenting doesn’t seem to work as well. Just driving down the highway when someone cuts us off doesn’t seem to work as well, because we’re not well-seated in ourselves. When you’re well-seated, you can imagine that these things—you have a buffer, because you feel at one and undivided in your soul.

Rick: Yeah, of course, Joseph Campbell’s famous phrase, “Follow your bliss.” By that, he didn’t mean do whatever makes you feel good. I think he meant, you know, follow a higher purpose, which actually leads to bliss. You don’t associate the word bliss with getting a new car or getting a bigger house, or many of the things people strive for. Bliss is a term that’s usually used in a spiritual context—ananda—for a degree of happiness that’s sort of beyond that which relative things can provide. And I think that if we’re moving in the direction of finding that level of life where such happiness resides, then bliss is an appropriate term. The mind has a natural tendency to want to move toward it if it can see a way to do so and if it can be allowed to do so, if its natural tendency isn’t thwarted.

One more quick point to throw in before I forget it: Regarding fundamental purpose, we were talking earlier about Amazon workers and people like that. I think that whatever one finds oneself doing in life, perhaps needs to do under the present circumstances of one’s life, one can add a spiritual practice to that. So you meditate in the morning, you go to work at Amazon, you come home, you meditate again, you do yoga or whatever. Do some kind of spiritual practice, because that begins to shift everything in ways that you can’t possibly foresee and that will end up being very profound if it’s fruitful and if you stick with it religiously.

Chances are you won’t find yourself working at Amazon in five years because your life will have shifted so auspiciously. But even if you are working there, you’ll find that your level of contentment and meaningfulness in life has risen significantly over that period of practice. So anyway, I just want to throw that in.

Jonathan: Yeah, no, I love that. So, you know, I’m quite clear that I wouldn’t want to work on the Amazon floor. But if I had to, if there were two flavors of working there—one where I know my soul-level purpose and one where I don’t know my soul-level purpose—I’d take number one. Because with number one, I don’t know exactly how I would do this, but I would live my purpose to whatever degree possible on the Amazon floor. So it’s not impossible.

I’ve worked with incarcerated people. There’s a prison about ten miles from me called San Quentin. It’s a really huge prison here in California. It’s a famous prison—an infamous prison. I’ve been there a few times teaching this purpose work. I thought, “My God, some of these people are lifers. How does this work?” And it became clear to me very quickly. I asked myself, “Well, what would I do?” I thought, “It’s a community of 4,000 people. I mean, it’s huge. It’s like a city in there.” And I thought, “Well, I really actually believe, whether I’m deluded or it’s actually true, I really experience myself at a deep level doing this whole-person midwifery work. So I would do it there.” With whoever was interested, obviously—only a fraction of the guys would be interested. Some of them would want to beat me up if I said the truth.

But some would go, “Yeah, I can’t think of a better way to spend my life in prison than to discover who I really am, and then help some of the men in this miserable, forsaken prison have a better life.”

Rick: Yeah.

Jonathan: So, you know, that’s a much worse situation than being on the floor of Amazon or bagging groceries. It is really quite possible to live your purpose in almost any circumstance.

Rick: And if you consider that whatever our specific purpose may be—and there are various purposes among all of us in the world—we all have a fundamental purpose in common, which is to evolve spiritually. And you can do that anywhere if you play your cards right. You can do that in a prison. I interviewed a guy named Damien Echols about a year or so ago who spent 18 years on death row for a murder he didn’t commit. He dedicated himself to practicing ceremonial magic, eight hours a day or more, which he attributes his sanity and survival to. He said that he went in at the age of 18 and came out at the age of 36, so he spent half his life there up to that point. And he said that if he had it to do over again, he’d spend that time in prison again, because if he hadn’t, he would never have gotten into this spiritual practice in the way he was able to. So it was a horrific situation.

I mean, mosquitoes chewing on him, no light, lousy food, and it was a really bad prison down in Arkansas, I think. And yet he’s grateful for it, because it was so conducive to him getting on this spiritual path.

How Crisis Can Open Space for the Soul

Jonathan: Yeah, it’s so often the case—it doesn’t have to be, but it’s so often the case—that a crisis precipitates a deep spiritual inquiry. In some cases, it can be like right now. At the time of this recording, COVID-19 is raging, and it’s just increasing. If I had a magic wand, I’d wave it and it would go away. I don’t want it, and I’d pass on its spiritual treasure, quite honestly. But it is here. And so what it’s doing is creating ego destabilization, right? It’s cracking us. I’ve been in this house for weeks now with a 10-year-old boy bouncing off the walls. We can’t go to our offices to work. We barely can go out to do anything. It’s hard. There’s a hardship. And, of course, some people have it way harder because they’ve lost their job, they’re living paycheck to paycheck, and how are they going to even buy the next bag of groceries?

Well, if you can’t get rid of it—and we can’t get rid of COVID-19 today—then we can use it as grist for the mill. What it’s doing is cracking us open, creating these fissures in ego to let more soul in. So it’s a forced—it’s like this psychospiritual oven that’s so hot that it’s cracking us.

Rick: Is it really? I mean, maybe it’s doing that for you. Do you think it’s doing that for most of the people in the world? Is it doing it for people you see on the news? I mean, what do you base that assertion on?

Jonathan: Sure. Yeah, no, that’s a great question. What I feel some degree of certitude in is that the pandemic is disturbing and agitating deeply to everybody. We know it can come for us, and from the older side, we know that our chances of dying are a little elevated. And so we’re concerned, we’re nervous, some anxiety comes up, some fear. So the cracking begins to happen.

Now, what I said is it can let more soul in. So the space opens up. Now the question is, do the antibodies of default purpose come swooping in, which they will, and disallow that upwelling of soul? So just because you have the opportunity doesn’t mean you’re not going to get right in the way and tamp it down.

Rick: Yeah. So what you’re saying is that—you just used the word “opportunity”—this could be an opportunity for people, if they can see it as such and do the appropriate things, to really benefit from it.

Jonathan: Yeah. Well, I mean, a simple one is I took it for granted that I could go outside my whole 53 years. I could go outside and I could be in company. I just thought that was the normal way, and I thought I needed it. And I realized I don’t. I prefer it. I want it a lot, but no, actually, my freedom isn’t dependent on that. I’m finding that. I know there are moments—I want to be honest—where I’m like, “Yeah, I’m feeling like I really need to get out.”

Rick: Yeah, well, you can get out a little bit, can’t you? I mean, go…

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: But can you go walk on trails around there or something?

Jonathan: No, I can. I can. What I meant by “out” is go to an office or go to a movie or go to a restaurant.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Jonathan: Be with friends.

Rick: Right.

Jonathan: So I thought being with friends was a necessity. And it is one of the great joys of life. One of the great things is to be in community with people, live. And that’s not possible right now. And so to the extent that I was attached, and I was sort of unconsciously dependent on it, there is some liberation to be had and realized: “Yeah, actually, I don’t need that.”

And then I had some money in the—what do you call it?—the retirement account.

Rick: Right.

Jonathan: And boom, the Dow Jones goes down. So did I need that money? Well, I’m sad that I lost it. Anyone who invests in their potential retirement would like it not to get cut in half or whatever it did. No, I’m okay. So we discover again and again that our freedom wasn’t dependent on really anything.

Now, for a while there, the tectonic plates will shift, and we’ll be like, “No, what are you talking about? I need all these things.” And, of course, if I had no money, then my survival and safety would be threatened, and I think that would be a different scenario. So that’s one of the freedoms that we can discover and deepen as a result of this imposed spiritual retreat that we’re made to do.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, I have a question that’s been kicking around in the back of my head all week as I’ve been listening. It’s like in a Shakespeare play, let’s say, there are good guys, or in a Western, you know, there are good guys and bad guys. And if all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players, then in the play of human life over the millennia, there have been all sorts of characters playing different roles. If you have a sort of bad-guy role, such as Adolf Hitler, to take one extreme example, are you living your life’s purpose? Is that his purpose, to play such a role in the game of life? Or could he have found a higher calling? He didn’t, so maybe he couldn’t, to paraphrase Byron Katie. But, you know, do we have choices from low to high, and can we possibly always have chosen a higher purpose than the one we chose, particularly if we choose some nefarious role to play?

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah. I love that question. So, yeah, let’s use Hitler. I mean, everyone knows him. Clearly, his soul-core powers—at some point, if there’s time, I can elucidate—there are sort of eight facets of purpose in my cosmology. And one of them is our soul-core powers. He had, amongst other things, a great deal of organization, and he had the power of oratory. I mean, I don’t speak German, but you listen to one of those speeches, and he’s like, you know, and people are just cheering. So he was a powerful guy.

In my estimation, he absolutely did not live his soul’s core purpose. It got twisted. You can see the strand, the pure strand, and then the twist. The pure strand is that he was very into evolutionary—what shall we call it?—development of humans. The master, the Übermensch, is what Nietzsche called it, right? To be the superman or superwoman, to be this person and really fulfill the destiny of humanity. And so he kind of pushed that forward, but he did it in a terrible way. He picked out one race of people and burned millions of others. So he clearly was on to something and then went berserk in the wrong direction.

So let’s do a thought experiment. He comes to me—God forbid; I wouldn’t want him as a client—and says, “I want to find my soul-level purpose.” I’m like, “Great, let’s do it.” And once he found it, by definition, a purpose is a purpose beyond self that serves others. It always serves something else. When I studied with this one shaman—and shamans are into power in a good sense—he said, “You must never use these abilities for yourself. Don’t use them in a self-serving, narcissistic, selfish way. Only use them in service of others.” He didn’t do that.

Now, if he had used that oratory, that passion, his work ethic, and all that he had at his disposal, and had discovered his soul-level purpose, he would have been an unbelievable force of nature. So, yeah, I don’t believe for one moment that his destiny—like you and I, I’ll speak for myself—means there isn’t a part of me that is… It’s not a part that I exercise. Let’s call it the criminal Jonathan. Well, you know, bank robbery. There’s that joke: the judge says, “So why did you rob the bank?” And the guy goes, “Because that’s where the money was.” So there’s the bank robber in me.

Well, I don’t do it. Why? Even if I knew I could get away with it, I could say, “Well, it’s Bank of America or Citibank. They have enough money. They won’t…” I don’t want to scare people. I don’t want to be part of corrupting and harming society. So it’s not like it’s not there. It does exist. It’s a voice or a subpersonality. You could call it evil. I’m not in touch with, at least not consciously, my deep Hitlerian evil. But, you know, I can imagine bank robbery. Yeah, I could bank-rob and da-da-da, break into people’s homes. That’s the choice, right? That’s a selfish, egoic desire to have money and do it efficiently and quickly at other people’s expense. By definition, that’s not a soul-level purpose. It doesn’t bring more beauty, goodness, or truth into the world.

Rick: So based on that explanation, we could generalize to say that everybody in the world who is doing something selfless and helping others is more likely to be in line with their soul purpose, with their higher purpose. Such as, for instance, all the healthcare workers now who are working in the hospital long hours, many of them getting sick with COVID-19 in the process. And anybody who is doing something out of selfish motives, or anything that’s hurting others, is not in tune with their soul purpose. I’m not saying that’s necessarily true, but I’m just saying, based upon your explanation, that would be a conclusion.

Jonathan: I wouldn’t quite say it that way. Because let’s say you come from a lineage of doctors. Your grandfather was a doctor. Your father was a doctor. Your mother was a doctor. And you just went into medicine because that’s the family business. Now you’re a good doctor. You help people. Terrific. So you’re still a net benefit to the world. But that doesn’t mean you’re living your soul-level purpose. So you can be doing great work in the world and hate it.

Rick: It’s true. Some people do.

Jonathan: It happens. It happens. So what we want is that sweet spot where it’s your greatest joy meeting the world’s hunger. That’s the metric. That Frederick Buechner line is worth its weight in platinum: Find that specific one place where your great joy and the world’s hunger meet. No one wants to watch me ski race. No one wants to listen to me jazz drum. I would have been a jazz drummer if I had the talent. I didn’t. And I would have enjoyed it. Maybe I would have gotten into a certain place where it would have served others. So, no, that’s not my destiny. So I found: What are my core soul powers and talents? And where is the mystery, or life, asking me to deploy them?

Rick: There was a song by the band that was Bob Dylan’s backup band, and they were from Canada, just for context. The line was, “I’m a thief and I dig it.” So, you know, I guess the question here is, can you be doing something that’s not life-supporting, but you dig it? So in that case—

Jonathan: Yes.

Rick: You said—

Jonathan: Yes.

Rick: It provides satisfaction to you.

Jonathan: Totally. It may occur. I mean, I don’t think it will, but it may occur that I take two months off work, take my kid out of school, and we become ski bums for two months in the winter.

Rick: Sounds like fun.

Now, I don’t know yet what your mythopoetic identity is, but whatever it is, it shined through and illuminated your being a TM teacher. It’s illuminating you right now as an interviewer on Buddha at the Gas Pump, and maybe in five years it’ll illuminate in yet another way. I don’t know.

Jonathan: You spend January—it does. I would totally dig it. And you know what? That would be a lovely thing: to take a break and just do something that brings me alive and makes me have a lot of fun. Now, it doesn’t have to serve enlightenment. It doesn’t have to serve soul-level purpose. It can be enough to have a prolonged period of digging it and just being a ski bum.

Rick: And it wouldn’t be hurting anybody unless you decimated your family’s income or finances or something. Whereas robbing banks or stores would be hurting people.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Rick: You might find it gratifying if that was your proclivity.

Jonathan: Yeah. One of the thought experiments I like to run with people is, okay, let’s use the lottery. You win the lottery. And enforced in the thought experiment is that you get to take six months and have fun, do whatever you want. Let’s do a thought experiment that you’ve won the lottery. You’ve got 10 million, 100 million, whatever. So the first question is: What do you just want to do that you always wanted to do but couldn’t afford? I’d want to be a ski bum. I’d want to take several months and just ski with my son. Then I’d want to fly around the world and stay in five-star hotels and eat at five-star restaurants. I’d want to—what’s the word? I want to be a hedonist. I want to experience what it would be like to be a hedonist.

But here’s the thing: after six months, I think I’m done. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life just eating, you know, whatever. It’ll be fun. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m going to really enjoy the museums in Paris and the food in Japan and all of that. So at some point we allow ourselves to feel satiated. We have to allow it, because you can always go to the next—you know, I made the joke about one helicopter pad on your yacht, and then I didn’t need another. So at some point we go, okay. So I took the time to really enjoy, to be happy, but it never brought me deep joy. Not that deep bliss. It’s wonderful, but it isn’t sustaining and it doesn’t have the depth.

And then we ask, okay, now I don’t have a survival-dance need. What can I do again, like with Mary Oliver, with this one wild, precious life? And the thing that I would want to do is twofold. One, I’d want to go see how far this spiritual well goes, whatever this word “awakening” is. It seems to me so far it must be endless. It just keeps going. So that’s number one. Number two is: How much can I love? And Canadians will say, you know, “Leave it all out on the ice,” right? You know, playing hockey. I would like to love so exuberantly, so deeply and fully, that on my deathbed in hospice, or surrounded at home by loved ones, I’ll be like, “Yeah, I really was a demonstration of love in the world. I proved to the people around me that true love exists.”

And so I would refrain, or at least cut back, from being a ski bum and traveling the world and see what is inside of me, uniquely inside of me, that I can offer. And it’s not just choosing anything, right? If I had the ability to be a doctor, I wouldn’t want to do it. I don’t want the blood and the pus and the guts. It’s just not me. What can I say? I’m squeamish. I don’t even like needles. I get a little—so then we ask the question: What am I called to? What is life calling me toward? And we ask the right thing. We ask soul.

Because if you ask your parents—my parents, the best they could come up with, which was still pretty good, was, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And what they meant was, “How do you want to earn your living?” So it’s not a bad question, because it turned out they were right. After I got out of college, the money spigot stopped and I had to earn my own living. Okay, good question. So that took care of the survival dance. I became a psychotherapist, et cetera.

But then the question is: How do I occupy what is actually authentic? What is actually indigenous, you know, and organic to me? And so I discovered soul work, or depth psychology, archetypal psychology, the vision quest ceremony, and so forth. All of these things are a road, a pathway between everyday personality and ego, which poses the question, and the answer—which is embedded—is, in fact, a living force inside of you that I would call soul.

Rick: Yeah. Well, you know, the Buddha kind of won the lottery, right? He was born a prince and grew up in a palace, and he had it made materially. And yet he realized something was wrong in his little sheltered existence, that there was a higher purpose he wasn’t being shown in the life he was living. And he realized he had to find—

Jonathan: I love the Buddha, but I’m also a little critical. I was lay-ordained in the Zen tradition, so I’m a great, great, great lover of the Buddha. But let me just look at the Buddha’s story.

Rick: You didn’t like the way he left his wife and kid?

Jonathan: I did not. Because I think one of the things it shows—and, of course, it’s beyond my pay grade to state unequivocally that one must never leave their wife and kids, because who am I to say such a thing?—but I will give my very impassioned idea that when one wakes up, as he did, there wasn’t enough to just be a prince and have a wife and children. He woke up. He had a mini-wakening before he went out and had the big one under the Bodhi tree. It is almost never important to become a deadbeat dad in the process of finding your life’s purpose.

Rick: No, especially in our modern society. He’s very famous.

Jonathan: And he didn’t come back. It’s interesting. Upon awakening, upon having this maha, right, the great enlightenment of the Buddha, he didn’t actually come back to the palace and say, “Hey, kids, I’m sorry. I had to do this.” So I think it’s illustrative of the passion and ardor, the love he had for his path. But I don’t believe that one needs to completely blow up one’s middle-world life in order to find and live their purpose. He could have visited on the weekends, so to speak.

Rick: You know, we haven’t mentioned the word “dharma” in this conversation. I think that word is very much synonymous with purpose. But there’s a verse in the Gita which says, “Because one can perform it, one’s own dharma, though lesser in merit, is better than the dharma of another. Better is death in one’s own dharma. The dharma of another brings danger.” So, you know, perhaps his dharma was to be a monk; perhaps it was to be a householder, and he abandoned that dharma. But in any case, dharma is that which we are capable of performing well. To try to live somebody else’s—let’s shift to the word “purpose” here—to try to live somebody else’s purpose can be downright dangerous, because it’s not suited to you.

Jonathan: Oh, perfectly put. Yeah. So I coined this word—maybe others use it too—but I call it “default purpose.” In my cosmology, my understanding is that we all—all 7.7 billion people—live on purpose, because we are meaning-makers, we’re storytellers. We cannot help but tell some story about life, because nature abhors a vacuum. So even if you’re a nihilist, you’re like, “There is no meaning.” Okay, well, you’ve just decided that it’s a meaningless universe, and that you live in it.

Rick: That’s meaning for you.

Jonathan: That’s the meaning. There’s no meaning. And then whether you can make one up or not, it’s pointless to say whether you should or not. Okay, so default purpose is insidious, because if you don’t actively ask, “What is my original or my organic purpose?” you will inherit—another word I like is “inherited purpose”—which is to say, “My family basically gave me the, you know, be financially successful, have a nice family, be a good person.”

So that’s not bad. I mean, you know, better than many others. Better than being the parents of, I don’t know, an ISIS terrorist. So they didn’t tell me to start a caliphate and kill every infidel. So it had that going for it. But we will cling to a default purpose if we do not ask whether there is a higher, deeper, or more organic purpose to us. And we can run with that all the way. We can run with it to death. I mean, we can see the current occupant of the Oval Office, you know, being big and flashy and showy and billions and rich and all that. It’s just, it’s overtaken so very much. So we can see that you can become absolutely filled with a purpose that is not truly yours at a soul level.

Rick: Yeah. Have you put together a list of really great “find your purpose” movies?

Jonathan: No, I haven’t. That’s a great—

Rick: Here’s one for you that came to mind as you were speaking: Dead Poets Society.

Jonathan: Yeah, that’s good.

Rick: Yeah, that would have been—so that’s your number one on your list. There are all kinds of movies in which they play that theme. And it might be a cool thing to recommend on your website or something.

Jonathan: Good idea.

Rick: Yeah.

Jonathan: Yeah, well, we all hear the call. I think—well, no, let me back up. Many of us hear the calling, but we just brush it off. Even Ramana Maharshi, who I consider—he’s a classic Indian sage. Many, many people know him. His picture is right here. I got to meet him when I was 16, not in the flesh, but—he died in 1950. I wasn’t even born.

Rick: Last life.

Jonathan: He was instrumental. He was the classic Indian sage who came to me at 16 through his books. And I got this image, right? But he’s like, what? A one-loincloth type of guy. He just sits there at Arunachala. But even he had a calling. At 16—or maybe it was 17—he went through his sort of experiment with dying. Then he felt this calling to go to Arunachala. The mountain called him, and he obeyed.

So even though he lived what I would call a very upper-world-heavy, spirit—what would we call it?—samadhi-oriented life, even he was obeying a calling. And so many of us have heard a calling again and again and again, sometimes induced by a crisis, like a divorce or a sickness, and we just brush it off. So it’s there. And some people haven’t heard it for many reasons. One, they’re stuffed up with default purpose, and so it’s important to clear a path and actually have the ability to open up the line between self, small self, and soul.

Rick: I think one good aspect of what you’re doing is that it might awaken in people the realization that they might have a deeper purpose, which they hadn’t even—I mean, if you don’t know that such a thing might exist, you’re not likely to look for it.

Jonathan: We live in a—

Rick: Yeah, you get them to realize that maybe I do have a higher purpose, and then what could it be? So it can kind of get the ball rolling, you know?

Jonathan: It’s so important to introduce this idea to our children. I have a 10-year-old; you met him for two seconds before the meeting. I’ve said to him just once a year, because he’s only 10, “Did you know that deep inside of you is a soul-level purpose?” And he’s listening to me like, “Yeah, well, you’ve always told me that, Dad.” And I’m like, “Do you have any idea what it is?” And he goes, “I have no idea.” And I said, “That’s okay. You’re 10. You don’t need to know, but I just needed to let you know that if you’re interested, it’s waiting for you.” My parents didn’t say that, and society doesn’t say that.

So if you look at mainstream psychotherapy today, it’s much more accepted, right? Psychology in general. But it’s mostly about making that which is unconscious conscious and bringing us into healing, healing and joy. Well, that’s terrific, but that’s as far as it goes. Now, if you look at classical or traditional non-duality, it’s not really heavy on the soul’s-purpose piece. It’s embedded; it’s in there, but it’s not in the foreground. It’s more about awakening from the delusion of separation, but it’s less heavy on the last ox-herding picture, which is coming back into the marketplace. And then the question is, what does that sage do?

So you could say that we’re in a really optimum time, that the technologies of psychotherapy are here to help us become happier, more integrated, more fully functioning egos. The technologies of non-duality, from Nisargadatta Maharaj to Ramana Maharshi to modern teachers like mine, like Adyashanti and Rupert Spira, are teaching wildly beautiful iterations of classical Advaita. But what isn’t present as much is this underworld journey to soul. This underworld journey to soul.

And so, actually, lucky me, I asked Adyashanti if he would do a book club with us. He wrote an original piece on purpose and soul for my institute, Purpose Guides Institute, and on May 7th he’s going to come and start doing an online thing. My attempt—and it seemed to have worked—was to ask a master, who I regard as a master, Adyashanti, to teach to that piece of soul and purpose. And lucky for me, he was like, “Yes.”

So I think the non-duality of the future, so to speak, the one that’s fleshed out more—I think the two-stage model, the old model of illusory separate self and then pure open awareness, I would like to take that scroll, roll it up, put it in the Advaita Museum, and leave it there. It has some problems. I would want to add this whole lower world of spiritual dimension that Jung, Suhrawardi, the Sufis, Hillman, and the shamans have pointed out. Then we’ve got a true non-duality, in my opinion.

Rick: Yeah, I think this whole notion of the world as an illusion has been misunderstood. I think what it really means—the word “maya” itself comes from roots which mean “which” and “not,” so “that which is not.” But to my understanding these days, what it really means is that it’s not that there is no world, no person, or anything like that. It’s just that we’re not perceiving the world or the person in their full value. We’re not perceiving them in terms of what they actually are. We’re perceiving some distorted, limited, smudged glimpse of them.

So if you could really see the world aright, you would see it as glorious, beautiful, divine, totally profound—not in any way accidental or something that we only got stuck into through some descent or fall, and that we have to do our darnedest to get out of once and for all. You know, that whole way of thinking, I think, is misguided.

Jonathan: Yeah, beautifully put. There’s a saying—I can’t remember whom to attribute it to. When I do, I’ll say it—but the person said, “For a thing to be here, it needs to be mostly somewhere else.” For a thing to be here, it needs to be mostly somewhere else.

That is to say that I don’t picture soul as being inside of us, though we can take the inward-facing path and discover souls, as it were, inside of us. But ultimately, I actually see that we are inside of soul and soul inside of spirit. So in that video game, Acorns to Oaks, this is actually the three-dimensional or four-dimensional video game, and it’s a liveware-space video game that’s taking place in soul. And this is just the avatar. This hand, this hair that’s falling out of my head and graying on my chin, is the avatar. It’s an aging avatar, but what are you going to do? And that’s not what I really am. It’s my Earth Suit interface. And we mistake the Earth Suit interface for the real deal.

When we get really lost in Pac-Man, I actually think the ghosts are coming to get my Pac-Man, and I’m like, “Ah, I died.” I’ll even say, “Oh my God, I died.” No, I didn’t. My avatar did. And so we just have to place our Earth Suit avatar very carefully in what is real.

Rick: When you said that, you know, for a thing to be here, it must exist somewhere else, what came to my mind is an iceberg. Okay, I see this iceberg sticking out of the water. There must be a whole lot more iceberg underneath the water that I don’t see. So anything we see—a tree, a person, a dog, a cat, anything—we’re seeing the gross surface value of it, but there are subtler and subtler and subtler, more refined levels, right down to the celestial level of these things, including rocks and anything. And then beyond that, or within that, is the transcendent, the universal consciousness. Or we could say everything is within that. It works both ways: that is within everything, and everything is within that.

Jonathan: Yeah, that’s a great metaphor, because we see, what, a tenth of the ice of the magnificent iceberg above the surface. That’s what we’re conscious of. But underneath is so much.

Another metaphor I like is to consider a probe, like a space probe. So you see the space probe; it’s going past Saturn.

Rick: Voyager.

Jonathan: Voyager. And you think that’s the probe. The answer is no. It’s just the tiny little extension of something that mostly exists at NASA, Cape Canaveral, with 60 or 100 scientists sitting at computers. So for a thing to be seen—the Voyager spacecraft—it’s mostly unseen. Most of what the probe is is back at Space Command. So you, Rick Archer, are a probe sent from the multidimensional reality, and you get hopefully 80 years out of this probe, and it eventually goes. But it’s not who you are. That’s not who I take you to be.

Rick: We’re sense organs of the infinite.

Jonathan: Beautiful.

Rick: A couple of questions came in. Let’s see where these take us. This is Ravi from the United Arab Emirates. He asks, “Many of the Western masters speak of purpose, but most Eastern masters transcend purpose and teach that there is no real purpose for the individual soul except to find out and experience the ultimate reality and to establish in that state. How do you reconcile the two views? Is there a spiritual evolutionary ladder from purpose to no purpose?”

Jonathan: Yeah, that’s beautiful. Thank you, Ravi. So, yeah, the classical teachings, right? You’ve read many of the same sources that I have. There are some—I would call them the radical fringe, and that’s fine. They’re real specialists, and they say the deepest purpose is to transcend any story, any narrative, any purpose, soul-level or not. And in a sense, that’s correct, right? Because even beyond any purpose is just, what shall we say, awareness at rest, at peace as itself.

But I would also say that pure being is one face of life. There’s also the becoming, the evolutionary impulse to move. Humans, so far as we can tell, also want to move and do, contribute, and love. So the wisdom or discriminating part of Advaita, I agree with, is to transcend all purpose. But then the question is, “All right, I’ve transcended all purpose. It’s the 10th ox-herding picture. I’ve come back into the marketplace. What do I do?” And we want to be of service. We want to love. So if love isn’t in the mix, and love doesn’t want to express itself as support and some kind of activism, then I’d say it’s a drier Advaita, drier non-duality.

Rick: And most sages who have realized the self do something with it. Some of them will just stay in a cave, but very few of them would ever say, “You know, I’ve got mine, to heck with all you people.” Most of them knock themselves out trying to help others, sometimes in very manifest ways. Some of them, like Amma, build orphanages and schools and hospitals and all that stuff, or just sit and teach, like Ramana. But still, he was very involved in his ashram, crawling around on the floor, picking up grains of rice, teaching people not to be wasteful, and, you know, involved. He could have just sat in the cave, but after doing that long enough, I think he was ready to roll, and he came out and served a purpose.

Jonathan: Yeah, he was called by his people. Apparently, the stories that I’ve read—I have a bunch of the books—say he was pretty happy to sit there in samadhi for years and years and years. Eventually people were like, “We want to learn,” and he accepted the invitation. He could have said, “Nope,” or he could have just stayed in samadhi and let the ants eat him up, and he’d leave it at that. But life called him, and he responded. To me, that’s the movement of enlightenment. That’s enlightenment in action, or rubber hitting the road, as Ajah says.

We have all these different identities in the everyday personality and ego, right? I’m a father, I’m a husband, I’m a teacher, I’m an adjunct professor, blah, blah, blah. I’m a friend. In the upper world of spirituality, the undivided, I am Sat Chit Ananda. I am being, consciousness, bliss. I am awareness itself.

Rick: Yeah, that very often happens too. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s teacher, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, left home at the age of eight and was just living in jungles and caves and whatnot all of his life, and attained realization at an early age. And he was, I think, about 70 when they finally managed to recruit him to become Shankaracharya. They’d been working on him for about 20 years, and finally he just kind of went with the call that was hitting him and served in that function for 13 years.

But, you know, I think a lot of times sages are responsive to the—I’m thinking of Carlos Castaneda’s teacher at the moment—he would see everything that happened in the environment as meaningful and as indicative of something, and not just as accidental or meaningless. And so sages are very often responsive to the calls of devotees or circumstances or whatever. They take it; they’re so in the flow that all of that is part of the divine orchestra.

Jonathan: Yeah, well, that is one—that’s another path to soul purpose: through transcendence. So one could say that when I go on retreats with Rupert Spira, who’s, to my mind, kind of a classical non-dual teacher, he doesn’t really speak of purpose and narrative and story. But here he is just doing the heck out of such precision. He’s using his soul-core powers magnificently.

And so what I see, the way I see it, is he’s had this Maha awakening, and then he’s being used by life for a purpose. And in my conversations with Adyashanti in preparation for this book club, same thing. He said, “Yeah, you know, early on I didn’t really talk about it. I thought purpose was sort of like second fiddle. And now,” he said to me, “I realize that I was living a purpose all the time, but I was unconscious of it. Like, what were the actual essentialities of what I was meant to do in the world?” And so now he had, how you would say, a post-awakening awakening to purpose after having become so ardent around classical enlightenment.

Rick: One thing I like about Adya is he’s very cognizant of the fact that he’s still a work in progress, and things are always evolving for him.

Jonathan: Yeah, his humility knocks me out. Really, I’m blessed to know someone that humble who’s gone so far.

Rick: Before I forget to ask you, when is this book club with him, and how can people participate in it if they want?

Jonathan: The preview call, kind of the intro one hour that anyone can come to for free, is live on May 7th at 6 p.m. Pacific time. So just go to PurposeGuides.org and you can sign up and come and be with Adya live, and hear him talk about purpose.

And then we have a two-session book club two and three weeks after that May 7th date where you can actually study with him and ask him questions specifically around finding and living your life’s purpose.

Rick: Good, okay.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Rick: A question came in from John in Strasbourg, France. You mentioned earlier, he says, that you would get back to talking about the three or four forces which work against the fulfillment of one’s purpose. So let’s talk about that.

What gets in the way of discovering purpose

Jonathan: Yeah, so one is we live in a soul-illiterate culture. It’s just not in the mix, right? As I said, my family—standard, decent family—my grandparents never asked my parents, “Do you know what your soul-level purpose is? Do you know that you have one?” It wasn’t in their tradition, it wasn’t in their background, and that’s fine.

But we could have, a la the Sufi tradition, a la some Native Indigenous traditions, this idea that actually there is something that is uniquely ours to serve the tribe. So then there’s the vision quest ceremony: fasting and praying for four days out in wild nature. An elder in the community—we don’t have this now, but they did, and maybe still do in some places—would be able to see when the young person was ready to go out and find out what was theirs.

They would call it the giveaway. I don’t remember the actual Native American word for this. And they would fast and they would pray. I think it was called Humblečeya, or Humblečeya (Haŋbléčeyapi), and that’s the translation of the word for vision quest. It means to lament, to cry—literally crying for a vision of your mythopoetic identity, for what your true occupation at a soul level is to give into the world. And so I didn’t have that. I had a bar mitzvah.

Rick: Your parents never told you about any kind of life purpose or anything like that?

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah. So, let’s see. Yeah, so the question is, what are the forces working against our awakening to our soul-level purpose? So, yeah, one of them is we live in a soul-illiterate culture.

So, in the old days, there would be—things are just popping up on my screen, got to get rid of them here—in the old days, an elder could spot when a youth was ready to go out into the wild and do this fast, do this vision fast, right? Humblečeya, meaning this lament, this cry: “I want my life to be true. I want to live in accordance with what is really mine.”

And then they would come back and they could offer their giveaway: the thing that was theirs to truly gift the community. So, yeah, I said, you know, in my case, the rite of passage or initiation was a bar mitzvah. Well, you know, that’s fine, but it didn’t exactly get me my soul-level purpose. So, a soul-illiterate culture: I wasn’t taught it in the schools. I was a religion major, a psychology major, a philosophy major, you know; it wasn’t there. I didn’t find it, though I was looking for it, and didn’t get it from my family, didn’t get it from TV. So it’s not there.

Rick: Yeah, it’s not like they’re all conspiring to hold out on you and conceal it because they haven’t found it either.

Jonathan: Exactly, exactly. Yep, totally. And so another is simply competing commitments. We can take the first levels of Maslow’s hierarchy—safety, security, belonging, and esteem—and we can build an entire life’s purpose around those, right? I want more fame, more money, more safety, more security, more friends, more likes on my Facebook posts, more whatever, you know.

Rick: More people at my rallies.

Jonathan: More people at my rallies, you know. So, okay, you know, that’s fine. Of course, I would like my programs to be well attended, so there’s nothing wrong with that. I would like you to think I’m intelligent and not dumb. Okay, fine. I would like to feel safe and secure. That’s fine, and it’s necessary, but then, sans knowing our deep soul-level purpose, those can become our abiding purpose. Those become the center of gravity.

So if we are always thinking, “Well, I want 10 thousand dollars more, and then I’ll be happy.” Well, you know, I tried this when I was a psychotherapist. I started off—I earned 30,000 25 years ago—and I thought, “Well, if only I could earn…” And then I did, and then guess what I thought? “Well, if only I could earn 50.” And I mean, this would go on endlessly, I’m quite certain, if I kept running the experiment.

So our competing commitments can become addictions. We can become so attached to them that they drown out anything else. And along with that comes just the fact that we actually have, unconsciously, layers of default purpose or inherited purpose. We actually feel like we’re driving towards something. And in some ways, that’s true. We want to become more erudite. We want to get a better body and become stronger. We want to have more friends or whatever it is. And they’re wholesome to a degree, but they don’t touch. They’re usually purposes of the ego and personality, and not our true mythopoetic identity.

So those are some of the forces working against. And just the safety one. Like, sometimes when I ask people in an introductory class, I say, “If I had a magic wand, which I don’t, and I could wave it and you would have your soul-level purpose, is there any part of you that wouldn’t want it?” And they raise their hands and they say always the same things. They go, “Well, what if I’m not good at it?” “Okay.” “What if I can’t make any money at it?” “Ah, okay. What if people laugh at me?” “All right.”

So what we have here is different voices, different aspects that have other purposes. I don’t want to be laughed at. I’m not particularly terrified of it. But, you know, if you get a hundred emails in your comments saying, “That joker is an idiot,” you know, I’ve got thin skin. I’ll feel it, right? So then maybe that will push me away. But if you’re really on fire with your purpose, you can take it. It’s not even taking it; it moves actually through you.

Rick: You know that Gita verse I quoted, “Because you can perform it, your own dharma is better than the…” Is it true of one’s soul purpose that you are likely to be good at it more so than anything else, because it is actually your soul purpose?

Jonathan: Yeah. So it’s above my pay grade to understand exactly how this works, but it also makes intuitive sense. If this cosmology has the perfume of truth—of course, everything I’m saying isn’t the truth; it’s the facsimile. It’s a word story that points to the truth—so by definition, when you’re living your purpose, you are made to do it and do it well.

So it’s been noted that everything in the world lives its purpose naturally and organically except for a Homo sapien. Because a Homo sapien—I was watching Yo-Yo Ma and dreaming the other day, like, “If I had the talent, I’d like to be Yo-Yo Ma.” But I’m not. I wasn’t meant to be. When I was 16, I watched Gandhi come out, the Ben Kingsley version, and I was just like, “I want to be Gandhi when I grow up.” Well, it turned out I didn’t, and the reason is obvious: I’m not him. He did what he did.

So, by definition—and you don’t have to trust this, but I would ask people to consider that—you will be good at it. It will feel natural, it will fit you like a glove, it’ll be a bespoke tailored suit or dress, because it’s the most natural thing in the world for you to do the thing for which you were created.

Rick: Yeah, that sounds good. I think we wanted to talk about climate change a little bit, and we can perhaps make this conversation segue into it. I’m showing a graphic on the screen right now that you showed in your webinar yesterday, with a bunch of sharks. People can see what I’m showing and you know what I’m showing, so it’s pretty obvious. I’ll let people look at it for a minute while you explain it. How is it that this—why did you show this graphic in your webinar, and how would this relate to our whole topic of today?

Purpose, climate change, and collective action

Jonathan: Yeah, so as I said, I really believe that the meta-purpose of humanity is to midwife more goodness, truth, and beauty. Here at the time of COVID, I’ve been watching videos with my 10-year-old—I mean, the poor guy’s bouncing off the wall. So we did Beethoven’s Fifth on TV last night; two nights ago we did Beethoven’s Ninth and Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach concertos—not concertos, but Bach somethings.

Rick: So you’re watching videos of symphonies?

Jonathan: Yeah, I’ve got to do something.

Rick: Those are great ones. Do Beethoven’s Sixth also.

Jonathan: Okay, Beethoven—he was somewhere in the 1700s. I was just saying to my son, “This German fellow apparently couldn’t even hear the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf by that point.” It’s just unbelievable. There’s a guy living his purpose. Now, was he enlightened? Did he fulfill the wake-up part? I have no idea. I don’t have a sense that he did. Was he a mature emotional adult in his middle world? I don’t think so. Maybe he was, but maybe he was a very hard guy to get along with. But what he did do is he had the soul-core power, and he did it to the hilt, to the hilt. He was made to do it. He could do it even deaf. So it’s just an amazing thing to be a human.

If we all were to awaken to our own soul-core power, we may not end up doing it at the level of a Gandhi or a Beethoven. In fact, we will likely not do it at that level. I don’t think that’s what’s in store for me. If it is, fine, but I don’t think so. We play it to the level that the mystery brings us to, and it feels so good. So one of the things that I—

Rick: I just want to interject that Kabir was a potter—a weaver, a weaver—and wrote all this beautiful poetry. Rupert Spira, when I first interviewed him, I think he was still employed as a ceramic artist. Then he finally gave that up to be a full-time teacher.

Jonathan: So, yeah, when I met Adyashanti, he was a machinist. He had a survival dance.

Rick: That’s right.

Jonathan: He was living his purpose because he was waking up in the morning, had a meditation hut, and would meditate three hours a day before doing this blue-collar job, maybe low-paying, right? But he was on it. So just because you’re doing a job that isn’t sort of your soul’s purpose doesn’t mean that you aren’t on fire with it.

Rick: Yeah. And the time will—you know, nature will conspire to get you to do your soul’s purpose full-time. I have a friend whose husband felt like, “Well, I’m an artist, and I don’t want to do anything other than my art.” But the family was starving. She ended up having to leave him with the kids just because it wasn’t working. So I think if you really have something you’re meant to do, it will emerge. It will be irrepressible. But you may need to do something else at the same time until it has a chance to sprout.

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah. For a while, you’ll almost definitely need to be doing your service. When people take my course, I say, “Please don’t quit your day job within six months of taking the course.”

Rick: Good warning.

Jonathan: Because if the course—if the program does its job, people in fact wake up partially or fully to their soul-level purpose. And then some people get very excited and they’re just like, “Oh, yeah, I want to quit my job.” And I’m like, “No, no, no, no. Wait, wait.” I’ve never said, and will never say, that eating and paying your rent is irrelevant. So take a little time to do your sacred dance for free, getting good at it, before you have it be your survival dance as well.

Rick: Sure. Okay, so why did we show this graphic? Let’s get back to that.

Jonathan: Oh, the graphic. Okay. So look, a human being on the human realm, and all the other animals and life on the planet—we’re not actually able to discover our purpose and midwife more goodness, truth, and beauty if we’re dead, if we’re extinct. There was a picture of a couple of monks—maybe they were Tibetan monks—and they had a sign that said, “Climate change is important to us because we can’t meditate when we’re extinct.”

Everything—it doesn’t matter if you’re a renunciate and you’re a hermit out in the middle of nowhere. Everything depends, at least in this realm on planet Earth, on living in harmony with the ecosphere. It is part of us. In fact, we’re part of it. We are an emanation of the Earth. We are a recent innovation of the planet, a beautiful innovation with a self-reflective conscious ability that can even imagine, “I can imagine being Yo-Yo Ma,” though I’ll never be him. That’s why a tulip won’t imagine being a daffodil or a rose. It doesn’t have that self-reflective capacity.

I live with three cats, three felines, and what I can tell is they don’t reflect on, “Oh, I wish I was like that big, tall, gangly ape guy named Jonathan.” They’re happy being what they are because they can’t imagine other possibilities. It’s a burdensome privilege, a burdensome privilege, to have the ability to imagine alternate purposes than our own. It’s great that we can imagine it, but then we get lost in imagination and don’t learn to actually listen.

So, that picture of the sharks: you have the human being representing all humans, then you have COVID-19, which is going to—or is in the process of—taking out hundreds of thousands. We’ll see what happens; millions at this point. It’s April 3rd, and we don’t know what’s in store exactly. Behind that is a bigger shark, and the bigger shark is the economic destabilization that is occurring.

Long after we beat COVID, if we do, we will still have the situation where a lot of—well, I’ll just say it in 30 seconds. We have the fact that the landlords aren’t getting paid because the renters can’t pay, and they have mortgages to pay the banks. Then, you know, it’s just the whole thing. How do you buy groceries? It’s a big mess.

But here’s the thing: COVID and the economic situation are a tsunami, and they’re beginning to wash through our country and countries across the planet. It’s creating deep suffering. But off the shore is a tsunami that is, I don’t know, 100 times as big, and that is climate change. Depending on who you—You must have interviewed Catherine Ingram at some point.

Rick: Yes. I’ve read her article, too, and corresponded with her about it. Also, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee—I was corresponding along similar lines. But go ahead and say what you’re going to say about her.

Jonathan: Yeah. This journalist and Advaita teacher, Catherine Ingram, wrote something—I think it was called “The Extinction Crisis,” something like that. Basically, she’s saying that there are, granted, a minority, but a good number of climate scientists who are saying it’s not like the year 2100. It’s not just like the year 2050. It’s on our doorstep. We are months or years away from one of these feedback loops that can happen. People just don’t know that part of it. They’ve been told by the International Climate Project on Climate—

Rick: IPCC.

Jonathan: Exactly. That’s a conservative organization that only takes into account the things they can verify now. They’re open about that. They’re not trying to dupe us, so far as I can tell. But here’s the thing: you have to account for the feedback loops and the albedo effect and all these loops, the methane—

Rick: The methane, right.

Well, there’s what we would call the solid world, right, the so-called material world, although no one’s ever found the material world. You can’t actually find it. You go down to the subatomic level, and it’s mostly space, right? And then there’s the so-called nonduality, which we’ll sort of call awareness or consciousness, undivided, pure being.

Jonathan: Methane is being released by the metric ton, and it’s 86 times more powerful than carbon. Anyway, the bottom line is, it’s possible—I’m not a climate scientist, so take what I say with a grain of salt—that there’s a possibility, and it’s not a random, outside possibility, that we have a handful of years left. So the climate change thing is coming. Talk about a psycho-spiritual pressure.

My contention is this: this whole “wake up, grow up, show up” thing is not just for middle-class people who have the time to think about such things. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. We’re on the Titanic. It’s sinking. The real Titanic took two hours and 40 minutes to sink. In the James Cameron movie, they showed some wealthy people on the upper-class deck, smoking cigars and drinking port, saying, “They’ll fix it.” Of course, within 20 minutes they realized that wasn’t the case. Well, we’re a bit like that. We’re like, “Well, you know, it’s fine outside my window now. How could it change so quickly?” Well, it can, and it is. Thousands of species are going extinct every year, and we don’t realize that we could be next.

One of the things I did was call it “Climate Change as Spiritual Practice.” I also have another one called “Pandemic as Practice.” The idea is that our activism and our spiritual life aren’t separate. They’re expressions of one thing. Years ago, I founded an organization called Green Sangha, and it simply was spiritually engaged environmental activism.

One of the things I did was call it “Climate Change as Spiritual Practice.” I also have another one called “Pandemic as Practice.” The idea is that our activism and our spiritual life aren’t separate. They’re expressions of one thing. Years ago, I founded an organization called Green Sangha, and it simply was spiritually engaged environmental activism.

Well, the times call for it. I read that article by Catherine Ingram, and I felt sick to my stomach. I just wanted to vomit. I was walking to the library to do work for Purpose Guides Institute. I’m not a guy given to self-hatred that much; it’s just not my thing. But I was feeling it. I was like, “Oh my God, I’m a carbon addict like everybody else. I burn it in my engine, I burn it in my furnace, I burn it when I fly occasionally.” I was like, “I have to do something.” I felt called to attempt to do something, so I created “Climate Change as Spiritual Practice.” We have these events and gatherings, and it’s for a very narrow group of people: people who are interested in nonduality and spirituality. You want to find your people.

Even if you’re a fundamentalist born-again Christian, great, and you’re a Republican and you love Trump, fine. But if you love the values that he stands for, the Republican Party stands for, or a traditional church stands for, you’re going to need a viable biosphere. Find your people, the people you want to work with, the people you enjoy working with, and then work with them. I call them my people: people who are nondually oriented activists.

Rick: Yeah, and if you’re one of the people you just described, listen to Katharine Hayhoe, who is a fundamentalist Christian, raised by one, and is speaking to those groups about what’s going on with the climate.

You know, you have your graphic with the sharks. I also posted a graphic recently of an airplane’s tail with little trim tabs on the rudders. There are also trim tabs on the rudder of a ship. I saw Buckminster Fuller speak in 1971, and he used that term a lot: “trim tabs.” A trim tab is a little thing that helps to move a larger thing. It would be hard to turn the rudder of a ship or an airplane without the trim tab. It sort of creates resistance in the opposite direction, which helps to turn it.

So I’ve kind of thought of this COVID thing as possibly a trim tab, which is going to help us move the larger thing of climate change. Perhaps when the whole thing blows over, we’ll sit down and think, “All right, now, what else might we be ignoring that’s kind of looming on the horizon that could do us in?” Certainly, we’ll look at the possibilities of other pandemics. But climate change is the big shark.

Jonathan: I love that image of the trim tab. So imagine, if you will, that the planet Earth is like a giant 747. You have 7.7 billion people, and the engines have cut. We’re on a long descent, right? But we may crash within five months or five years from climate change. The question is, what do we do with the trim tab? How can we be the trim tab and find our place in it?

You can sit there in the plane, and we can all sit and watch Dumb and Dumber or Star Wars or whatever for the next 10 years, and then we all die. But my response is to get outside and work with that trim tab. What can I do? What’s in me that I can offer, and can we join together?

It’s not just something I do at Purpose Guides Institute. I’ve joined several other organizations that I’m working in concert with, working at different levels. Working at the level of government is really important. The Citizens’ Climate Lobby is getting the right politicians in. By “right,” I simply mean ones who are capable of reacting proactively to the situation. The other thing is to put pressure on them to do the right thing. So this is part of our work—practical.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah. All righty. There’s more we can say about this, but we probably should get onto some general wrap-up points. Let’s switch back to this: If a person were to decide to work with you, to get your help finding their purpose, what would be involved? How much time would be involved? How much money? What kind of things would you do to help them find their purpose?

How purpose guiding works

Jonathan: Yeah. So, the practical questions: Once a year, I start a new group. That happens in the fall, every September. It costs $1,200, and we meet 12 times.

I synthesized the learnings, the things I found were best in the literature. I’m obsessive. I’ve studied with so many people, read so many people, and experienced so much. I gleaned the pieces I thought were most effective. There are 12 modules, and I do it like a reverse classroom. People go to the library, and the first thing they do is simply read a seven-page article that I wrote on that particular subtopic around purpose. Then they listen to a lecture. And then here’s the most important thing: They do the experiential piece.

That will be a soul-centric kind of meditation, a guided meditation that isn’t necessarily bringing us to the cessation of separateness or to the unbounded, but to listening to soul. Part of it is the inward-facing path, where we can go inside. But there’s also the outward-facing path, where we experience the clues of our destiny out in wild nature, spending time in nature and allowing ourselves to experience outer nature as coextensive with our very own being—which ultimately it is, because we couldn’t possibly be separate from it.

You could call these soul-encounter technologies, soul-encounter practices, or techniques. I think there are about 18 of them that I use in that particular course. But simultaneously, we also need to work with resistance. You could say this about upper-world spirituality, too. If I had a wand and said I could wave it at you and you would have Ramana Maharshi-caliber abiding awakening, do you have any reservations? Well, you might. You might kind of go, “What would happen to my friendships? What would happen to my show? What would happen to my—would I still like eating ice cream?” Your identity would be so changed.

So we need to work with the voices, the minority voices. The majority may say, “Yes, if soul purpose exists, like this guy is telling me, like Carl Jung said, like Suhrawardi and Ibn Arabi and James Hillman and Bill Plotkin and all these people—if this exists, if Joseph Campbell was right, and there is a bliss to be followed, that place that is deeply joyful for us and serves, then what are the voices that say no? Let’s say, ‘I need some attention.’” A part of the course is working with that.

In Zen, they weren’t so great at working with resistance. They’d hit you with a stick and you kept going. That’s fine. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, I don’t know. But Zen worked well for me, so I’m not really complaining. With my background as a therapist, I find that working with the resistances, instead of just trying to push them to a corner, is really helpful.

Those are the two wings of the bird: on the one hand, working with resistance, and on the other hand, working with the passion and love that we have for the possibility of living from this deeper place. So that’s the program. It’s not like you start it and then, at the end, I guarantee you perfect soul-purpose awakening. Good God, no. That’d be like going to an Adyashanti retreat or a Rupert retreat and inferring that they were trying to tell us that we would become perfectly enlightened. They don’t, and I don’t.

What I do say is: Give it a year. Take the course for three months, experience the different moving parts, have me as a guide to help you with the resistances and the challenges, and then keep moving with the practices. If you go on a three-month meditation retreat, the Roshi or the teacher doesn’t say, “Okay, well, you’re done.” They suggest you have a daily practice. You become what you attend to. So if you attend to soul, soul will attend to you.

Rick: Give us a couple of examples of actual people who’ve gone through the program and how their lives have changed.

Jonathan: Yeah. So, one fellow—he’s on faculty now—was a businessman.

Rick: On your faculty?

Jonathan: My faculty, yeah. He was working in the corporate world, earning really good money. He’s a really great guy. But his side gig—I mean, he called it the golden handcuffs. I once asked him, “Well, how golden are they?” He told me, and I was like, “Oh my God, wow, I get it. I, too, would be loath to leave a job that paid that much money. In my wildest dreams, I doubt I’ll ever be earning that.”

He was having a hard time breaking them. Interestingly, he got lucky—but I put “lucky” in quotes—because he lost his job. They were bought out by a bigger company, and they got rid of middle management or whatever. Summarily, after, I think, 10 or 12 years of really high-quality work, he was out.

The first night, he said he was in terror, which I get. His wife was shaken. How were they going to pay the mortgage? They had become accustomed to a nice lifestyle. Then he realized that he had been given a privilege: it was a privilege to lose this job.

He was already in love with it. He’s more of a shaman than I am. I’m not really a shaman, but he studies with Indigenous people, and he’s really picked up that mantle. It’s amazing how quickly, I think, all the work he did as an executive has really helped him. He’s working with people who aren’t really my people. If someone’s an executive and they want a purpose guide, I’m not saying I wouldn’t work with them. But I think this fellow, Brody Hartman, is a better choice. He just knows that.

Rick: I thought you were talking about him. He was the guy who was on the call the other day.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah. Brody Hartman. I don’t know if you know him from quorum.com, but Brody Hartman. And so that’s another question, right? Who are your people? Who are the people you’re meant to work with? My people tend to be people who do have a meditation practice. They’re interested in classical enlightenment. They’re interested in being mature adults. I’ve had a few corporate types, but that’s mostly not it. So, yeah, he’s an example. He went through a hard time losing his job, but that forced him to actually take his sacred dance and make it his survival dance. And amazingly, he’s thriving.

Can you think of an example of someone you’ve worked with who wasn’t doing well financially, found his core purpose, and now is making a heck of a lot more money than he was? We don’t always want to make it seem like we lose the corporate job and end up doing something profound that doesn’t pay much.

Jonathan: Yeah. Well, I’m making more money now as a purpose guide than I was as a therapist. I was making a good income as a therapist, and I’m making a better income as a purpose guide.

It was a risky proposition because, though I of course did not invent purpose guiding—it’s been around for thousands of years—that particular formulation, purpose guiding, is my iteration. Quickly, I was met with a big marketing problem: I was selling something no one had ever heard of. When I was a therapist and a meditation teacher—well, I still am—I could market those easily because people understood what they were. You could say Zen; I could say Advaita, or whatever, to those in the know.

At first it was hard, and there was a pay reduction. Then I found, over time—and I trusted, and it turned out to be right in this case—I thought, “But this is my deepest purpose. I think this is my offering, and I think when people recognize me as their future guide—and most won’t, but some do—they’ll go, ‘Ah, there’s something about what he’s saying.’” Whether they like the personality and the packaging or not, they may like it, they may not. But there’s the perfume of the teachings: I’m part of a lineage. I didn’t invent this. They come, and they’re coming in bigger numbers. So, in my case, yeah, the income has increased.

Rick: Yeah, it seems like this is a time when a lot of people are going to be looking for a purpose, but they’re also out of work. They may not be able to pay your tuition. Have you written a book about this, or something people can read inexpensively? How can they get more knowledgeable about this without paying?

Jonathan: Lots of free offerings. On the site, the first tab says “Free Stuff.” I don’t think it says “stuff,” but something like that.

I made a movie. I interviewed all these people we’ve been talking about—Adyashanti, Rupert Spira, Michael Meade—just really beautiful souls. I asked them to make a statement to my son when he turns 18, which will be eight years from now. I said, “If it arises in him that he wants to know his soul’s purpose, what would be your best wisdom?” So Rupert Spira looks in the camera and says, “Yi”—that’s my son’s Korean name—“happy birthday. Here’s what I would do.” Then you see about 10 teachers in a row. So that’s free.

What else? There’s a paper I wrote that was part of a book called Purpose Rising. Ken Wilber had a chapter, Bill Plotkin had a chapter, and I put mine up for free on the website. It’s about 28 pages long. So there’s plenty of free stuff. If you don’t have money, just go there, and you’ll get quite a bit. There’s a YouTube channel where I interview these wonderful teachers. It’s all free.

Rick: Okay. Now, you’re going to be doing a webinar on Friday, I think, similar to what you did yesterday. Tell people a little bit about that.

Jonathan: Yeah. So there’ll be one after, if you’re listening to this later than that. It’s called Pandemic as Practice, and it has three components. It’s two hours on Zoom. It’s free, talking about things you don’t have to pay for.

The first part is simply about unthawing ourselves. A lot of us, including me, sometimes feel agitated and a little like, “Oh my, deer in the headlights. What? COVID? It’s coming? Will my dad live?” It’s disturbing. So there’s an opportunity just to speak to that anxiety. You can just be a watcher and listen. You don’t have to speak; no one’s forced to talk. But it can be helpful to express your concern, your fear, if there is any.

The second and third parts are really together. There’s a meditation part where I ask people—I guide them, or attempt to guide them—to touch that place that is absolutely safe. We were on that call, and I got an email from someone. I guess they were a person who didn’t know about Advaita. They said, “You know, that part where you invited us to feel the part that is absolutely safe? I had this opening. I don’t even understand what happened.” They were like, “Thank you so much.”

So that’s a part of it: that whole upper world of being the unbounded, where COVID is not a threat. And then the third part is, “What am I called to? What is COVID?” Unless you’re 120 years old, no one alive remembers the 1918 Spanish flu. This is unprecedented for us. The question is, “Well, what am I going to do other than put on gloves and a mask, stay away, and keep social distancing?” My joke is, drink more wine and watch more Netflix—which I am. And then the question is, “Well, what else?”

The question I have is: In the year 2030, when your children or your friends’ children say, “Well, Rick, what did you do?” you don’t want to just say, “I only watched Netflix.” You want to say, “Well, I had this show, and I talked about it, and thousands of people watched it, and I think maybe some of them were inspired to be a demonstration of love.”

So I want the people listening today, whether I’ve ever worked with them or not, to ask that question: “What can I do at the time of the COVID crisis?” Really imagine that you were courageous, like very courageous. You weren’t like, “Oh, shucks, I’m not X, Y, and Z.” Who cares? You can do something. So that’s Pandemic as Practice. It’s free. It’s two hours. It’s on Zoom. It’s live. Go to PurposeGuides.org and sign up.

Rick: Good. I’ll link to that from your page on batgap.com, and people can leap from there into that, and you’ll be—

Jonathan: Like climate change.

Rick: Yeah, all that stuff.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, great. Well, thanks, Jonathan. This has been a lot of fun.

Jonathan: Yeah, thank you.

Rick: That’s funny. I look like I’ve been beat up. I’ve got this thing going on here.

Jonathan: You do. Poor guy.

Rick: Yeah.

Jonathan: No big deal. Good for you.

Rick: All right, so thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching, and we’ll see you next week. Next week I’ll be interviewing a woman who is into the Toltec path, which is what Carlos Castaneda wrote about. I really haven’t covered that. She’s a student of Don Miguel Ruiz. So go to batgap.com if you’d like to see who we’ve got scheduled, sign up for the email newsletter, make a donation, sign up for the audio podcast, or any of that. And thanks for listening or watching. Thanks, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Bye-bye.

Rick: Bye. Bye.