I listened to Steve Pavlina’s podcast about finding one’s specific purpose, and it got me thinking (as his work often does). He distinguishes ‘specific’ from ‘universal purpose’: universal purpose may be true throughout your life, and is quite open and general; specific purpose is the way you are realising the universal purpose here and now, and will change during a lifetime. And specific purpose, he says, needs to work at several levels: it needs to meet material needs, be emotionally satisfying, be within your capacities, and answer your spiritual sense of what you are called to do. If you’re missing any of these – if you’re doing what you feel called to do but not enjoying it, or doing emotionally satisfying work but broke – then something is wrong.
As I listened, I started to visualise what he was talking about in terms of hexagrams. The ‘purpose’ he was talking about seems to me to be a yang element: something directional, firm and creative. The requirement that the purpose be ‘within your capacities’ has a different feel to it – it’s about the power to get things done, not a reason to do them. So this leaves me with three layers of yang to visualise…
Purpose – yang – is all in relation to the outside world, the roots and tips. How to get Nourishment, and how to provide it? While hexagram 27 deals with all kinds of needs, it does have a lot to say about the drive for material security.
Moving one step inward…
…fills up lines 2 and 5 with purpose. These are lines of relationship with other people – heart connection, leadership – which is surely the source of emotional fulfilment. Inner Truth is more than that, though – it’s presence, connection, the soul as conduit.
And one final step inward –
Every line is filled with purpose and direction, right through to the central two lines, traditionally known as the human realm connecting earth and heaven. And we come to Steve P’s final ‘layer’: spiritual inspiration and calling, looking for the time and space where it can be realised.