The Only Thing That Matters (4 page)

On Earth, that is.

What are you doing here? What is the point of this? What is Life's purpose?

These
are the questions that have to be answered before you can begin to make decisions about The Only Thing That Matters—to say nothing of living your daily life focused on that. So the next few chapters—
Part Two
of this book—will be devoted to a deep investigation of these very questions.

As you move through these next pages, know that this is an exploration for which your Mind has earnestly yearned. Your Mind, you see, has been trying for years to make sense of a life that makes no sense at all
.
Now, thanks to the Knowledge of your Soul, you will be placing everything that is happening in your life into a new context—a context in which life finally
does
make sense.

(NOTE: If you're a bit impatient at this juncture and do not wish to engage in this investigation right now, but would rather move directly into a discussion of what it looks like to focus your life in such a way that 98% of what you do
does
matter, feel free skip ahead to Part Three of this book. But just to let you know: you're very likely to wind up going back to Part Two eventually, reading through the deep explorations in
Chapters 5
–
18
, because it is there that the whole construction of Life—which is what
makes
The Only Thing That Matters
matter
—is defined and described.)

5
Back to Basics

D
EAR
S
WEET AND
G
ENTLE
B
EING
… As we move more deeply into this exploration, let us step back and take a look at some fundamental concepts, including this one: You are on a journey here. And no, it is not the journey from birth to death. It is a journey from way before birth to long after death.

The importance and the implication of this Journey upon which you find yourself can barely be comprehended by your Mind. It can be comprehended … but barely.

Is this because your Mind is so incapable, so inefficient? No. It is because your Mind has been given so little information about the Journey itself.

We learn about it in a very indirect way. Not because our elders and our teachers sit us down and tell us everything we need to know about it (they have, after all, been given no more information than they are giving us), but because our art has done the best it can to fill the gap.

It is humanity's culture that tells us about the experience in which we find ourselves. (And this is why, by the way, the movement to remove “cultural pursuits”—music and drama, art and other creative expressions—from our schools, leaving classrooms full of children to look only at our history, is so crushingly damaging to our sense of who we are and why we are.)

We need culture and esoterics—story and song, movies and plays, fiction and poetry, and really good television—to tell us about ourselves in fuller ways.

The American poet Em Claire did just this, capturing the essence of our journey, when she wrote …

I left The Home so long ago now
that I would not recognize my own face.
I constructed the Boat of my Life
and I set out
into the open sea
waving to all who knew
that the seas would give me
everything I could handle
and everything I could not
and yet they waved, and I set out
into the open sea
In the Boat of My Life:
built from Soul, crafted by Heart
and with great innocence I pushed off
into the open sea
and have been away from my Home
so long now that I would not recognize my own face
but I know that Home
Home
remembers me
.
_____
“Long at Sea”
©2007 em claire

This feeling and sense of being “away from home” is common to many people who yearn for the knowing and the experiencing of their union with the Divine.

Yet are we in the fullest sense “away from home”?

No. We are neither away from home nor away from God, but it sure seems that way. The tiny amount of information that we have been given by those who simply write about our history and our physical sciences has been wholly lacking in any truly important metaphysical or spiritual detail. Or, worse yet, it has been riddled with error.

All of that is going to end here.

You've brought your Mind to this self-exploration to remember three things: (a) the purpose of your life's journey, (b) the paths that this journey can take, and (c) the journey's destination.

Your remembering will begin with some more basics. But first, a request—from your Soul to your Mind:

Because these
are
“basics,” much of what you will read in these next few passages may feel like “old news” to you. Have patience, then.

A gentle request, yes?

It is not a bad thing to be reminded of what you already know. Most people are not
applying
what they already know anyway, and that's the point. Perhaps a memory jog would be really good right about now.

And perhaps there are one or two tiny pieces of data that are not fully remembered—the remembering of which could change everything.

So please, have patience.

Now then … to those basics.

You are not your body. Your body is something you have.

You are not your mind. Your mind is something you have.

You are not your soul. Your soul is something you have.

Who, then, are you?

You are the sum total of all of these things—a loving, caring, sensitive, compassionate sentient being that
has
these things—and each of these things has a purpose and a function that serves the agenda of all three.

This Body/Mind/Soul trio will be referred to in this self-exploration as The Totality of You.

The function of the Mind is to guarantee the survival of the current physicalization of The Totality of You for as long as it takes to fulfill the Soul's Agenda.

The function of the Body is to gather data from the physical environment to assist the Mind in guaranteeing your survival, and to place within that environment, in physical form, the nonphysical ideas, concepts, and decisions of the Mind.

The function of the Soul is to experience as many aspects as possible of Who and What It Really Is, using the Body, the Mind, and the physical environment in which It has placed Itself, as tools with which to accomplish this.

Because your Mind has been given little—or worse yet, totally inaccurate—information about the Soul's Agenda (which is
Life's
agenda), neither your Mind nor your Body can very often serve that agenda well—unless it is working in
conjunction
with the Soul.

Right now, if your Mind does not know what the Soul knows, your life could feel as if it's being pulled in different directions. Indeed, your very purpose for being on Earth could wind up being compromised—if not completely ignored.

This is, in fact, the circumstance in which most of humanity finds itself today.

What must happen if you wish to live a life that serves its actual purpose is that your Mind must bring into its database that of which the Soul is already aware, so that you can produce the
experience
of it. The Soul holds Knowledge, while the Mind creates the Experience of what you call Reality.

This is the very reason that The Totality of You came into the physical realm: to Experience that of which It has full Knowledge. Yet if the Mind's data does not
include
the Soul's Awareness, the continuing experiences the Mind creates will not be expressions of what the Soul knows—and that will
not
serve The Totality of You.

It is very important to understand that the “database” from which you may construct any present reality (i.e., the information that is stored within you), exists in
two different places
and is accessed in
two different ways
.