What if we knew our life’s purpose with absolute clarity? What energy we could draw on! How free we would be from worrying about unimportant noise and distraction!
Even better, imagine we understood how to fulfil it. It’s possible, but it demands great self-awareness, intimately knowing who we really are.
Ken Wilber is a polymath who knows and respects numerous non-dual traditions, western philosophies and therapeutic approaches, but he enjoys a special affinity with Dzogchen. My own simplification of this Buddhist tradition is that all is eternally perfect, with no need or opening for intervention or improvement of any kind.
To discover who we are, our investigation first identifies what we are not. We notice a hypnotic array of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, but these mental objects — on their own or together — are not us. We are what experiences them, that which knows them. As these objects change, instant-to-instant, what remains the same?