This guest blog brings you the thinking of New York Times best-selling author Dr. Stephen Post on finding your creative and compassionate calling. His long career as a researcher, public speaker and professor has given him deep insights into this topic, and he consistently eschews easy answers to inherently complex questions.
Dr. Post’s latest book, God and Love on Route 80: The Hidden Mystery of Human Connectedness, is a true story of the author’s recurring dream as a teenager, and how he literally followed the dream west on Route 80 until he got to a ledge on the Golden Gate Bridge – actually, he’s been following the dream for the rest of his life. It’s a classic story about the hero being called on a spiritual journey.
MAY YOU FOLLOW YOUR CREATIVE AND COMPASSIONATE CALLING
“Work is love made visible. And if you can’t work with love, but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of the people who work with joy.”
~Kahlil Gibran
“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.”
~Arnold Toynbee
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
~Krishnamurti
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”
~L.P. Jacks
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
~Eleanor Roosevelt
“No one has to do what they cannot.”
~Tom Frutig
Know thyself, said the great philosopher. As human beings, who are we? Why are we here? The answer we propose is this: each of us without exception has some equally meaningful talent that we are born to discover and in which we are meant to flourish as we contribute to humanity. Human dignity is on the one hand an inalienable inherent worth that we all have simply by virtue of being human beings, but there is an additional dignity that we gain through realizing as well as developing our unique gifts and callings in life.
But sadly, many of us remain ignorant of who we are. We are diverted from this great discovery because we wrongly believe that our purpose is merely hedonic, possessive, materialist, or manipulative. We are raised and educated in such a way as to undermine our natural gifts. We are never encouraged to discover who we are as creative beings. Instead, we are educated to “fit the same mold,” to memorize facts, to follow the pull of extrinsic rewards; and later we find ourselves running on empty, depressed, and confronting crises of meaning that will not end well without spiritual transformation.
We really do need to know who we are as a matter of inner peace, good health, flourishing, joy, love, hope, and even radiance. In fact, we don’t have to go that far to know ourselves. We can talk, think, reason, write poetry, argue philosophy, do geometry, theorize quantum physics, heal the sick, care for the frail, feed the hungry, alleviate pain and suffering, and be a light to the world. No other being could ever approach these as we are each a masterpiece of nature and a wonder of the universe. Each of us can transform miseries to splendors in ourselves and in others. But we can only discover our gifts when we are nurtured and affirmed by our teachers, role models, and mentors who remind us who and what we are. We are each the work of a Supreme Artist, but this essential dignity is often opaque, buried by humiliation, de-dignifying attitudes, and cultures of destruction.
We seek a global society of human dignity, the universal realization of human dignity as inherent and also as realized through creative callings. Families, schools, spiritual communities, places of work, neighborhoods, and culture should exist primarily to nurture this dignity drop by drop with patience and cherishing. We encourage a complete cultural and educational transformation by the “waterdrop method” of patiently helping people person-by-person to know themselves.
The great Artist of nature and of human nature has left it to each of us as responsible human beings to complete the creative work both within ourselves and in all others such that every human being without exception can flourish both internally and externally. We all have a mission to eradicate all forms of hunger both spiritual and material from the face of the earth through a full awareness of who and what we are.
What follows are portions of the Prelude to God and Love on Route 80:
What you seek is seeking you.
~Rumi
The boy had no astonishing spiritual experiences like seeing a blazing bush on a rocky mountaintop. It was only an awesome recurring dream that started him off on a different kind of road trip that no one could ever have anticipated, much less condoned. The dream felt like a premonition and a calling, and from it many episodes of synchronicity would follow. These are episodes of surprising encounters that feel much too perfectly “set up” by the universe to come from nothing. They point the way to an unrevealed destiny that we cannot find on our own. It has to find us. The boy’s task was to believe, to recognize, to respond, but not to follow his own plans conjured up by his limited little mind. He gained confidence in the dream with each new episode, and he flourished as his destiny unfolded.
. ***
The dream came to him seven times over a couple of years. It was early morning, misty and silver-gray, at the end of a long road to the unknown west. High above the sea, a long-haired blond youth leaned outward over a ledge about to let go when out of the mist appeared the light blue image of an angel’s face. Speaking softly and with great love, the angel said, “If you save him, you too shall live.” Then she faded back into the silver-gray mist.
Throughout his dreamy journey, the boy knew in his soul that the blue angel was an expression of infinite Mind trying to break through his little human worldly consciousness to awaken him to a larger universal field of Mind. This is a field of Mind in which we are all connected with God and one another in love, and that is the source of all that is perfectly wise, enduring, energetic, and pure. Such spiritual love is not comprised of the same uneven “stuff” as human love, which is always making exceptions, and lacking in wisdom, reliability, and purity.
“The total number of minds in the universe is one.”
~ Erwin Schrödinger
“Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.”
~ Carl Jung
“Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.”
~Rabindranath Tagore
How to Follow a Different Kind of Dream
The boy, in his Sixth Form Independent Paper for Rev. Rodney Welles wrote: “What really is spiritual love? When the happiness and security of others means as much to us as our own or sometimes even more, we love them. When any human being loves everyone who they actually do encounter in this way no matter who they are, they have far transcended the limits of human emotional love and entered the spiritual love field of the infinite Mind.”
“You must learn to get in touch with the innermost essence of your being. This true essence is beyond ego. It is formless; it is free; it is immune to criticism; it does not fear any challenge. It is beneath no one, superior to no one, and full of magic, mystery, and enchantment.”
~Deepak Chopra
About Dr. Stephen G. Post
For over twenty years, Stephen has been spreading the science of giving and the commitment to the greater good. He has promoted the idea of “give and live better” across the globe. Funding over 50 scientific studies at the nation’s top universities as well as conducting his own research, Stephen is considered the “go to” guy with his uplifting message that when we contribute to the lives of others, give meaningfully, and live by the Golden Rule, we are generally happier, healthier, more resilient, creative, hopeful and successful.
Click here to order Stephen’s latest book, God and Love on Route 80: The Hidden Mystery of Human Connectedness.