prem baba on purpose: the courage to be who we are

Have you ever asked yourself what you came for in this world, that is, your purpose?

Have you ever stopped to think that during your childhood there were several signs of your calling?

The spiritual master & psychologist Sri Prem Baba brings up deep and yet simple reflections on how to listen to our inner voice and live an abundant life.

In this book, you will learn what purpose is, how to think about your purpose and also reflect upon the facts in your life that may be preventing you from accomplishing it.

Why most people do not recall their purpose

 

When a child is born, he or she recalls what they came to do in this world. Until the beginning of youth, they carry the yearnings and dreams that are expressions of this purpose.

However, they gradually forget their calling and start to believe in the external voices that insist to say this dream is impossible to come true, or this path is not a good one, or else they are not capable of doing so.

At some point, they end up giving in to these voices. Following, they give up, completely forget about what feeds their heart and start to dream someone else’s dream.

According to the author, personality development happens during the first seven years of life.

Some additions can occur over the following years, but the foundation is made up in this initial period. Because of this, the beliefs built during these years will have an influence on the rest of life.

It is easy to understand this if you have had the opportunity to follow a child’s growth.

The infant that has not been contaminated by adult’s beliefs simply holds their parent’s hands and go with them, without even knowing where they are being taken.

Gradually, however, they stop trusting.

They are affected by fear in the form of distrust, and uncertainty, and by hatred in the form of rage and revenge.

But why does it happen?

It happens because that is what they have been taught.

From an early age, children learn they are victims of external circumstances and because of that, they must defend themselves.

So, they create several protection mechanisms and internalize limiting beliefs.

Those mechanisms are limiting because they serve as protection, but, at the same time, generates separation and oblivion.

The protection walls are the same ones causing isolation from the world.

Prem Baba labels protection and oblivion mechanisms as “inferior nature”, “lower self” or even “evilness”.

Yes, this evilness we see in the world is simply a set of protective shields that human being develops early in life to defend themselves from the pain of humiliation, rejection, and exclusion.

This feeling does not refer only to criminals or corrupts’ behavior because we all suffer from this kind of pain.

Thus, all of us hold some evil inside. The more evilness one manifests, the less one recalls their purpose.

Stop creating expectations and fulfilling your needs through your children

 

The spiritual master argues that we should let go of our expectations regarding our children’s path.

These expectations are manifestations of our needs, which should not be met by them. In fact, this is one of the sources of misery that passes through generations.

At the same time, it is very difficult to not repeat patterns and stop imposing points of view to kids.

If you are not aware of your own needs, you will inevitably want to format the children according to your expectations.

If you have been rejected or humiliated and are in a position of authority, you are likely to lose yourself and end up abusing this false power with your kids.

In this way, you revisit your past in the present moment. That means you repeat your own history through the child and convey your evil to them.

Several times you think you are loving your kid, but actually, you are just trying to solve your own problems.

In fact, you are trying to have your personal accomplishment with them.

By forcing your children to do things your way, you end up deviating them from their true path.

And any path that is not the soul’s path, is a bad one because they will be walking away from their purpose.

Spontaneity gives place to strategy, which means they stop doing what they feel like doing and start to do what pleases others.

They stop hearing the voice of the heart and start to listen only to the mind. Reasoning overlaps intuition, but reasoning without intuition is like a bird without wings.

By acting entirely based on reasoning, you become a machine; and by acting only based on feelings and instinct you become an animal.

Intuition unites thinking and feeling, reasoning and instinct.

It brings us closer to what defines us as human beings.

There are no doubts that putting limits with love and awareness is a way to help children’s development.

However, repression acts the other way round: it is like a poison contaminating the virtue which is the base of everything: self-confidence.

Spontaneity is an expression of self-confidence and it is blocked and contaminated by the fear of not getting love.

This is the basic illusion that sustains misery in the world: the idea that we are needy and therefore need to get something from the outside.

Baba believes that if we could avoid these beliefs from getting installed during childhood, everything would be different.

If self-knowledge and spirituality became part of early schooling, parents would be more aware and would not pass their dramas on.

Analyze your addictions, they may hide repressions

 

If you have any kind of addiction, examine them carefully, the author alerts. They may be covering up shadows of yourself that need to be solved.

The main “shock absorbers” that keep you from awakening the consciousness are sex, money, and food.

Compulsion, for example, is a manifestation of impulsiveness.

It does not matter if it is a compulsion for eating, shopping, talking or having sex: underneath it, there lies some need, an existential emptiness that cannot be filled up with excess.

What happens is that a gluttonous person tries to fill a repression related to food with more food.

Whenever this compulsion is not met, it creates anxiety that needs to be treated in order to break the vicious circle.

Laziness also hides something.

This vice is understood as paralyzation towards what needs to be done because of suppressed feelings.

And, it may manifest itself actively or passively.

In the passive way, one cannot do what needs to be done and sometimes cannot even get out of bed.

This generates a chemical unbalance in the brain that leads to depression.

In the active fashion way, one does several things but the one that really needs to be done.

The person becomes a workaholic by procrastinating.

Doing without being present also fits in this category.

If you do not put your soul into whatever you are doing, this action becomes a distraction. It does not matter what the

In this sense, even self-knowledge and spiritual practices may serve as an escape.

At last, pride, which is a conditioning of false superiority, may hide several dramas. Its identification is more complex because it can unfold in several ways.

Some of them are vanity, presumption, shyness, inferiority or superiority complex, victimhood and false modesty.

To sum up, any kind of addiction or evilness comes from the lack of something.

It comes from a rupture with your essence through some sort of repression that has happened in your history.

Suffering to be happy is self-sabotage

 

The spiritual master states that “suffering to be happy” is one manifestation of the inner saboteur of happiness.

Precisely, this popular belief that you need to suffer first to have a joyful life later on.

That unfolds in several ways.

It starts with the idea that you need to work and strive a lot to get a day off.

Then, it evolves to sacrificing enough so one day you can relax because purely enjoying life is something for vagabonds.  

In other cases, it means that to be a spiritual person you need to make a vow of poverty.

This happens because scarcity and violence are closely related.

If you are afraid that your needs will not be provided, the most common reaction is some kind of violence, be it lack of care with yourself or even external violence that we see among people.  

Therefore, do not lose yourself in the delusion that you need to struggle to enjoy life someday.

You do not need to conquer the world to be happy.

You can be happy now, even without ruling the world.

You do not necessarily need to do charity or to be a yoga teacher to be happy

Another way of saying no to prosperity is the idea that purpose can only be achieved through social work, charity, or some well-being job.

However, not every volunteering or well-being work will be aligned with the purpose of your soul, especially if you use it as a runaway from what you came here for.

Some people decide to be therapists or yoga teachers as if those were the world’s panacea.

If you came here to do yoga classes, you will naturally feel a sense of belonging in doing it.

But if you did not come here for it, you may transfer your anguish from one profession to another.

Volunteering follows likewise.

It is clear that someone who makes donations or volunteer is contributing to the world. There is no doubt about that.

Indeed, it is not possible to have peace if most people are suffering from lack of material resources.

How can spiritual values develop if the majority still cannot have their basic needs met?

The main point being made here is if these activities are what you feel in your heart your soul came to accomplish, argues Prem Baba.

Many times your soul’s programming involves working with great amounts of financial resources so it can manifest accordingly.

Thus, it is not a problem to have spiritual realization and be materially abundant at the same time.

In fact, when you are aligned with your purpose your material needs will be naturally covered.

This is a law.

Another aspect of this point is: there is nothing wrong with wanting recognition or fame for what you do.

It all depends on what your soul needs at the moment. Even, many are led to serve in key positions in the eye of the matrix.

And who are we to judge the plans of life?

Each one is where they need to be.

The spiritual consciousness needs to expand in all the places because this is the greatest goal of life.

For this to happen, spirituality needs to be a part of everyone’s life.

If you are in the ego-assertion stage, meaning, you still need to grow and build things in the world, do not worry much about resignation.

Make your wishes come true and conquer what you want.

Go after the money and fame you think you need.

Do not fall into the spiritual ego trap that believes the right thing to do is to let go of all.

You can only relinquish what you have.

During the process, it is expected to swing between altruism and selfishness.

Besides, do not deny the former.

It is important to recognize it exists, but not to feed it.

In other words, you accept that it exists, though you do not judge it.

All of it is part of the process. All is fine.

Above all, your purpose must be self-sustainable because you are in a body that is subdued to the laws of matter.

Some try to deny the material dimension, they try to separate spirituality from matter but this is not possible.

Denial is one of the main poisons to consciousness.

It prevents us from awakening from suffering.

Trust is the foundation of prosperity

 

Usually, the person who is more afraid of not receiving is the one less capable of giving, says the author.

Fear makes people question if they will get back what they have to give. This is one of the symptoms of the fear of scarcity, which is one side of lack of trust.  

Trust is a virtue of the soul, a result of mature consciousness.

It is born out of a pure heart.

This means that one cannot forge this state with the mind. Instead, you can dedicate yourself to self-knowledge to access the images and beliefs that are preventing you from trusting.

This feminine quality is the most important in the process of awakening love. Without it, self-accomplishment is not possible.

If you do not trust, you cannot love, because trust is like a bridge to love.

If your relationship is contaminated with distrust, even with just a small portion of it, it becomes impossible for love to grow.

The universe will send you all you need

Once you allow yourself to trust in the wisdom of uncertainty, you access a place in which we are one with the universe.

In this space of unity, our needs are naturally supplied by life.

This transition from fear to trust may seem impossible for those who are overly related to the fear of scarcity.

At the same time, the only way of knowing is giving it a try, which inevitably implies taking risks.

If you are aware of the purpose of your soul, it does not matter where you are. Any place is the ideal place for its realization.

Possible causes of lack of trust

Inside the feminine sphere, the mother is arguably the greatest symbol of trust.

And our connection with the maternal image is really deep because she is the vehicle that leads us to trust.

Nowadays, science proves that the child receives all signals of the environment while he or she is still in the womb.

In fact, not only the environment, but also their mother’s psycho-emotional world, with all its doubts, fears, joy, and sorrow.

Sometimes her milk comes with a taste of rejection, impatience, and anger; sometimes she has no milk at all.

It is within this context children are developed and fear of scarcity starts to get installed in our system.

This means that fear of scarcity is not only related to money, but also to affection, welcoming, and love.

This fear of not being loved is manifested as a sense of non-belongingness, insufficiency, helplessness, and inadequacy among other negative emotions.

In this state, thoughts such as “I cannot get what I need” or “I do not deserve this” are very frequent.

These beliefs act as commands to our subconscious, which creates the imagined reality.

Once the contact with the mother is so determinant to the foundation of self-confidence, the author highlights the importance of reconciliation with the feminine – not only with the mother, but also the feminine in nature, in the human body, and women in general.

We need to relearn how to trust

Relearn because, in fact, we are born with trust but, at some point in our lives our trust is broken and we learn to be afraid.

Fear of life is like a supervirus. There is no specific medicine to kill it. Its treatment is quite hard.

Sometimes you take a step forward towards trust and say: “Ok, I will trust!”

Then, you decide to follow your heart, but something in you does not go as you had imagined, then you get frustrated and start not trusting again.

Occasionally, having an injury is part of the learning process because to free yourself from fear and grow in self-confidence you need to live a hurtful experience.

The fact is that there are no guarantees that things will always be as you hope for. Taking risks is part of learning to trust.

Little by little, you get to a place of internal trust where all doubts go away and where you are sure you are at the right place, even if everything looks wrong.

This is the real trust, the one that is independent of what is going on in the external world.

Because it comes from the inside, it frees your system from fear, especially the fear of scarcity.

This perception is only possible when we free ourselves from the belief that we cannot get what we need.

And this is only possible by forgiveness.

As long as we keep on not forgiving our mothers, we do not forgive the feminine, and, if we do not forgive the feminine, we keep on destroying the planet and our own lives.

When you make up with the feminine through forgiveness, fear stops having power over you.

And if fear does not have power anymore, hatred also becomes helpless. Hatred has strength only because of fear.

Hatred and fear go hand in hand, but fear is at the root of them.

The shadows of your mother, meaning, her flaws that caused you any block, wakes up the fear in you.

This fear activates hatred, which is perpetuated through your father’s shadows.

Because of that, if your consciousness is identified with your father’s shadows, you will inevitably feel the pain of neediness

From neediness come many other symptoms: jealousy, envy, rivalry, helplessness, greed and all kinds of misery.

On the other hand, if your consciousness is related to the light,  that is, the qualities of your parents, it is a different story.

You understand that these shadows are just a delusion and everything is transformed.

For those who are in the path of self-knowledge and self-accomplishment, it is important to answer some questions to solve this issue:

1. When did I lose trust?
2. When did I start to doubt and fear?
3. How can I trust back again?

These are meaningful questions that can help you to map the beliefs that back up your fears.

Being and doing are inseparable

 

When the alignment of what we are and what we do occurs, we are taken by a deep sensation of completeness and belonging, says the spiritual master.

It is as if we went back home after several years of travel.

This happens because when we do not act according to our essence and we build a false identity, an unbalance occurs between what we are and what we do.

We simply let a fictitious character take over our home and we start to do what pleases others and this fake self.

For this reason, this rebalance feels like a reunion to yourself and it is a moment of great joy.

From this moment on, the truth about who we are starting to manifest through our actions because doing is closely related to being.

In fact, being and doing are inseparable, just as a rose is undetachable from its perfume.

Our gifts and talents are fragrances of the Supreme Being that inhabits us, good smells that are spread over different actions in the world.

They are the diverse qualities of our core essence: love.

Therefore, an important point that should be understood is: the purpose of our soul is not what we do, but what we are.

The question about identity is paramount in the process of unveiling the purpose of your soul.

When you ask yourself “what did I come  here for?”, you are automatically asking yourself: “who am I?”

In this context, self-accomplishment is not only about professional or material accomplishment but, above all, about remembering who we are.

When we wake up to this memory, the program of our soul inevitably reveals itself and our gifts and talents become a mean to express the truth about who we are.

More than that, they are the gifts we have brought to give to the world.

So we feel a great comfort in being where we are and do what we are doing.

Everything that happens is to make you learn to surrender to the flow of life. It is always taking you to accomplish your purpose.

Your success is in the soul, not in the ego

 

The real success has to do with the accomplishment of the purpose of your soul, but most people believe purpose is the accomplishment of the ego.

According to the psychologist, this mistaken notion also comes from lack of affection.

Unfortunately, it is an emotional disease that distorts the perception of reality.

It makes you depend on approvals, external recognition, and consideration from others to be happy, which is a mechanism created by the ego.

The ego is important, but we are not our ego.

It is, in fact, a character.

It holds the leading role in the history of our earthly experience. It is this character that lives situations and learns.

However, we are not this character, but the actor that plays this role, in other words, we are the spirit.

As life unfolds, ego gets stronger and the character is incorporated in such a way that we are led to believe we are this character.

And if this character’s wishes start to become an end in itself, the actor’s success – which is accomplishing the purpose of his soul – is usually compromised.

Depression is caused by this division. Your soul wants to take you somewhere, but your conditioned mind is driving you somewhere else.

And the conditioned mind is taking you to this other place because it wants to please, it wants recognition, it wants on and on. The nature of the mind is to wish. Wishing is compulsive. This compulsion and wishing consume your vitality, health, and time.

In the end of the day, all the mind wants is to be loved.

But it only feels really loved when it is loving.

At some point, you will need the courage to break this vicious cycle.

Another aspect of lack of success is related to you refusing to use your own gifts because you are afraid of your own greatness.

It seems absurd, but it is very common.

The fear of having your potential revealed is a side of another fear: overcoming your parents.

Several people nurture dependent relationships with their parents and often show a feeling of helplessness before them.

So, unconsciously, many do not want to grow, because they think that when they put their gifts into action, they will overcome their parents and that will destroy that relationship.

Some are even able to do well, but they keep a certain subservience because they feel guilty for being better than them.

Others suffer so much with this regret that they need to live far away from their parents to thrive. They cannot break up with scarcity having their family nearby.

For this reason, keep in mind: success comes from the soul, not from the ego.

Finally, let your heart act and your gifts manifest so you succeed.

The path to liberation

 

The path to freedom that takes us to self-accomplishment happens through selfless service.

Selfless action free us because it allows us to stop reacting. Consequently, we get rid of conditioning, meaning, the net of karma.

This is only possible when our actions, karma, and our purpose, dharma, are well aligned.

This means that our actions must correspond to what we come here for.

The more aligned our actions are with the higher purpose, the more positive effects our actions will have and the more consciousness they will bring to the planet because the purpose of the individual soul is directly related to the collective dharma and karma.

At last, spirituality is a synonym of detachment.

You become a spiritual person when you can detach from the story you have created for yourself.

In other words, this happens when you can let go of revenge, of the need to make justice with your own hands and when you can let go of the beliefs you have created about what is true.

As a natural effect of this process, the purpose begins to reveal itself as you surrender to the spiritual flow, which is the same as surrendering to the callings of your heart.

Conclusion

 

All of our evils arise from a moment in our lives when we have suffered rejection, especially during childhood, because of the typical vulnerability of this stage of life.

These pains are perpetuated through generations due to lack of spiritual consciousness while raising children.

This sets people apart from living what they came here for, which is accomplishing their purpose.

To break this cycle, it is necessary to accept all of our shadows.

Then, to reconcile with our parents and forgive them in order to cure emotional pain and move on.

In this way, purpose begins to reveal itself as you listen to your heart and surrender to the flow of spiritual life.

How about you?

What do you think of Prem Baba’s ideas on purpose?

Can you relate to any?

I would love to talk to you in the comments below. 🙂

Anyways, I think you also may like to read The Art of Living & To Love and Be Free.