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Discovering One’s Role or Mission in Life · Sri Aurobindo Studies

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  When we are fixed in the external personality, we take
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  our cues about our role in life, from our family, our friends,
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  the social, and economic environment.
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  And with that framing our particular interests and
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  aptitudes. As a child, we may want to
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  emulate people in uniforms and thus may want to be a pilot or a
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  service technician or any of a number of uniform professions.
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  As we mature, we begin to hear advice about what education we
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  should receive and what career path we should follow much of
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  this revolves around income potential and status in his
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  novel Bleak House Charles, Dickens, Trays one character as
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  uncertain about what direction to take.
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  And he's excessively tries to go into the medical field, followed
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  by equally failed, forays into the military and the legal
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  field. All of these were attempts to
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  navigate the societal demand for a productive and lucrative
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  Direction in the external life. Although he was unable to match
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  up these demands with his own inner self, which frankly he was
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  never able to discover in his short life, people fixate on
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  their outer position and status as a measure of who they are.
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  Yet frequently, they find that the life they are leading is
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  empty, meaningless and frustrating to any deeper
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  aspirations. They may secretly have arising
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  within them. In the book called to heal
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  African shamanic, healers the author.
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  Susan Schuster Campbell relate to tale of a shamanic healer,
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  who tries to avoid the calling that kept pressing on her from
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  within and who tried to develop a more outwardly acceptable
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  career and life pattern. She continued to have setbacks
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  obstacles and illnesses. And finally, she was told by
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  someone who was counseling her that she was.
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  Avoiding her true calling as a Healer as soon as she dropped
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  her resistance to that inner pressure, her life turned around
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  and she felt fulfilled on what turned out to be her true path.
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  The mother notes quote, the first thing to do then is to
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  find out what it is that you are meant to realize what is the
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  role you have to play your particular mission?
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  And the capacity or quality, you have to express, you have to
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  discover that. And also the thing or things
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  that oppose and do not allow it to flower or come to full
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  manifestation. In other words, you have to know
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  yourself, recognize your soul or a psychic being for that.
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  You must be absolutely sincere. And impartial you must observe
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  yourself as if you were Irving and criticizing a third person.
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  You must not start with an idea that this is your life's
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  Mission. This is your particular
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  capacity. This you are to do or that you
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  are to do in this. Lies, your talent or genius,
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  Etc. That will carry you away from
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  the right track. It is not the liking or
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  disliking of your external being your mental, or vital or
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  physical choice, that determines the true line of your growth.
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  Nor should you take up the opposite attitude and say I am
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  good for nothing in this matter. I am useless in that one.
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  It is not for me, neither, vanity and arrogance nor
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  self-depreciation and false modesty should move you.
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  As I said, you must be absolutely impartial.
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  And unconcerned you should be like a mirror that reflects the
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  truth and does not judge. If you are able to keep such an
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  attitude, if you have this Repose and quiet trust in your
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  being and wait for what may be revealed to you, then something
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  like this happens. You are as it were in a wood
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  darkened noiseless. You see in front of you, merely
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  a sheet of water dark and still hardly visible a bit of a pond
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  embedded in the obscurity and slowly upon it.
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  A Moonbeam is cast and in the cool dim light emerges the calm
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  liquid surface. That is how your secret truth of
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  being. Will appear and present itself
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  to you at your first contact with it.
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  There you will see gradually, reflected the true qualities of
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  your being the traits of your Divine personality, what you
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  really are, and what you are really meant to be.
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  One who has thus known himself and possessed himself.
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  Conquering, all opposition within himself, has by that very
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  fact, extended himself. And his Conquest making it
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  easier for others to make the same or a similar Conquest.
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  These are the Pioneers or the elite, who by a Victorious
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  campaign within themselves, help others towards their victory.
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  And quote, reference SRI aurobindo in the mother growing
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  within the psychology of inner development.
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  Chapter 8, the psychic being an inner growth Pages, 153 to 154.