The fifth principle is the antidote to meaninglessness. It states that your life has a purpose. You define it at the level of your soul and then it unfolds in daily life as part of the Divine Plan. The more deeply connected you are to the plan, the more powerful the purpose in your life becomes. Nothing can stop it. When I write about the spiritual path, I come to the idea that I need to get rid of terminology like “soul”, “God” and “spirit”. Because since there is only one reality, we do not need a separate, ordinary dictionary for our everyday existence and another special dictionary for our higher existence. Either it’s all spiritual or it’s nothing. In God’s eyes, walking on water is as supernatural as the ability of hemoglobin to bind to oxygen in the blood cell. Neither is visible to the naked eye, and both belong to the infinitely unfolding plan of creation. Yet somehow it seems to us that a life filled with purpose and content must be closer to God than another life spent aimlessly.
Dualism exerts a powerful influence on the mind – we cannot free ourselves from the categories of higher-lower, better-worse. What is difficult to understand is that God, since He wants nothing, demands nothing from us. In a spiritual sense, one life isn’t more or less valuable than another. Today’s thief will be reborn into tomorrow’s saint and vice versa. In the Divine plan, everyone has a role. And since God is within you, you yourself have the absolute right to choose your role in the Divine Plan. How is this plan implemented in a practical sense? Fundamental to it is the issue of perception. When you were a baby, you perceived yourself in a very limited way. What you could not handle or understand was provided as care from your father or mother. They fed you until you learned to feed yourself, sheltered you until you could provide for yourself, and so on.
As you have developed more and more abilities, your sense of where you are in relation to the world around you has changed. In other words, with each step you take toward self-sufficiency, your perception has changed. The divine plan is similar to this. In the beginning, personal power is very limited. The ego suggests that it must secure itself by grabbing what it wants and discarding the rest. Perception at this stage is limited to the individual himself; the horizons are quite limited. All that matters is what the benefit is to “me, myself and mine”. The ego is not interested in how the self relates to everything else. What an irony: at this stage, when we are given external forces and the power to dictate events, it is the ego that feels most powerful. As perception expands, so does inner potential. Beyond the ego a different circle expands in all directions.
In the Divine plan, at the level of the soul, man can expand without limit. You begin to observe how amazingly the creation is organized with perfect care and infinite intelligence. The more your perception expands, the closer you get to God. You don’t even have to search for it, you just have to look. After all, everything is already God, so it’s a matter of seeing deeper and deeper. You acquire a vision that is in harmony with the finest aspects of beauty and truth. One of the greatest blessings of existence is that everyone is born with the desire to see more and more. That is why Indian sages believed that even thinking about God was a sign that he would surely appear one day. It turns out that the expansion of consciousness is the Divine Plan itself. There is no other. As your consciousness expands, you become increasingly convinced that you are part of the Divine Plan. Nothing more is required of you, and never has been.
