Masonic Articles and Essays
Purpose in Life - Part I
The Very Illus..... Bro... Manly P. Hall 33o
Date Published: 8/14/2024
The first part of a transcribed lecture by Manly P. Hall, Purpose in Life examines the nature of human destiny, the conditions of human growth and the potential of our evolution. Freemasonry teaches the same knowledge, by a symbolic system,and much light can be gained from this detailed explanation.
I have the belief from a pretty long career of observation and reflection that there is a definite reason behind the life of every human being. There is a particular purpose. Nature does not produce nonessentials. Nature has not fashioned some persons to succeed and others to fail. Nature has never been extravagant with life. Every living thing who fills parts in a plan and this plan in the human being has been individualized. Each person is here for a purpose. Now why are so many not aware of this purpose? I think the answer lies in the fact that the average person is confused by pressures that are artificial. He comes into this life perhaps in the highest degrees of his intelligence. As a newborn babe, he’s probably wiser than he will ever be in is life. That perhaps is one of the reasons that so many come weeping into the world. But we also realize that many children have strange and mysterious deaths even in infancy. Their little faces seem to bear witness to something more than the obvious. The moment however the child is born it is regarded as a lump of putty, everybody wants to get their fingers in it. Everyone wants to help this child succeed and before they get through they may definitely force the child to become a failure. In an effort to assume that this material world in which we live for a few years is the most important place in the universe and that to achieve some minor success here is the outstanding distinction to which a human being can attain.
The process of fitting the personality into the traditional patterns closes in around the small child. He is told what to believe and how to believe. If he is in a religious family, he is told who to worship and what church is proper for him and as he goes into school, he comes into contact with a mass of conditioned associates. Children like himself who have been more or less destroyed before they even reach grammar school, destroyed in the sense that the internal pressure of a reality behind themselves is being continuously blocked. After a time this growing person begins to assume that adjustment with the world in which he lives, adjustment in the sense of acceptance is of the primary importance. He is exposed to all kinds of conditionings, among others he is taught that he must gradually accumulate an education that will enable him to make a living. He is impressed with the psychosis of success. If he is lacking in aggressive ambitions, he is assimilated if possible. And if he cannot be assimilated, it is assumed he will end up as a second class citizen. The individual never really is encouraged to make use of his own resources.
Yet behind this pressure constantly exerted upon him, there is something else and that may be described perhaps as the will of life. The eternal reality which is far deeper and more important than all of the various superficial levels and structures that are built upon him. The only way we can really approach this is to realize that when we have received the full conditioning of our society and have attained physical maturity that perhaps we will be able to pause for a moment and find out a little more about ourselves. Usually however, this moment of pause only comes when physical or emotional reverses break down the structure of the so-called physical, material, industrial plan for living - nearly always, a crisis, a great disappointment, a heartache, a desperate illness. These are the kinds of pressures that perhaps have been placed here to remind us that we have an individual existence and that this existence must be given expression or the life that we are living will remain incomplete. There are very few of us that manage to get through this world without some kind of sorrow, without reversals, disillusionment, and even despairs and these bear witness in most cases to the fact that we are not fulfilling the purpose for which we were created. The materialist doesn’t believe there is a purpose, therefore he is constantly contributing to a purposeless existence. His only out in this is material advancement. The individual becomes the banker, then perhaps another individual becomes the university professor, and in these achievements, comes to regard his life as fulfilled. Yet in reality he has gone through 50, 60, 70, years of physical existence and learned virtually nothing. He has not even learned to direct his energies toward the fulfillment of a universal procedure very much bigger than any material ambition can possibly be.
Where are we going to equate this, how are we going to approach this? Well, perhaps one way is to study ourselves, at any age, whenever the impulse first arises within us. In the midst of all the things we are doing because they appear reasonable or inevitable, sometimes we can ask ourselves, what would I really want to do? If the condition were permitted to me to make a completely free choice, what direction would my natural instincts compel me? It may be that a successful lawyer always wanted to be a sea captain. Another individual always wanted to be a poet but was never able to get around to do much more than ever signing checks. What would the person be if he was able to fulfill the deepest parts of his own life? What would the small quiet voice inside of him recommend if the pressure of outside influence was not there? I think that every living thing, from the mineral kingdom on, has some kind of an intuitional inner life and this intuitional inner life impels that living thing, whatever it is, to fulfill the purpose for which it was created. To assume that the universal destiny is fulfilled by a person becoming a political leader or a major economist or an advisor to something, such cannot possibly be regarded as important to Nature.
Nature, which is a leveler of all things. Nature, which rules behind all of the processes that we recognize certainly is not too much concerned as to whether we have a swimming pool or not. Nature has a job of it’s own and Nature is working through living things to fulfill a common good. And each of us in some way an instrument of this plan, it is very important for each of us to try to understand natural purpose for humanity. Why was the human being created? Why was the breath of life breathed into it? Why was he given a body such as he has? What was Nature’s purpose of placing him in an environmental world such as he has? These questions are overlooked and ignored because they run contrary to approved policies for conduct. Yet we cannot assume that Nature was frustrated by the fall of the Roman Empire or that the divine plan was overthrown by Adolph Hitler or Alexander the Great or Genghis Kahn. These are episodes, incidents on the outer surface of human existence. They bear witness to ignorance, and to false ambitions, arrogance and tyranny that are not naturally given to us by Deity. The idea that we are a compound of good and bad which for the most part, weakness predominating, is not solid when we contemplate it in terms of Nature. Nature has put us together in an extraordinary way, it has created a being that even the greatest scientists cannot yet even estimate. Man is full of wonders. Nature has conspired to produce a miracle and call it humanity.
Now the question is what is this miracle going to produce? What is going to justify the millions of years of physical evolution that lies behind man? What is going to justify the constant unfoldment of faculties and powers? Most of them have been perverted. They have been degraded into instruments of profit. But behind the individual is a creativity that is superior to the uses that have been made of the creative instinct. Back of the individual is a resource infinitely greater than anything he ever uses. Why doesn’t he use it? Well to the most of people there is not even a realization that it exists. They’ve lived on the surface of themselves from the beginning and expect to end there. And having had this magnificent fabric bestowed upon them, they depart from this world with very little that they have contributed to the advancement of anything. How then does man get this incredible potential? The answer seems to be only one possible solution and that is reincarnation.
The individual is not here for the first or last time, he is here as part of a chain of embodiments and the purpose of this chain of embodiments is the enrichment of the inner light of the individual. He has grown up through thousands of years, millions of years perhaps, of adjustment or near adjustment with environment. He has gradually come nearer and nearer to becoming able to use rather than abuse the circumstances that exist around him. Now in this long procedure of rebirths, the individual has gradually matured a personal entity, an individuality. This individuality is based upon the accumulated wisdom, the accumulated experience and, to a large majority, also the accumulated wisdom which has come to him. This accumulation has resulted in a great generalization of abilities which we overlook. He has been developing talents, abilities which gradually came together to provide him with a kind of genius. This genius, to the Greeks was not a quality but a being, the genius in us. This genius is a composite, subconscious, subjective record of the totality of our experience. It does not necessarily represent a continuity because, in many instances, the life of the individual is violently changed but it is always a record of a relationship between the individual and his environment.
It began perhaps in the Stone Age or earlier but it was always a struggle on the part of the individual to attain security in a hazardous environment. We are still struggling for the same thing but unfortunately we are not making use of the accumulated resource of previous experience, because it is not consciously remembered. It is ignored and we have no way of explaining the various intuitions, hunches, feelings, pressures that do arise within ourselves. These pressures divide naturally into a number of levels. On one level these pressures are simply the perpetuation of mistakes which continue to hound us and annoy us until they are corrected.Another level of these pressures is imagination, intuition, the individual becoming inwardly aware of values greater than the common place. Most of our great teachers in philosophy and religion, the great idealists, the great sociologists, the utopians, all these people are born with a strong summation within themselves of what they have gone through in the past – why it was not sufficient and how in the present embodiment they can make use of that which has gone before. Physically we can say we build up a history but there is another kind of history – records within ourselves, records within the flesh, the bone, the nerve, the artery, the glands, pressures within ourselves that bear witness to ages of conditioning.
Now it is not at all seemly that all this record, this internal achievement pattern, should be completely wasted. The fact that we do not consciously remember it is largely due to the fact that we have been taught not to consciously remember it by our environment. Some small child who precociously exhibits genius is a cause of joy to some and causes problems to others. We know that such things happen. We know that there are people born in this world to play the piano. We know there are people born to paint or to write good poetry,we know there are some here born for sciences and philosophies and others are by pressures within themselves inevitably drawn to religion. These attractions do not arise from the superficial relationships of life. We know definitely that a great variety of so called talents come into life with us. We try to solve all of this with the law of heredity and it did not work. We find that there is no physical heredity consistent enough to explain the peculiar genius of individuals. Many very famous and important creators have come from environments in which there was no background that is in any way comparable to what was attained. And again these very geniuses do not transmit their skills or their abilities to progeny, very often the progeny of genius are mediocre.
There is something else that determines these things and that something is the record carried within himself. He doesn’t have the details but he does have a balance sheet he brings with him - in which the assets and liabilities, the credits and debits, reduce a peculiar type of internal integration, an integration which is going to dominate life if this is permitted. This record of integration is not primarily built around material success. If we go back assuming that the individual was born many times on this earth, go back a hundred or a few thousand years and practically all of the activities that we are familiar with today were in a very incipient state, there are no great economists because we were not even concerned with economic systems primarily. There are very few great leaders in any field and very few skills were developed that corresponds to our computerization of today or to the advances that we now know in the sciences. It was an entirely different type of progress, a progress intended to release the conscious power of the person to help the individual to grow. The growth is nothing more or less than the unfoldment and revelation of potential.
Growth is in truth, slowly but inevitably, that which he was destined to be in the beginning. And to fulfill his destiny the individual has to move his levels of estimations realizing that the institutions we have today will pass away, as to those which went before. The laws, the natural integrations, the entities with which we are now familiar are part of a passing pageantry. The world will change, for nothing is changeless but change and much of the experience that we gain today in arts and sciences will be of comparatively little use in a different time of social integration. The experience of growing, the experiences of gradually unfolding inner verities through transit manifestations, these experience continue to accumulate so we must finally, it seems, come to the original idea of Nature, Natural Law and Divine Law. The human being was created in the first place to amount to something. And that something is not to be judged in terms in the physical, mechanical, materialistic objectives to which we are addicted today. But what we are really here for is part of the whole growth program of the universe itself. And every step that we take is related to certain values within ourselves. One of these values is integrity. Integrity is something that naturally would express itself in the lives of most people but integrity is gradually undermined by compromise - the individual trying to avoid an unpleasant experience departs from honesty. Or in order to advance his material estate he corrupts his own morality. Or through weakness of appetites he again compromises his personal virtues.
Therefore we have forever a struggle between integrity and compromise, now this struggle can go on anywhere. It can go on in a cave, it can go on in an ancient classical culture, it can go on today and does go on in the highly economized and mechanized civilization that we know. It still remains a part of the human character to do it well or to compromise. But compromise is more pressureful where the advantages of compromise appear to be more desirable. But the entire story of man’s compromise of morality and ethics goes back to the problem of compromise. It looks as though Nature intends that we should develop the internal moral strength of integrity. Integrity is a valuable thing. It is not only valuable here but no matter what happens to our culture, it remains valuable. And what happens to us when we depart from here? Integrity is one of the most important and required factors of evolution and progress. So all through thousands of years, we may have been trying to find integrity. Some people started looking for it at a very early age in the history of society, others even begin to struggle with it in the middle years of the present embodiment but always Nature demands it. Nature must gradually prove to us that integrity alone fulfills natural requirement.
Here we have a world that could be a really beautiful place with many opportunities. Most of the good has been compromised through lack of integrity. Life after life, the private citizen has suffered from the dishonesty of his associates and has compromised his life by his own dishonesty. On and on this goes and will go probably for quite a time but each person is able to break that pattern when he realizes it is important to do so. The fact that conscience remains even though it seems to be very badly undermined reminds us strongly that the desire for integrity is innate and the desire for compromise is impermanent and due to external pressure. Another factor that is important in the pattern of things is the emotional pressure of life. Actually, the Divine plan calls for a beautiful world. It calls for a world in which people are happy, useful and able to achieve emotional fulfillment through the proper expression of affection, friendship, cooperation and integrity. But most people do not achieve this, they have moved the entire emotional world down into the gratification of physical appetites of one kind or another, only to discover in the end that these appetites cannot be satisfied and that no matter what we do or how we try to achieve happiness from the outside and through the fulfillment of appetites we remain miserable.
This record is so long and so well established that it’s a wonder that it has not received scientific recognition. The fact is that the individual who tries to be happy is miserable. But the individual who tries to be right comes nearer to happiness than any mortal can come. We have many such basic characteristics, one of these which I think is very basic is friendship. Most people are by instinct friendly but by experience they have become cautious and disillusioned. Friendship is no longer a simple acceptance of the inevitable relationships of life. Actually friendship is the basis of all cooperation in Nature. Friendship is the emotion that could end war, end poverty, break down the barriers of isolation and correct most of the neurotic pressures of the individual but by false conditioning the natural desire toward friendliness has been blocked. The individual has been exploited therefore he will not give his friendship without reservation. Yet within him he wants it. Now if each of us or even one was of us wants the basic experience of friendship, it is also true that every human being has this same basic emotion for these pressures come with life energy itself. The energy which supports the human being is not merely a physical energy, it is a moral energy. It not only rejoices in accuracy, it rejoices in beauty and it has discovered that accuracy and beauty are the same thing. That every relation that is constructive and normal is beautiful and every relationship that is not beautiful or has been perverted is abnormal.
The individual does not really understand how to face into this, how to work toward the revelation of the integrities in himself. Here is where we come into the different disciplines that have been adapted from time immemorial in an effort to help the person to rediscover himself or reaffirm his place in the universal plan of infinite benevolence. Most of the disciplines that have been accepted in recent centuries and also the ancient times were disciplines of which the individual was expected to perform certain disciplined actions toward himself. It was assumed that he must quiet and subdue the authority of outside circumstances over his own inner life. He must break through the barriers of slavery. Serfdom is an artificial state, for in the infinite plan of things, all living creatures have equal rights. Each individual has an equal right with all others and serfdom is nearly always the result of a mistaken interpretation of personal freedom. The moment the individual becomes a slave to his own negative attitudes he is in slavery. So the Greeks and the Orientals and the Egyptians and the early Christians all worked upon the problem of the individual achieving freedom and it was generally agreed that freedom depended upon the person emancipating his own consciousness from the miasma of material addictions.
The individual can live in this world but not be of it. He can fulfill every duty of citizenship and family without becoming deluded by the false values that have sprung up in the human environment. So in discipline the ancients believed that appetites and ambitions must be disciplined and curtailed. The individual must gradually divide himself from the common environment and assume or reveal his own personal destiny. Now a personal destiny does not mean a rugged individualism, it does not mean that the individual is no longer benevolently inclined. His real problem is to discover himself as a factor in the infinite good in all that lives. He has to realize that there are many jobs to be done in connection with the release of consciousness through the personality. Each individual has a place in the labor of growth. He is involved in the unfoldment of all other human beings. This is because we accept that the plan for things was correct. That the Divine purpose is real. And that there is no possible way of changing the basic requirements of living. We can change our false interpretations of them, with every passing day, but the truth remains that we are here to grow and to serve.
It is important and inevitable that this gradually comes to our attention. So through discipline we gradually break away from a whole group of temptations. We begin to recognize the true relationship between the life within us, which is eternal, and the life around us, which is temporal and impermanent. We have to reassert ourselves as citizens of eternity. We have to recognize the unbroken chain of circumstances which brought us to where we are and how this unbroken chain will continue in the future until it brings where we should be and this there is no way of avoiding. So instead of trying to avoid it it is far better to move with it. It is a means by which we capitalize the basic assets which we have and begin to give emphasis, more and more, upon the unfoldment of potential. Now when we start to try to do this we have a problem on our hands also. Namely, which way do we turn to find adequate instruction? How are we to be sure, or reasonably sure, that any move that we make is actually in conformity with Natural Law? Some feel that Natural Law would be consummated by a completely industrialized culture. Some feel that if we reach the point finally where the world is run by robots the human being will be free to do as he pleases. But a world run by robots will never give the individual anything to accomplish as a means of unfolding his own potential.
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It is a mistake for us to invent things to think for us or to invent ways of avoiding the common learning of life. For there is much more to be learned by the individual who can make a good pair of shoes than can be learned by the individual who simply buys pairs of shoes. Everything that we do increases skills, increases and releases creative expression, whereas when we turn completely to an economic purveyance of things, we lose practically all initiative, we lose the ability to meet problems and, as we are now at the moment, we live in a world of gadgets we cannot even take care of. We have lost the skills to do the things that might have made the possessions that we have important means of helping us to grow. Today they are merely important means of hastening us into bankruptcy because we do not use individual initiative. To gain a better idea of this, it is nearly always advisable to for a person to try to separate his own life, separate his external existence from his internal existence and recognize that the internal existence is the most important. It is the final victory of life over illusion. If he really, sincerely and intensely knows that as a being he must grow and only that which becomes part of an unfolding consciousness is essential. That which merely exploits consciousness for utility is not essential.
