It's easy to feel disconnected from the world. "With 25 percent of youth experiencing symptoms
of depression, but nearly one in four older adults were actually socially isolated,
a mental health crisis..." Our culture often makes us feel powerless to change anything. In a world
where there's less trust in our institutions and less trust in each other. "The number who trust
the government fell this year to 36 percent, trust in the news media also dropped to 40...
I traced the breakdown of trust in American institutions... a recent survey that discovered
that most of us only have four people that we can trust." But what might be the biggest tragedy
in all this isn't that we're disconnected from other people; it's that we become disconnected
from ourselves; a sense that the world discourages us from being who we really are. There's a story
that really captures this modern problem and gives us hints about how we can overcome it.
It's believed that around the 13th century a golden Buddha statue was made in Thailand;
it was beautiful and luminous. But the people of the town heard news that an army was coming
to invade them and so to protect the statue they covered it with a thick layer of mud
and plaster so it would look like it was made of stone, and with the hope that the invaders would
assume it had no value. When the army came they passed by the statue and left it there.
The plan worked. Days went by turning into months and then years until eventually no one remembered
that the statue was ever made of gold. But by the 1950s some of the rock began to crack
and fall away. To everyone's surprise it revealed the shimmering gold that was hidden underneath.
Many people gathered and they carefully removed the layer of stone and the golden
statue was restored. There's a symbolic message here that speaks to the story of our lives:
it's that each and every one of us comes into this world as precious and golden; as divine beings.
We're born completely connected to each other and to all the truths that could ever be known,
but somewhere along the way something happens to us: we forget who we really are.
It's our cultural conditioning. The messages that tell us that all the things that bring us joy,
the things we love doing, aren't practical enough. We're told that they must not have any value.
Little by little we're conditioned to conform; to hide our deepest talents to blend in with the
crowd. And as the years go by we stop valuing the very things that make us unique; we bury our true
nature under a kind of false self. A social mask we wear so we can carry on in the world
thinking it'll protect us. And we can go on like this for a while; for decades even. But eventually
the cracks begin to show. It can only hold for so long until finally something painful happens.
Maybe it's a divorce. Maybe it's losing your job or maybe it's a health issue. But whatever it is,
it knocks the mask away, and as painful as it can be, it's exactly in these moments that we
see a glimpse of the gold that we have hidden underneath. Joseph Campbell said that this is
a process that has to happen. It's a lot like being born. "It starts with being warm and snug in
a safe place, then comes the signal growing more insistent that it's time to leave. To stay beyond
your time is to putrefy. Without the tearing and the pain there is no new life." Because
it's exactly these signals - these callings - that show us how we can connect with our truest
selves. So how do you find your calling? In this video we'll look at three ways you can do this.
One of the keys to finding your calling comes from what psychologist David Feldman
and Howard Gardner called "Crystallizing Experiences." They found that the lives of
many gifted people follow a similar pattern. Often through a completely chance encounter
these gifted people would suddenly find something they were intensely passionate about
and often when they were quite young. We see this for example in the story of Claude Debussy
who composed some of the most beautiful musical pieces like "Clair de Lune."
When he was only 10 years old he studied music at the conservatory in Paris.
At the time he didn't show any interest in musical composition and he actually hated
a lot of his harmony classes. But this changed when one of his teachers introduced him to the
music of Richard Wagner. This music would move him so profoundly that it completely changed
his creative life. The young Debussy was so absorbed in the haunting melodies
that he lost all sense of time. When he finally decided to go home
he found that the doors were locked and he had to find his way out of the hallways in the dark.
Debussy would evolve his own musical style that in a lot of ways was a reaction against Wagner's,
but many point to this moment as the experience that set him on the path to becoming a composer.
People who have a crystallizing experience often describe it as an inner calling. A sense of
destiny that dominates their thoughts and their dreams. It guides them forward. We often think
of these people as being gifted with intelligence, but it's actually an emotional quality that sets
them apart. Crystallizing experiences can happen at any point in our lives, but they often happen
when we're young. Why? Because childhood is a time when we're unusually sensitive. We're open
to life's experiences, and receptive to new ideas. But as we get older our world becomes noisy,
our lives get too busy, and there's less room for the calls to get through. But it doesn't
have to stay that way. We can recapture that same sense of wonder, the curiosity we had as children,
to see once again with the eyes of an explorer. Back to a time when we were all artists: painting,
singing, and dancing. When everything was new and mysterious, and we laid in the grass staring up
at the sky watching the clouds and the birds in what felt like endless summer. Because children
aren't afraid to ask questions with sincerity. They tap into their imagination effortlessly.
The psychologist Carl Jung saw such power in this that he developed the technique known as
"Active Imagination" where the things in our unconscious mind are translated into images,
figures, or stories. In it we can talk with dream figures, with our past or future selves,
and with people real or imagined. In doing this we commune with the different parts of ourselves.
Jung saw it as a bridge that connected the conscious mind to the unconscious. What it
boils down to is a kind of inner exploration. Rediscovering that same sense of curiosity
and play. Think back to your life. What are the things that you completely fell
in love with doing? The things you never grew tired of when you lost yourself in the moment?
To hear your calling you have to be receptive to it, and that is where synchronicity comes in. Carl
Jung explained that synchronicity happens when an inner state of the mind lines up with something in
the outside world in a way that's not connected by cause and effect, but connected by meaning.
And when it happens it gives us a sense of the numinous: the feeling of transcendence,
of being lifted outside of ourselves, and connected to the divine. The author Gregg Levoy
wrote about it in his book: "Callings: finding and following an authentic life." In it, he tells
the story of his own remarkable synchronicity and how it served as a calling in his life.
He describes how in 1982 he was offered a job at the newspaper Usa Today. There was only
one problem: this job was in a different city, Washington, D.C. And it would mean
uprooting his whole life and moving there. After some thought he took the job, but after working
there for only a short time he was told that it wasn't a good fit. They let him go, and he had
to move back home feeling lost and embarrassed. His spirits crushed. But then one day as he was
driving home the radio played the song "Desperado" by the Eagles. As he parked his car, just before
turning off the engine, he heard one last line from the song: "you know the queen of hearts
is always your best bet." At exactly that moment he opened the door and stepped out of the car,
and sitting on the curb next to his feet was one playing card: the queen of hearts. The incredible
timing of hearing that exact line of that exact song and finding this specific card at his feet
was unbelievable. And so he just stood there stunned wondering what it could possibly mean.
Later that night he told the story to a friend. She smiled and said:
"when you're on the right path the universe winks and nods at you from time to time
just to let you know, and once you start noticing these little cosmic clues, once you understand
that you're on a path at all you begin to see them everywhere." But as amazing as this was this was
only the beginning. Over the next few years as he looked for a sense of direction in his life
he found five more queen of hearts playing cards in the most unlikely places. He found one in a
sand dune when he was visiting Oregon. He found another one in the mountain wilderness of Colorado
six miles from the nearest trailhead. Each time he found another queen card the sheer
unthinkability of it struck him as even more impossible until finally he surrendered to
it. There was one conclusion he could no longer avoid and that is that the astonishing arrangement
of events and timing in our lives must be guided by a kind of divine consciousness.
But for Gregg Levoy, what did it all mean? He took these synchronicities to mean that he was being
directed towards something that was missing both in his writing and in his life. He needed more
heart and less head, more intuition and less intellect. To develop more of his inner life
and to connect with his senses. The fact that the card was a queen was equally important. Queens are
symbols of feminine power and authority. He took this as a call to awaken these very same powers
within him. Powers that exist in all of us. And this new understanding completely changed his work
and the way he lived his life. Joseph Campbell wrote that when you listen to these callings,
when you follow your bliss, the universe will open doors where there were only walls. You will have
the feeling of being helped by hidden hands, where new doors open up to you where they wouldn't have
opened for anyone else. If you're at a turning point now in your life ask yourself: what are
you being guided towards? What is it you're meant to understand? And what is calling out to you?
The most powerful way you can find your calling is by confronting one unavoidable truth:
and that is one day you will die. Everything and everyone you know will pass on from this world,
and it means the time we have now is precious and fleeting. Many years ago Gregg Levoy interviewed
people who were terminally ill, they all knew they were going to die, they didn't have much
time left. And although many people were shattered by the news, once they made peace with it,
they often felt strangely free. No longer trapped by social expectations and no longer pressured
to live someone else's life, finally they were free to be themselves. One woman said that being
diagnosed with cancer wasn't a death sentence, it was a life sentence. Her passions and all the
things she loved were finally set free. This is something that ancient cultures understood
very well. They knew that life was fragile, that death is an integral part of the world,
that were continually dying and being reborn. In every life they marked these spiritual moments
of change with rites of passage and rituals to help cross over into the next stage of our lives.
From the moment we're born, from the passage of childhood to adulthood,
from single life to married life, and finally our physical death. At each stage we have to let go
and let our old selves die so that a new self can be reborn. Without these rituals our lives can
often feel blocked and stuck without even knowing why. As painful as it may be, death gives meaning
and importance to time, it brings focus and puts life in perspective. When we face our death we
can't help but drop the social mask, the stone surface falls away to reveal the hidden gold.
Death asks the most essential question: what do you love? What is your soul calling out
for you to do? Who is it calling you to become? Whenever I think of these questions I'm often
reminded of a clip from the late actor Brandon Lee: "because we do not know when we will die,
we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number
of times and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon
of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being, that you can't
even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that.
How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20, and yet it all seems limitless."
So you might ask once you've heard your calling, what comes next? That is what we'll look at in
the next video. If it's available you'll see it appearing here on the left side of the screen.
If it's not appearing that means I'm still working on it but I think you'll like the video
on the right side of the screen on the hero's journey and the call to adventure. And if you
liked this video I would absolutely love it if you showed your support by pressing the like button.
As always thanks so much for watching, take care of yourselves, and i'll see you in the next one.