Purpose - Volume I: Meditation on Love, Relationship, Fear, Death, Intuition, and Power-Uncovering Our Resistance to Life.: Purpose, #1

By Noura Books

2018 Readers' Favorite Award-Winner "For readers who want to find the peace and serenity that come with living with a purpose... This is a book that offers readers a powerful path to use meditation as a tool to transform their lives."
 

"This is an exceptional book for all who strive to grow and empower themselves... I found this book inspirational and empowering because I am the one finding my own answers through meditation."

A guide on finding our purpose, removing self-doubt and fear while improving happiness, positive thoughts, love, relationships, and intuition - "Purpose -Volume I" is an exploration of the meaning of purpose: What is purpose? What is our purpose? How do we find it? Where do we look? What gets in the way of seeing it? What other questions can we ask ourselves?

Is it possible to have clarity about ourselves that enables us to understand ourselves totally so we never have to rely on any belief? If we can look and see clearly for ourselves, are beliefs necessary?

Some of the topics explored include the following:

"Using meditation as a tool for self-inquiry and observation
"Mastering the mind through the mastery of love, which doesn't oppose
"Empowering ourselves through mastery of the mind
"Love as our natural state, which can be hidden or denied but never destroyed
"Darkness as the false in us to be undone through total understanding of ourselves
"Unity of purpose as the foundation of our thinking versus the belief in separation as the foundation of our thinking
"The strength of unity in relation to mental strength
"How fear and violence arise in our thinking
"Uncovering our resistance to life and freeing ourselves from that resistance
"Relationships, death, intuition, intelligence, greed, joy, forgiveness, and integrity
"Respecting the power of belief
"Boundaries versus defenses
"Duality versus nonduality
"The mastery of love versus the mastery of darkness
"Purpose

"I found this text extraordinarily helpful in untangling some of the challenges and obstacles in my life... Highly recommended. There were some issues I was having that this book helped me resolve."
-Amazon Review ★★★★★
 
"The title is a bit misleading as I feel that this book is so much more than its description. It is the amalgamation of mind, body, spirit, self, and present. Highly recommended for higher spiritual enlightenment."
-Amazon Review ★★★★★

"A first volume for a promising, refreshing, and inspiring series, Purpose - Volume I is a ground-breaking self-help book that is both insightful and intelligently crafted, a book for readers who want to generously embrace life and find the peace and serenity that come with living with a purpose. This is a book that offers readers a powerful path to use meditation as a tool to transform their lives."
 Readers' Favorite - Christian Sia ★★★★★
 
"Noura's style of writing is very insightful, polished, and flawlessly worded to enable the reader to join her on her journey to unravel the roots of the many different problems that happen in our lives. What question should we ask ourselves? This is where meditating on these issues will bring about solutions. I feel that parents would do well to have this articulate work in their home libraries."
 Readers' Favorite - Stephen Fisher ★★★★★

• Language: English
• Publisher: Noura Books
• Release date: Feb 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781393104506

Noura Books

Noura is philosopher who writes on the topic of mindfulness. She is an artist and her tools are words she weaves into ideas. Her love for writing was inspired by her love for reading and her very active imagination. Her purpose in life is to empower people to break free from the chains of their circumstances and unlock their highest potential. She is convinced that all people have within themselves all the answers they seek if they look and inquire. Read more at nourabooks.com.

Book preview

Part I

The Purpose of This Book

1

How to Approach the Book

Approach this book as you would a work of art. It’s not a scientific treatise filled with sources backed by experts. I’m not an expert myself. I’m just an artist. My tools are words I weave together into ideas. Words are nothing more than symbols. In themselves, they have no meaning. You bring them to life by the meaning you see in them. We’re all artists at heart. Each one of us has his or her own unique imagination; therefore, we may all read the same words, but we may see different meanings.

2

How It Came About

I’ve always loved to write. This started with a love of reading from a young age. I was one of these children with a very active imagination, and I felt that reading was a wonderful outlet for that. I credit this love for reading to my mother because when she noticed how much I enjoyed reading, she nurtured that love by making sure that I always had wonderful books available to read.

I grew up in a French-speaking country; however, I’ve been living in the United States for so long that English now feels like my first language. At first, I started writing because I found that putting my ideas on paper helped me to think better. It wasn’t until near the end of 2015 that the ideas for this book started to form. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night with some ideas that I really wanted to write down. So I made sure to leave a notepad and a pen next to my bed before going to sleep. Sometimes I’d have a dream about a challenge I was trying to solve. I’d solve it in the dream, then wake up, and write down the solution. Most of the ideas came early in the morning. Sometimes it was a battle between making sure to get to work on time and writing down the ideas before I forgot about them. I made it a habit to have a pen and a notepad in my purse just in case.

Sometime between 2016 and 2017, I went through a lot of rapid changes. As a result, the flow of ideas didn’t come through as much during these times. Nothing was going according to my plans, so I had to learn how to live in the present and how to adapt very quickly to rapidly changing events. When things finally settled down mid-2017, I was finally able to consolidate everything and add new ideas so that this book could finally come together. The book somehow never interfered with my life in any way. Instead, it flowed like water, molding itself around anything on its path and launching itself that way.

It was a very interesting experience writing this book because very often it felt as if it had a life of its own, and I didn’t always know what turn it was going to take next. Maybe the reason I felt so compelled to write it was because there was someone out there who needed to hear these words. If there’s at least one person who finds this book to be helpful, then its purpose would have been accomplished for whatever reason it wanted so badly to be born. As Rumi said, What you seek is seeking you.

3

The Structure of the Book and How to Use It

The book is written in the form of a conversation in which I’m inviting you to inquire along with me into the meaning of purpose. What is purpose? What is our purpose? How do we find it? Where do we look? What gets in the way of seeing it? What other questions can we ask ourselves? As we move along, I raise questions not necessarily to answer all of them but so that you may consider them for further inquiry, and possibly come up with additional questions to explore.

---

We’re exploring purpose in the following different ways:

Finding our purpose through the use of meditation and observation of our minds

Inquiring into the why of everything in our lives, including the obvious

Purpose as the connecting link between the seemingly separated different forms or aspects of our lives

Purpose as the factor that gives meaning to forms

---

Purpose is the factor that gives meaning to anything in life. The way I’ll understand the meaning something has in my life is by the purpose I’ve given it. This is why two people can read the same words and see a different meaning. For example, a colleague and I were trying to interpret a handwritten number. I saw 25/76. I interpreted it as a code similar to the number above it. My colleague saw 25176, and she interpreted it as a number meant to replace the scratched number next to it. We interpreted the number differently based on the purpose we saw in it. If you’d never seen a pen or anything similar to it, what would you see when you looked at it? When you’re looking at a pen, are you seeing the pen, or are you seeing your experiences with pens? If you saw a pen for the first time, your first question might be, what’s it for? What’s its purpose?

Your purpose for reading this book will determine your experience of it and the meaning you see in it. Will you see a discussion, a lecture, or an analysis? An analysis is usually written with the aim of demonstrating that a particular position is true. This is why it includes supporting data backed by experts. This book is more similar to an art form rather than an analysis. However, it’s not totally abstract like a work of art. It provides some instructions you can use, but it’s unspecific enough to allow freedom to inquire. It’s not meant to prove that a particular position is true as an analysis would. It’s written in the spirit of sharing ideas as you would in a learning environment in which we’re inquiring into various topics. When we’re inquiring, it can be helpful to hear different perspectives and other questions others might ask. You may come up with different questions or insights from your inquiry. Regardless of what you find, it can be an opportunity to look at it again or to look at it from a different perspective. The goal of the inquiry is for each one of us to investigate into our own minds and see what we each find. Even though we’re inquiring together, each one of us is looking at his or her own mind. I don’t get to hear your perspective, but you get to hear mine, which we can use as a way of stimulating further inquiry.

The main question we’re always exploring in connection with everything we discuss is not whether we should or shouldn’t do it, but what’s it for. For example, when we talk about beliefs, it doesn’t imply that we should or shouldn’t believe in the existence of something. We’re examining the meaning of the belief in our lives. If the purpose of believing is to eventually enable us to see for ourselves so we no longer need to rely on the belief, then it’s part of our path to freedom. If the purpose of the belief is to keep us perpetually dependent on it so we never see for ourselves, then it’s a prison. The meaning of the belief is found in its purpose. If we become aware that we’ve used the belief to imprison ourselves, we don’t necessarily have to give up the belief—we can change its purpose and use it as a path to freedom instead. Our focus isn’t necessarily to change the forms of our lives but to understand the purpose we’ve given them. It’s only when we see clearly what we’ve chosen that we can make another choice. Until then, we have no choice.

Part of finding our purpose is learning about ourselves by looking at our minds. The mind is the sum of all the beliefs and values we use to run our lives. The mind is a world of ideas and thoughts. It’s a system of thought we use to organize our lives. It’s not something tangible we can see or touch. The way to observe the mind and find the purpose that’s in it is to watch its effects in our lives. The effects of the mind are our thoughts, the way we think, the way we interpret information, what we do with the interpretation, our behaviors, our habits, our beliefs, our values, our hopes, our goals, our sorrows, and so on. Basically, the mind is the programming that we express in the forms of our lives by the way we think, act, and so forth. The mind is the foundation upon which we build the structures of our lives. If the foundation is weakened by the strain of carrying false beliefs or negativity of any kind, the entire structure will be unstable. We’ll become mentally exhausted and confused because the mental energy we need to look at life and understand it is being diverted to carrying our mental burdens.

We may not necessarily think of looking as action, and yet it’s a mental action because it requires mental energy and intent. Looking at something and actually seeing it as it is can be a challenge. When we look at something, whether it’s our minds or anything else, are we aware of all the influences inside and outside of us that affect our interpretation of what we see? Is the world as we see it, or is it something else entirely? How many times have you thought you were right about your interpretation of a situation only to find out that you were wrong? How about the interpretations you never discovered were wrong? In one of the upcoming chapters, titled Meditation, we’ll discuss meditation as a mental practice of looking at life in a way that frees our perception of as many distortions as possible.

In addition to using meditation, we’re approaching the question of purpose as we would when solving a puzzle. We’re attempting to understand purpose by solving the puzzle of our minds. When solving a puzzle, we don’t usually rely on an instruction manual or any kind of structure to guide us. Our perception of the pieces is our only guide. We look at all the pieces as one, and we connect them by seeing the similarities that join them. If we encounter pieces that we’re not sure how to connect, we set them aside temporarily and move on to other pieces. We don’t allow ourselves to get stuck on any piece for too long because we’re not solving individual pieces—we’re solving the puzzle. We look at all the pieces equally because the meaning of the puzzle is in its purpose, which is to become one image. This wholeness can’t be if even one piece is missing. Since our perception of the pieces of the puzzle is our only guide on this journey, we need to make sure that our perception of them is free from any distortion. If our eyes aren’t functioning properly, we may need to get corrective lenses or surgery. If there’s something obstructing our vision of the pieces, such as a wall, we may need to get around it, remove it, or move the pieces to where we are.

Similarly, we’re exploring purpose as a mental journey in which we’re not relying on any particular structure to guide us. We’re using our own observation of everything in our lives as our guide. Before we embark on this journey, it’s important that we make sure that our perception is as clear as possible. This is why the early chapters of the book focus on meditation, observation, and the conditions in the mind that are conducive to clarity or not. Even though I present my perspective of our common purpose, the focus is for each one of us to embark on this personal and mental journey of understanding our purpose and seeing for ourselves what it is.

The order of the book reflects my approach to solving the puzzle of purpose in my life. We don’t necessarily all approach a puzzle the same way. We may begin with different pieces, or we may look from different angles. The forms of the pieces of our puzzles may be different. One of the pieces I used in my puzzle was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I discuss this in part III, chapter 8: Love. This may not be a piece in your puzzle. As you read this book, you may encounter information that doesn’t seem to fit in your puzzle. It may be that a piece you need to process it is at the end of the book, or you may find it after you have read the book, or you may not find it. It may simply be that this information doesn’t fit in your puzzle. It may also be that I’m using terminology in a way that doesn’t work for you. Unfortunately, words are only symbols, and there’s only so much we can convey with them. If you were to perceive something for which there were no symbols in your world, how would you convey it?

The most helpful way to approach the book is to read it like an art form similar to poetry. A word might mean one thing in one section and mean something else in another section, depending on the context in which it’s used. I may be using words in ways that are new to you. I may be discussing concepts that are also new to you. I’ve included a terminology in part II to help with that. However, it’s much more helpful to keep in mind the context of the book and to allow it to set the meaning of the words.

The context of the book is the exploration of the meaning of purpose by learning about our minds. For example, we talk about letting go of judgments in the context of learning because a judgment is a conclusion to which learning is leading. If we begin with a conclusion, then the learning process has ended before it even had a chance to begin. But if we’re buying a car, we may want to come to a conclusion of what we want and then buy the car. In this case, judgments can be helpful.

The context of the book determines the kind of challenges we’ll be exploring. There are two aspects to solving a problem. There’s the behavioral aspect, and then there’s the mental aspect. Our focus is on observing and understanding the mental aspect. For example, anger is a feeling we may all express differently based on age, maturity, personality, mental health, and so on. A child might express anger by screaming. Some people might express it by withdrawing while others might act it out with violence. Solving the behavioral aspect of a problem has to do with asking how. An example of solving the behavioral aspect might be to restrain myself from hurting someone by acting out of anger. I could come up with ways to express my anger in a healthier way. Solving the mental aspect has to do with asking why. Why am I angry? What’s the purpose of the anger in my life? What does it mean in relation to everything else in my life?

When looking at the mental aspect of anger, here are a few questions we might ask ourselves. Can we be aware of the conditions in our minds that make us susceptible to anger? Can we be aware of these conditions before a stimulus triggers them? If these conditions are still present but there are no outside stimuli to trigger them, are we free of the anger? Can we follow the movement of anger or anything else in our minds from the moment it begins in our thoughts all the way to the behavior? Can we see the whole process clearly? Can we follow it like we follow the movement of music, without any opposition whatsoever, without any judgment, just watch and learn? If we can’t do this, why don’t we have the mental energy to do it? Where is our mental energy going?

All this inquiry is part of the kind of the mental actions we use to solve problems at the level of the mind. If we can understand the process in the mind by seeing how it works, we can have control over it rather than being caught in it. We can exercise our power to choose our state of mind. Whenever we talk about power, we’re always discussing this in the context of what’s happening in our minds. Our focus isn’t on what’s happening between us and other people. Our focus is on understanding what’s happening in our minds as a stepping-stone to understanding what’s happening in our relationships. We all psychologically contribute something to a relationship. We want to understand what we’re contributing, not physically, but mentally. We’re not looking at behaviors as a way of explaining mental processes. We’re looking at mental processes which may or may not culminate into behaviors. For example, how does violence begin in the mind? If the mental process of violence was operating in our minds, but we hadn’t invented guns, how would we have expressed it?

Solving a problem at the level of the mind (mental level) requires the mental action of looking at the process and purpose behind the problem in our minds. Solving it at the level of behavior requires behavioral action. The behavior is an extension or an effect of the mental process, which is the cause. This is a book in exploring the cause, not the effect. This is why there’s not a lot quantitative data such as numbers or specific solutions in terms of behavior. If we were solving something like gun safety, we’d need a lot of quantitative data. Some questions we might ask would be how many guns are out there, how many are produced every year, what’s the impact on the economy, how do we dispose of guns safely, are we manufacturing them with some kind of safety lock in case they fall in the hands of a child, what kind of measures have we implemented so far, how helpful have these measures been in terms of reducing the incidence of injuries in a particular area, and so forth. This is a very specific kind of inquiry that has to do with the kind of behavioral actions we’re looking to implement, whereas the unspecific nature of the book mirrors the unspecific nature of the processes in the mind. Abstraction is the domain of creativity because we can use it as a starting point to fill in the blanks with any specific form or any direction we choose.

Our focus is to begin with why before how. Both questions are important. However, if we implement a solution without first understanding the cause of the problem, we might end up solving the wrong problem. For example, if I have trouble with my weight and I’m not aware that this is due to an emotional issue, I might just change my eating habits as a way of solving the problem. This might help me with controlling my weight, but it won’t solve the cause of the problem. If I identify the cause, I might implement a specific solution like hiring a therapist to help me. If it turns out instead that the problem is my lifestyle choices, I might hire a dietician or go to the gym. The main idea here is that before solving a problem, it’s important to see it as it is, not the way we think it is. In order to see it as it is, we must first understand ourselves so that we can free our minds from any