Manly P Hall – About Life’s purpose
Transcript of a lecture given by Manly P Hall (1st part)
I had the belief for my 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 non-essentials. Nature has not fashioned some people to succeed and others to fail. Nature has never been extravagant with life; every living thing fulfills part of 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?
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 to the highest degree of his intelligence as a newborn baby, and he is probably wiser than he will ever be again in this life.
That’s perhaps one of the reasons why 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 kind of lump of putty everybody wants to get their finger in it, everyone wants to help this child succeed, and before they get through, they may definitely force the child to become a pliant 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, and as he goes, the school he comes into contact with the 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 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 conditioning among others. He is taught that he must gradually accumulate an education that will enable him to make a living, is impressed with the psychosis of success.
If he is lacking in aggressive ambitions, these are stimulated if possible, and if they cannot be stimulated, 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 the various superficial levels and structures that are built upon it. 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 try to 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 at heart, 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 of the life you’re living or will remain incomplete.
There are very few of us who managed to get through this world without some kind of reverses, 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 for his material advancement and the individual becomes a banker, then perhaps another individual becomes a 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 to the fulfillment of a universal procedure very much bigger than any material ambition can possibly be, where we are going to equate this? how are we going to approach it?
Well perhaps one way is to study ourselves at any age whenever the impulse first arises within us, during all the things we are doing, because they appear reasonable or inevitable.
Leave a Reply