Justin Patrick Pierce argues that purpose is a karmic drive that persists until spiritual completion, and that heightened consciousness makes failure and harm to loved ones painfully visible. True presence and conscious love, offered moment to moment, can heal relational pain even when external circumstances remain broken. He traces this practice to the Shravana movement of 800-600 BC, which birthed the Buddha's teachings.
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That's the thing about purpose is purpose is ultimately and fundamentally unfulfilled or unactualized. The whole point of purpose is you're moving towards this completion of this thing, which is ultimately never complete. And no matter how far you get around it, when you get on the other side, you realize, oh fuck, this isn't complete at all. I've got more to do, more to do, more to do, more to do. And the traditions say that doesn't just haunt you all of this lifetime. It's going to haunt you in the next and the next and the next and next and next until you just become part of this chain of reincarnations where then suddenly your next incarnation is the Buddha or Ramana Maharshi. And then when you actually do not possess a purpose anymore, fundamentally there's no karmic purpose inside of you anymore. That motivation stops and you just become Still, there's nothing to do. This is why Ramana sat in the ashram, and to the point where his ass started to grow into the, into the temple. He refused to eat. His mother would come and feed him grains of rice and just press them into his mouth so he would have some form of sustenance. He, he was done. He was karmically done. So until that happens to us, until that's— there's going to be the irritation of purpose living through us. Karmic purpose is part of that. So the feeling that you're constantly failing, you're not getting there, you're irritated that you're not achieving— that's all very natural and a part of the purpose process. If you really think you're— you know, it's a dangerous thing to say because I'm talking about in a spiritual context, not in a Tony Robbins context. This is a spiritual context I'm talking about it in, is that the feeling is that you're constantly failing. And the more conscious you become, the more you realize just how much you're fucking failing. Becoming conscious is a process of, wow, look at the suffering I'm creating in myself and in others. I never realized I was hurting people. I didn't realize that walking around like this was hurting my woman because she was losing trust in me. I had no idea. How is a man going to know that? She's certainly not telling him, but it's happening. She's losing trust in you every time you pick your nose or you're staring at the phone at the dinner table and you can't even think because your mind is trapped in shit. She's losing trust and she's suffering that. Most men have no idea that causes pain in other people. And then suddenly he puts down the phone, he straightens his spine. Takes a breath, relaxes his body, feels the irritation that he still has this business thing or this work thing he needs to do that's never going to feel complete, but instead is just fucking present with the person he's with. He's still suffering, failing his purpose because it's not done yet. He's offering this impeccable presence to someone he loves out of devotion. And she feels that, and she can trust even if it's not complete, even if there's not enough money in the bank, even if there's not enough food on the table, even because we're all in this perpetual desperate need to try and sustain ourselves permanently such that we don't die. We're wanting a guarantee from God that I will not die, I will not disappear. I will be forever loved, fed, sustained by this place. And we're irritated that we're not. And we sit down to eat a meal and all we're thinking about is where's the next meal going to come from? We're already stockpiling meals. We're not even present when we're putting food in our mouth. We're not present when these things are happening. And that's the sabotage. That's the suffering. If we let that dictate and control our lives, we won't be present, and others around us will suffer as a result of that. So when we become conscious, you're gonna feel that you're failing constantly. Yeah, but instead you're going to choose to recognize your unconsciousness and be conscious instead, for the sake of creating more love in your life. And you can't heal her, you can't sustain her indefinitely, you can't protect her indefinitely, you can't feed her indefinitely, you can't fuck her indefinitely. No matter what you do, this place is going to take her from you, or take you from her. Your children, every— your parents. This place is going to rob all of us blind. You get nothing. So you can't guarantee or protect anyone from anything indefinitely. You cannot be sustained indefinitely. So how are you going to relate to that? You're going to neurotically believe that there's some amount of money that's going to change that, some achievement that'll make your name, you know, call out through all of history for all of time, so you'll be remembered in your legacy. This will all be forgotten at some point. It's inevitable. That's the nature of this place. So what are we going to do with that? And when you start living moment to moment, not contracted around that, but actually offering consciousness through that love, through that, she feels safer. The children feel loved. They feel safer. And that's, that's all this is really about, is how do we bide our time and recognize love consciousness in the midst of anything. And the last thing I want to say is the people who discovered this technology with the Shravana movement back in India— we're talking about 800 BC, 600 BC— and Gautama Buddha was part of the Shravana movement, right? These individuals were surrounded by death. They couldn't leave their home without seeing a dead body on the street. People were dying everywhere. And they asked themselves, is there a purpose to life, or a life worth living, even in the face of death? Is life worth living in the face of this? And that's where this technology comes from. That's its origins. So it's important to remember those origins because They were facing conditions far worse than us, and they were able to find this love, this consciousness, this reason to show up this way.
