Purpose = Value Fulfillment

The re-frame that changed how I view living a purpose-full life

One of the most valuable things I ever learned about living a purpose-driven life came from a disembodied teacher.

This might get a bit weird for some, but stay curious. I’m confident you’ll walk away with some gold dust. Truth can be found anywhere, even in unexpected places. Especially in unexpected places.

In the early 2010’s a friend recommended I read a series of books by Jane Roberts. The books, known as the Seth Material, were allegedly dictated to Jane between 1963 and 1984 while she was channeling an “energy personality essence no longer focused in physical matter” named Seth.

Channeled texts weren’t my thing. Despite trying, I couldn’t finish even one of the books—they just didn’t land for me—so I set them aside, never intending to re-visit them.

Then in the middle of the pandemic, nearly a decade later, I was browsing my Kindle and opened one of the books, Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, and began reading.

Something clicked.

Actually, everything clicked.

The words were the right thing at the right time, and at the time I was wrestling with an existential crisis (weren’t we all?) and asking questions like What did it mean to be me? What was I born to do and be?

The book felt like it had been written to me, for me. In it I discovered a singular lynchpin idea that re-framed my entire understanding of purpose and, by extension, how I understood my whole life.

The idea: the purpose of life, mine and everyone else’s for that matter, is what Seth calls value fulfillment.

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What is “value fulfillment”?

Seth describes it this way (my emphasis in bold):

[Everything in creation] is endowed with an inbuilt reach of creativity that seeks to fulfill its own potentials in all possible variations—and in such a way that… also furthers the creative potentials of each other portion of reality.

You’re alive to know yourself through the endless exploration and expression of your potential. You’re here for self-discovery.

All of the ways in which you explore and discover your creative potential are the medium, not the message. In the same way that sound must travel through air, water, or another medium to be heard, so too does the tone of your life. Said another way, the music is the point, not the instrument.

Value, as Seth means it, has nothing to do with worth. It means something closer to desire, boundless creativity. It is the essential, irresistible urge toward integrity and creative expression that’s innate in All That Is.

It is the point of life, Seth says:

In physical reality, life is the name of the game—and the game is based upon value fulfillment. That means simply that each form of life seeks the fulfillment and unfolding of all of the capacities that it senses within its living framework, knowing that in that individual fulfillment, each other species of life is also benefited.

Individually and globewide, value fulfillment is in a fashion the purpose of all events, the impetus that drives the wheels of nature. Value fulfillment is the reason behind the existence of all systems, and of all experience within your field.

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A Direction, Not a Destination

If value fulfillment is the reason behind all existence, then where is it all going?

It’s easy to think of purpose/value fulfillment as something that is achieved or acquired. “Fulfilled” might lead you to believe there is an ultimate completion. The rational mind thinks in dualities—this and not that, start and finish, incomplete and fulfilled.

To the mind, purpose is a solid, definable destination. Like setting out to drive cross-country from Los Angeles to New York, you know where you’ll end up.

Value fulfillment is more like a direction, however. Imagine I told you, “To find your purpose, travel east. Once you arrive at the place called East, call me to let me know when you’ve arrived.”

You’ll never call because there is no such place called East. It’s simply that way. There is no arriving, no final destination, only an orientation toward the horizon, which is never caught:

In the three-dimensional reality in which your ego has its main focus, becoming presupposes arrival, or a destination—an ending to that which has been in a state of becoming. But the soul or entity has its existence basically in other dimensions, and in these, fulfillment is not dependent upon arrivals at any points, spiritual or otherwise.

There is no arriving. Ever. It’s an infinite trip. This is destabilizing and terrifying for the mind, which needs a destination, boundaries, and maps. But if you’re on an expedition in uncharted places, none of those things even exist. You have to make the path as you go.

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Excellence, Not Perfection

Making it up as you go means there’s no standard of perfection to measure your progress (or lack of progress) by. Again, this is terrifying for the mind.

Growing up as a Christian, I was taught God had a perfect plan for my life. However, that perfection was a particular thing, which I had to discover and fulfill before I died. If I didn’t, I would be judged for it.

No pressure.

The myth of perfection permeates western culture’s ideas of purpose. It’s an ideal we worship, which leads to a chronic feeling we don’t measure up and never will. There is no perfect path because the one you’re creating as you walk never existed before. If it does, as Joe Campbell says, it’s not your path. It’s someone else’s.

Seth, again:

The word "perfect" holds many pitfalls. In the first place it presupposes something completed and done beyond change, and so beyond motion, further development, or creativity. You must not expect to be perfect. Your ideas of perfection mean a state of fulfillment beyond which there is no future growth, and no such state exists.

Value Fulfillment always implies the search for excellence—not perfection, but excellence.

Excellence means integrity, living honestly. Authentically.

How do you do that? The better question is when can you do that? And when is the only time you can ever do anything, but now?

The truth is, you will never fully know your Self, because you never truly can. You are an ever-evolving, dynamically and boundlessly creative Being. Your potential is like an infinite Russian nesting doll. Crack open one layer and you’ll find another, and another, and another.

Excellence is a choice, an orientation of your total being toward responsibility and doing your best.

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For the Good of All

Value fulfillment means shifting from me to we identity, because the exploration and expression of your boundless creativity is not just about you:

All species are motivated by value fulfillment, in which each seeks to enhance the quality of life for itself and for all other species at the same time. That characteristic of value fulfillment is perhaps the most important element in the being of All That Is, and it is a part of the heritage of all species.

This sense of value fulfillment benefits not only the individual, but its species, AND ALL OTHER SPECIES. Each species or life form "realizes" that its own fulfillment adds immeasurably to the existence of all other forms.

In a way impossible to explain, the fly and the spider are connected, and aware of the connection. Not as hunter and prey, but as individual participants in deeper processes. Together they work toward a joint kind of value fulfillment, in which both are fulfilled.

The preceding passage is worth re-reading slowly. This one insight alone can revolutionize how to you see everything in your life.

We are entangled. Life is relationship. “I” don’t make sense outside of the context of you, others, or Us. In a way, we create each other in real time, and the world we build together is what our collective value fulfillment looks like in 3-D space and time.

I need you and you need me, which is why....

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Your True Mission

The words were inscribed above the doorway of Delphi: Know Thyself. That is the answer to the question, “Why am I here?”

To know yourself.

Self-realization has a contagious quality to it. In the act of knowing yourself, you effortlessly inspire others to do the same, according to Seth:

You can only advance the cause of mankind and the cause of your brethren by helping yourself and knowing yourself and fulfilling your own abilities—when you are yourself in your own shining uniqueness. Then you help others to become in awareness what they really are.

But if you believe you must sacrifice yourself to others, then you distort the truth within you. For there is no sacrifice involved, but the fulfillment of your being that brings out in each of the people that you know, the fulfillment of their being.

Many years ago, I studied the teachings of David Hawkins who would often echo ideas similar to Seth’s.

You change the world not through anything you do, he said, but how you be. Like a tuning fork that is stuck and brought near another, its resonance will activate the unstruck fork and cause it to vibrate, too.

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So What?

I’ve been experimenting with these ideas for a while, but lately I’ve been stress testing them. I have no time for what doesn’t actually work. What does work is aligning to and acting from inspired energy that shows up.

In my own life, I deeply value freedom, adventure, and connection. When I follow these energies they inevitably lead me toward acting in integrity and creative joy—value fulfillment.

Last week, I sat down at my computer to figure out an issue with my business. It was all mind stuff. The more I thought, the more tangled my mind became. It felt like pushing a boulder up a sand dune.

After a couple hours of frustration and no progress, I asked myself, “What would effortless look like? What would I do if I could do anything right now?”

The answer came quickly. I’d planned to do a four-mile hike after lunch. That felt energizing, so I put on my backpack and set out. Barely a mile into my hike, my mind relaxed, the energy shifted and the answers to my “problem” started to flow. Every twenty feet, I had to stop to jot down notes and ideas in my phone.

I kept going. My four mile hike became seven, and I returned home energized and with all the answers I needed to resolve my issue.

I felt most like myself, and that was a massive lesson in how I’m naturally “bent” toward intuitive living (when I actually listen) and how to follow the subtle clues of how my life wants to express.

This is why we’re here: to be ourselves. It’s as simple, and as complicated, as that. In the end, our life is its own definition, a story woven as it’s been told through every moment, every act, every choice. Through simply being you. You just need to now find out what that means.

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