Lost your Purpose?

What do you do when you’ve lost your purpose (or never had one to begin with)? Too often these days we hear the words … “life seems purposeless … I have lost my purpose … life is a grind and has no purpose”. Unfortunately, without purpose people withdraw into their problems, MEST (Physical Universe), electronics (cell phones and computers) and the Bank (the reactive mind). 

Definition of purpose – the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists, a person’s sense of resolve or determination.

Just finding a purpose to do something will bring a person uptone; “today I am going to fix the broken table my wife has been on at me about!”

That is great but it is only a temporary fix. What is needed is that a Being figures out their Basic Purpose. It really is the answer to long life, health and happiness. LRH has answers to this …

“The basic formula of Living (not Life) is:

HAVING AND FOLLOWING A BASIC PURPOSE.

“Thus, expansion is an increase in living.  To increase living and raise tone and heighten activity, one need only apply the expansion formula [See below] to living.  Clean away the barriers, noncompliance and distractions from the basic purpose and reduce opposition, and the individual or group or org will seem more alive and indeed will be more alive.”

LRH, HCOPL 13 March 1965 Issue III, “The Structure of Organization, What is Policy?” – OEC volume 0, page 123

Here is the definition of the Expansion Formula:

EXPANSION FORMULA,

1. 1. “Direct a channel toward attainment; put something on it; remove distractions, barriers, non-compliance and opposition.”
   2. a) Provide good policy. (b) Make it easily knowable.
   3. Be strenuous in making sure it is followed. This is the most broad possible formula for expansion.”

(Also from HCO PL 13 Mar 65, Divisions 1, 2, 3 The Structure of Organization – What is Policy?)

And further LRH states “Purpose has to be assigned to life because it is purposeless.” … It seems we have to create our own purposes!

“If man cared more, if man had a better understanding of his own purpose, man would make a better effort to survive, but lost in the confusions of ideologies which were intended to do nothing but confuse him, what chance does he have?”

“The chance he has is Scientology. We’re giving him that chance and if you do not pass along to him what you know, you yourselves are failing that man, failing yourselves, and failing us. This is man’s one chance. You must give it to him otherwise he faces other planets, other times, other elsewheres, but no more here. Scientology is not so much man’s first science of understanding as his last call to reason.”
Ron Hubbard, Founder, PAB 81, PROFESSIONAL AUDITOR’S BULLETIN, 24 April 1956, PURPOSE, Vol. III, Page 358.

And also there is this to think on …

“A game is composed of freedom, barriers, and purposes.  And we’ve got one of these trick triangles, like the ARC triangle.  You increase any corner of it, you increase the other two corners; increase two and you certainly increase the third.  That’s a highly selective triangle, and it works — whammity-bam!

Oddly enough, in games there is a singular triangle: it’s freedom, barriers, and purposes.  You increase somebody’s freedom you increase his barriers and purposes.  You increase his barriers you increase his freedom and purposes.  You increase his purposes, and you increase his freedom and barriers.  And that’s the wildest-looking thing you ever studied.

And I’m going to have to ask you to look that over and find enough examples to satisfy yourself that interrelationship does exist, because it looks absolutely mad that if we put a nine-o’clock curfew on the streets of this city, that people would have more freedom. See, you’ll just have to walk your way through the morass of it, because it’s true.  It’s the wildest thing you ever saw.

Now, it’s only when somebody unbalances this triangle violently that we have trouble, exclamation point!  Real trouble.

An individual has no purpose. There he goes!  He won’t have freedom or barriers.  No purpose: no freedom, no barriers.  .  .  . Now, you can assign purpose to life, and if you don’t, nobody will. Purpose has to be assigned to life because it is purposeless.  There isn’t any purpose to life at all.

When you can swallow that bitter pill, you can live.  But to swallow it requires that you conceive a static.  Thetan native state – no purpose. But it is a solvable thing.  It’s solvable.  Just invent a problem of comparable magnitude to anything; invent some games.  Raise the whole trio here – raise those three corners at once: freedom, barriers, and purposes. “
LRH – “Anatomy of Cause” lecture series, also known as the 16th American Clinical Course. “Auditing Techniques: Games Conditions.”  It’s the 22nd in the series, and was given on 1 February 1957.