One of the pillars of the Eclectic Method is the process of building the mental fortress. It makes up part of the foundation of the Eclectic Method because life is suffering, this is one of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, and the process of building the mental fortress is how we develop the mental fortitude to deal with the inherent suffering in life.
The king of that mental fortress is purpose. When you have a purpose, you have direction and meaning for all the things you do. Purpose brings meaning to suffering and that is what makes suffering tolerable. That is why purpose is the king because the king is the one who is supposed to provide the direction for the kingdom. The king unifies all the forces of the kingdom and drives them towards a common goal, which should be the strength and growth of the kingdom.
There are bad kings that lead their kingdoms to ruin, and that is because their purpose is corrupt, and the same happens to your mind when your purpose is corrupt. If you want to have a strong mind, and have every aspect of it working to your benefit, then you need to have a strong purpose.
You need to have something you want to do with your life and a strong ‘why’ to back it up because life is difficult, and if you don’t have something meaningful behind the reason for why you keep going when things get hard, then chances are that you will give up. Why suffer more if there’s nothing to gain, right? Problem is, if you think like that, then you don’t end up gaining much from life.
Have you given much thought to your purpose? Do you know exactly who you want to be and what you want to have done with your time on this planet? Do you have a ‘why’ for the things you do? We’ve all thought about it, at one point or another, but have you ever sat down and given your purpose dedicated, concentrated thought?
I invite you to sit down and write these questions (leave plenty of space in-between each one):
What is my purpose in life?
Who do I want to be?
What would I do if I had no limitations?
What could I do that would make all the suffering in life worth it?
Why do I want this to be my purpose?
I find it useful to set a time limit for my response because it leaves my mind less time to drift off-topic and helps prevent me from taking too much time on one question. After you write down the questions, set a 10 minute timer and answer all questions as directly as you can.
Once you have finished answering your questions, read them over. It will be interesting to reflect on how you responded. There’s a difference between just thinking about it and actually documenting your thoughts on paper. Now that you’ve done some reflection, give yourself some time to expand on each response. Maybe set another timer, but give yourself 20 minutes this time to go more in depth with your response.
Now, there are two more questions to ask yourself now that you’ve clarified what your purpose means to you. These two questions are:
What can I do to live my purpose?
How would I think and what would I do to be the person I want to be?
What is getting in the way?
When asking what you can do to live your purpose, be specific. I personally like the S.M.A.R.T goals model I learned from NASM which are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely. Try to have at least 3 things you can do and break each actionable way that you can live your purpose into a S.M.A.R.T goal. Leave yourself plenty of space to fill the page.
When responding to how you would think and what you would do to be the person you want to be, understand that you trying to take on an new identity, and the best thing to do in that case is to ask that question regularly and then change your thinking and behavior to match that of the new identity until you get there.
Then answer the question about what is getting in the way of you living your purpose. What do you currently do that would prevent you from being the person you would want to be? What should you avoid if you want to become that person or achieve that goal? Sometimes just doing less of the things that hinder us will get us farther than more effort applied to the things that move us forward.
Now that you have everything squared-away, get moving. I recommend copying what you wrote down into a note on your phone so you can re-read it every now and then when you could use a reminder. Sometimes its easier to just have everything on your phone because if you write it down on loose pieces of paper, you can lose it, or if you write it down in a journal and you don’t journal very often, then who knows when you’ll crack it open again. Most people are digital now anyway, but do whatever works for you. I personally feel a deeper sense of importance when I write it all down.
The Realignment Procedure
There are times when life gets chaotic and, let’s be honest, we might just be doing our best to survive. There are busy seasons of life. We get caught up in our work, personal issues arise and throw a curve-ball at us, and that’s on top of the many tasks required just for normal adulting. We are working, cleaning, doing chores, making food, getting groceries, taking care of our cars, taking care of our homes and kids, doing whatever silly life admin that we have to do, and sometimes working towards our purpose can get put in the back burner, especially when it’s not what we do to pay the bills.
Sometimes in the midst of the shit-storm we lose focus on our purpose. Sometimes there isn’t even a shit-storm and we just fall away from our goals in a slow and unobtrusive way. The way that we get back into alignment with our purpose is by performing the realignment procedure.
It’s the same thing that technicians have to do for complex machinery and circuitry that run for long periods of time. Every so often, maybe every 100 hours or every month or every quarter or every year, these pieces of equipment need to be realigned because overtime little variances can change the performance of the instrument. Those slight changes can cause issues with the output of the equipment and eventually, it’s not aligned to its purpose.
So what maintenance technicians have to do to ensure the equipment continues to perform as it is designed is to perform a realignment. The equipment’s output is compared to a standard and they use the difference to re-calibrate that equipment so that it performs as it should.
We can use the Principle of Correspondence to liken the process of realignment with your purpose to the realignment of a machine. Equipment that is meant for a purpose has to be realigned within a certain periodicity because over time, slight vibrations, movements, use, and other variables tend to throw the equipment out of alignment.
So, what you have to do to ensure that piece of equipment will still perform properly is that you have to realign it by comparing it to a standard, and then correcting for the difference. We can perform a similar “alignment” for our minds when we find that we have strayed from the course we originally set.
The way you perform the mental realignment procedure is to take what you wrote about purpose and those goals that you made and re-read them. Then you make a diagnosis by taking up your pen once again and asking the questions:
How well am I aligned with my purpose right now?
Did I meet or make progress towards my goals? Why or why not?
What have I learned?
Once again it can help to impose a time limit for answering these questions to encourage yourself to be direct in your answers, and then reflect and expand upon what you wrote as we did in the previous section.
Then under your diagnostic write down what you need to do to get realigned with your purpose and your goals. Write down specific actions that you can take to get back on track and be aligned with your purpose. This procedure is helpful to perform at a regular time interval dependent upon the deadlines you put in place to meet your goals.
What did I do wrong?
What did I do right?
What system can I develop to keep myself on track?
What can I do right now to get back on my purpose?
What are 3 things I can change to be the person I want to be?
This process may seem time consuming, but a little reflection on your daily activities and you may find, as I have from time to time, that we waste plenty of time on things that don’t move us forward. A little bit of strategic redistribution of your time will prove that you can find the time to ask yourself the important questions.
There is arguably little else more important that you can do than to dedicate time and brain power to determining your purpose and to make a plan to live it. Not many people take time and make a dedicated effort to be introspective and assess their lives and their purpose, and those subjects may be the most important ones to invest time into understanding. Memento Mori, remember death comes for us all, and the worst time to start thinking about your purpose is when you have little time left to live it.
Hopefully, this has given you much to think about and much to do. In the nuclear Navy, we do this sort of process all the time. We set goals, assess how well we met them, determine how we fell short, figure out what we can do better and then make a plan to course-correct and get realigned with the mission. This process isn’t just a self-improvement thing, it’s how the military, corporations, and successful businesses improve and ensure that they are aligned with the purpose for doing all they do.
The reason that those entities are so successful is because of processes like this, and if you use the Principle of Correspondence to liken yourself to them, you will see how such a process will also be beneficial to you. It’s like taking a look under the hood at the first sign of a problem. If life feels meaningless, take a look under the hood and figure out what makes you tick. What makes it all worth it? Are you doing something that gives you a drive to wake up in the morning? If not, you might want to check under the hood and start asking yourself some questions.
Its a simple method that only requires a bit of time and effort that can significantly alter the course of your life. You don’t want to snap to it one day and ask yourself, what have I been doing with the last 10 years of my life? At that point, you’ve already lost 10 years, but you can make a change, a step in the right direction today by doing the steps outlined above. All it takes is a pen, paper, a bit of soul-searching and some time that you probably would’ve spent doom-scrolling anyways.
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