The Japanese have a word for it. They call it Ikigai, and give it a vague description that loosely feels and sounds like what purpose is supposed to be. Everyone has it, they say, it’s what French philosophy might call a raison d’etre. It’s the one single reason why any of us spring out of bed each and every day with the intention of staying alive.

When a group of us gathered from around the world to discuss what devotion and purpose means, we could mostly define purpose, yet a majority of us held our tongues from expressing what we felt when confronted with the word devotion. It invoked memories of practices tied to religious ideals, and for some it even evoked negative connotations. So we spent an intensive week reading, sharing deep thoughts and decoding what devotion might actually mean, once applied to daily life.

In the words of Jin Chuan, the Buddhist monk who jokingly was introduced as “the monk who went to Stanford," devotion is far from being a religious practice. “Everyone is devoted to something!” he exclaimed. We later found out that amongst us were devotees of eating cookies, while others had desires to devote entire lifetimes to caring for older loved ones. We learned about anti-devotion habits, such as procrastination, and in the process, we understood on a much deeper level, what it truly means to have a monkey mind. It’s that little playful voice that seems to derail one from committing to tasks that are difficult, choosing instead to take the easy way that meanders gently around life’s mountains and valleys.

At the end of the week, the practice of devotion became more personal. We discovered a fine thread that looms through the circles of our daily devotions, accepting that one’s purpose can change from time to time, but that whatever it is, that ikigai remains hidden deep inside each of us, and finding it requires opening up to the world around and it’s boundless possibilities of self-expression.

In one of the head readings, we were transported to the universe at the cellular level, discovering how small, yet how extra-ordinary and how incredibly shocking it is that any of us even exist. We are lumps of matter, layered upon other intricate layers of more matter everywhere, and yet each one of us, each single cell that is the awareness within who we appear to be, matters. We matter so much that our stories are intertwined, and they linger on long after we are gone. We matter so much that the functions of more than 40,000 neurons that make up our heart muscles remain a mystery. Who knows what any of us is truly capable of?

We also learned that try as one might, one cannot do without others, and we can’t do without the universe, and the universe cannot do without all of us. We learned that we are the universe, and that the universe dwells inside us. It was hard to grasp in a few days the simplicity of the message contained in this pod, because to get there required a complex weaving of ideas, wading through the tunnels of distractive thoughts, and a series of negative events happening all around the world. But more importantly, to get to the core of this simple message required a serious harnessing of our collective wisdom, which is what we spent days talking about, crossing geographical boundaries and virtual worlds, ignoring clashing time zones, and for some, even while battling the latest outbreak of Covid-19 in India.

In the end, maybe it was a song performed for the first time by one of the attendees, reminding us to look up, to keep a joyful spirit, and a happy tune in our hearts. Maybe it was the wisdom contained in a quote pulled from J. D Salinger’s novel ‘A Catcher in the Rye’- The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one."

Whatever cosmic power that brought us together, we each left with this gentle reminder- we are but travelers on foreign lands, we have just one fleeting moment in time, one chance to make good on our promise to live fully, breathing in deeply, and allowing the good inside us to meet the good in others, until the whole world becomes one forcefield of pure goodness.


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Originally posted in Devotion and Purpose Pod.