Ask Questions
Take An Important Step Toward A State Of Integrity
Having lived through the period of life from high school to parenthood and having also guided my daughters through much of this period, I am prepared to say that the main life question for adolescents and young adults is:
“What role will I play in life?”
Until later in life, when other questions loom larger in most people’s consciousness, every other puzzle for the five to twenty years after high school seems to be subordinate to this main quandary.
This question is typically answered as one, after careful planning or muddling through, finds a career or a long string of jobs.
One’s compensated work is the typical answer to the above question, one that leaves people and the world wanting. What I will attempt to do in this course is show readers a more comprehensive answer to that question, one that goes something like this: “I will learn how to become an ecologically minded person, mature spiritually in a way that gives me an uncommon depth of happiness and character, and then share my wisdom with others as a true and respected eartHeart or eco-centric life coach.”
This answer helps people better answer the other two other questions that arise in most people in the so-called “middle years” of life. That is the time, often between the ages of thirty and sixty, when many people grapple with how to provide for themselves and their families while also caring for blossoming adolescents, diminishing parents, or both.
Answering three questions will add to your integrity.
Frequently feeling the tension of constant pressure to attend and to act, those in the middle years of life are neither too old nor too decrepit to be justified in dodging such responsibilities, and so, they come to question their role in life and even their life purpose with the hope that, at least, there is still time of fulfill their role. More often than not, at some point in most people’s lives, this role proves to be less than perfectly satisfying, and so, people often ask:
“What can be done to improve my life?”
The answer to this question usually involves improving one’s standard of living.
But, while improving one’s financial wealth and the amount of material objects one owns can be helpful, doing so is not totally fulfilling because one’s quality of life and one’s relationship with a greater reality are not adequately brought into the equation. This inadequacy frequently leads to a third key life question:
“What can I do to make the world better for everyone?”
Answering this question corrects the shortcomings that arise by only answering the first two questions. The third question arises usually after at least cursory solutions are put into effect regarding the previous two questions.
These three important questions typically arise separately and answers to these questions involve either greater effort to find a job or establish a career, earn a bigger salary, improve the mind through education and meditation, or serve others. Whether one chooses salary improvements, education, meditation, or service, the answers to all of these questions are, more often than not, less than satisfactory. One is typically left playing roles that do not meet one’s goals. One is left personally wanting or overextended. Despite attempts to solve social or environmental issues, the world continues to face mounting problems.
Although there are plenty of roles to play, much money to be made, many schools to attend, numerous effective meditation techniques, and plenty of ways to serve others, satisfactory answers to the three big life questions are elusive because typically one does not bring them together in recognition of the interdependence of Self and other. Let me now propose just this sort of blended question that happens to be the central question of this course:
“How does one ethically and effectively both save the Earth and improve each person so that there can be happiness in one’s newfound effectiveness?”
The answer to this question has to do with the fact that when any one of us reaches a full measure of spiritual maturity, a condition that we will define carefully subsequently, the whole world is a step closer to being saved, particularly from global problems caused by shallow and reckless people.
I will in this writing attempt to demonstrate how, by using Dr. Cohen’s methodologies along the Heartwood Path, one can, metaphorically speaking, earn the wings of an angel, ascend in one’s spiritual maturity to an exalted level, and, thereby, significantly help the world’s environment become more beautiful and more sustainable.
