Enlightenment And Life Purpose

[MiracleMan]

Are the two mutually exclusive, or can enlightenment be a life purpose in itself?  Or is enlightenment more of a personal goal and possibly a supplement to life purpose?  I'm told enlightenment is no-thing and you shouldn't make it into a goal because then it becomes some-thing.

[Truth]

Your instincts are right. It's just when we talk about enlightenment we're constantly trying to resolve the paradoxical nature of the work. people are just trying to make you more aware of the potential pitfalls of "pursuing" enlightenment, pursuing what is literally right in front of you. 

Edited August 12, 2017 by Truth

[Joseph Maynor]

This is a thought-story, so take it loosely and don't cling to it too tightly.  Its just one person's overly crystallized perspective.  But you asked for an answer, so I'll bite with that caveat.

Ideally enlightenment would be deeply perfected in your life before implementation of your life-purpose work.  In a perfect world.  But do we live in a perfect world?

Figuring-out what your life-purpose is has little to do with enlightenment.  So work on that very hard now and maybe do enlightenment work soon, but at the right time for you.

Enlightenment is what gives you the emotional-mastery to execute your life-purpose.  But then there's a bunch of other personal development theory that you need to learn too to attain emotional-mastery when you're acting in the world, not just hiding from the world.  We don't wanna be hiding from the world.  That's a trap that you gotta watch out for.  We want to be acting out into the world, penetrating the world with our seed.  Mastering our harvest by mastering ourselves.  Complete self-control and self-mastery are our only path to our true full-potential. And those require complete emotional-mastery to implement.  

But, see, hold this story loosely because someone else could totally disagree with everything I said here and have an equally "valid" story.  We could literally do a round-robin of storytelling on this forum on just this question alone and never resolve or need to resolve anything.

Edited August 12, 2017 by Joseph Maynor