Card #130 – Sacred Quest

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Make a commitment to your Sacred Quest.

By keeping your commitments to yourself, you keep your commitments to others and the world.

No matter how crucial your life mission may be, you will still, on a daily basis, have to deal with the mundane world. Consider the Fellowship of the Ring in Lord of the Rings. Their quest couldn’t be more sacred and essential. The fate of the world and the turning of a great age depends on them. But if we view their quest as a real occurrence, we realize that the book and movies cover only the most dramatic episodes.

For Frodo, from the day of inheriting the ring to its falling into the Cracks of Doom is seventeen years. The physical quest takes six months — about half of that layovers and the rest hiking. For most of that journey, he was just walking, and every day, there were mundane chores like gathering firewood.

So, no matter how valuable your life mission is, you must spend much of your day dealing with mundane activities.

A centering question of almost universal application is asking yourself, “What’s the best use of my time right now?”

The answer might be the highest value activities, but it might also be to relax and do nothing, and quite often, it will be some mundane task that simply has to get done, like the laundry.

Meaning and purpose are not just in the dramatic moments of life. For this reason, I call the items on my to-do list “quest links.” Taking care of my body, cleaning the house, buying groceries, keeping track of finances, etc. are crucial tasks. The most meaningful quest tasks for me usually involve sitting before a keyboard and a screen and writing. My creative sessions are usually seven days a week, but it takes work throughout the day to be in good shape for the next one. Exercise, eating and sleeping well, and taking care of all sorts of practical, mundane tasks like cooking, cleaning, and organizing are part of every day. I must also take care of those things to be available for high-quality relationship time.

One thing I spend as little time on as possible is mundane social time dominated by small talk and superficiality. In general, I spend as little time as possible on things that don’t further my life mission. I focus on the highest quality creative work, social time, and all the physical tasks needed to keep my body, finances, house, and vehicle in working order.

It’s been said that “The way you do anything is the way you do everything.” The Warrior brings the same focus and impeccability to whatever the moment requires, whether the moment is dramatic or mundane. Your mission in life is not just about the dramatic moments or the highest-value activities; it is about every step you take on your journey between birth and death.

Your Sacred Quest is what you incarnated here to accomplish, the path of your True Will, that which you will remember well on your deathbed.

If you do not know your Sacred Quest, be alert to what stirs your depths and ask yourself what you will remember well on your deathbed. Your Sacred Quest likely involves a combination of two factors: working on your own development/consciousness/wholeness and your service to others.

If you neglect your Sacred Quest, your life is bound in shallows and miseries, and the life-giving rhythms of the eons become the dread ticking of the clock.

The only tragedy in life is not to fulfill your Sacred Quest.

See: The Capsule of Intentionality
that formalizes a ritual system for designing and executing your quest. Here are a few excerpts:

Level One participation in the Capsule of Intentionality ritual system requires that you compose a Mission Statement. Mission Statement is capitalized because it will consist of the most important words in your life. The Mission Statement is a twenty-five-word or less statement of your deepest intentions — the purposes, goals, and meanings you are living for.

Writing twenty-five words or less does not take long, but composing these words is worth all the time and soul-searching it takes to develop them. If you can’t formulate a Mission Statement, your life is adrift. I can’t imagine waking up in the morning and certainly can’t see walking out the front door to do anything without an implicit Mission Statement. You may never formulate a Mission Statement, but that doesn’t mean you lack one. Your Mission Statement may be implicit in your thoughts and actions. But it is a major step toward clarity, focus, and effective action to clarify your Mission Statement, writing it on paper so that it becomes a concrete object that you carry with you always.

Your Mission Statement itself is more than symbolic. It is representative of your intentionality, but it is also the literal, functional, language-coded core of your life.

Your Capsule of Intentionality represents your striving to stay true to certain principles and aims and to maintain continuity of will through time as the chaotic storms rage inside and in the world around you. This does not mean that your Mission Statement needs to be unchanging.

At any time, you can modify or radically change your Mission Statement. But don’t do this for superficial reasons or without careful thought and reflection. Before you change your Mission Statement, go into your deepest self to be sure about what you are doing. Take your Mission Statement out and copy it once a day before sleep or upon awakening if you wish. As an absolute minimum, I would reexamine the Mission Statement and how well you live by it every birthday.

LEVEL TWO — Lifeline Mission Parameters

Level two involves a daily ritual that builds on level one. Every morning or evening write down specific goals, tasks, actions that are congruent with the goals of your Mission Statement and that you want to perform in the next twenty-four hours. You can call this list Lifeline Mission Parameters. For example, visiting with a friend, going to work, writing a journal entry, exercising, and buying groceries are all examples of specific activities. You’ll know at the end of the day whether you wrote in your journal or bought groceries or not. I would avoid generalities like “work harder” or “try to relax.” This is a place to write down specific goals rather than self-admonitions. This list is different than a to-do list. First, ensure that every important part of your Mission Statement has a corresponding action on the Lifeline Mission Parameters side. If you have long-term goals, you need related activities listed in your Lifeline Mission Parameters (or quest links) for the day.

If you have long-term goals, it’s important to act on them every day, even if it is only ten minutes’ worth. If it seems silly to write down something as inevitable as “go to work,” do it anyway because the immense energy involved deserves recognition on the paper. You deserve the recognition of a major item to check at the end of the day.

Each one of these activities should be a “Lifeline Mission Objective,” meaning something that helps further or sustain your life, which can range from the productive to the recreational. Buying groceries or picking up an application aren’t glamorous, but they are authentic parts of your quest. In fact, whether or not you carry out these actions will be the real test of your intentionality. Remember, actions reveal intentionality, not wishes.

See:
Temporal Fencing and Life Fields
Pathfinding/Daymapping
Mechanical Resistance Matrix
writings on the Warrior Stance

For more on the Sacred Quest see The Path of the Numinous — Living and Working with the Creative Muse
and Parallel Journeys