175The “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother” idea is based
on purpose. When our purpose is great, so is our strength
and energy.
“But, I don’t know what my purpose is,” a lot of people
tell me, as if someone forgot to tell them what it is.
Those people may wait forever to be told how to live
and what to live for.
There can only be two reasons why you don’t know
your purpose: 1) you don’t talk to yourself; and 2) you
don’t know where purpose comes from. (You think pur-
pose comes from outside yourself instead of from within.)
Purposeful people know how to go deep into their
own spirit and talk to themselves about why they exist,
and what they want to do with the gift of life.
“Only human beings have come to a point where they
no longer know why they exist,” said the Lakota sha-
man Lame Deer. “They don’t use their brains and they
have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies,
their senses, or their dreams.”
Lame Deer is not optimistic about what the future
holds for people who live without purpose.
“They don’t use the knowledge the spirit has put into
every one of them,” he says. “They are not even aware
of this, and so they stumble along blindly on the road to
nowhere—a paved highway that they themselves bull-
doze and make smooth so that they can get faster to the
big empty hole that they’ll find at the end, waiting to
swallow them up. It’s a quick, comfortable superhigh-
way, but I know where it leads. I’ve seen it. I’ve been
there in my vision and it makes me shudder to think
about it.”
Purpose can be built, strengthened, and made more
inspiring every day. We are totally responsible for our
own sense of purpose. We can go inside our own spirit
Take the road to somewhere