I know quite a few people who are not simply looking for a good job. I know people who are searching for their calling. These are people with a passion for life, capable of taking risks in order to follow their hearts. Carrying within themselves the flame of Promethean fire, these freedom-loving and deeply humane beings want more than anything else in the world to leave a trace behind and to share with others the gifts they possess. To be creators in their work is essential to them, and a fulfilled life is a goal whose price they are willing to pay—no matter how high.
And they do pay it—by passing through the exact opposite of what they imagine a fulfilled life to be. By a strange irony of fate, the search for one’s calling leads them not to the dreamed-of work, but to the edge of financial and professional crisis.
From the outside, what can be seen is that something seems to be preventing them from being successful at what they love to do, yet it is not entirely clear what that something is. An external observer might attribute a whole range of reasons for why they fail to find their ideal work, and they themselves are no less inventive in coming up with explanations for why things are not working out. These explanations, however, do not help. Instead of leading to a solution, they lead to an even deeper sense of deadlock and financial insecurity. Such a situation throws their loved ones into genuine bewilderment, and they themselves cannot understand where exactly they are going wrong.
Until recently, I did not understand this either. Eventually, insight came: the search for one’s calling is a spiritual impulse, connected with the awakening of the soul. And when the soul awakens, the archetype of the Destroyer steps onto the stage of inner life. Its other face is the Creator, but before it reveals itself as a creative force, it spends a long time dismantling our lives in every possible way.
If we look for the root of the word “calling,” we arrive at Christianity and the belief that God created each human being with specific gifts and talents in order to serve Him on Earth. In English, one of the words for “calling” is precisely calling. “The Call” is also the name given to the first stage of spiritual awakening described by Harry Moody and David Carroll in their book The Five Stages of the Soul. In this sense, a calling is literally a calling forth—and this call comes not from anywhere outside, but from the depths of our own soul.
If the spiritual dimension of the impulse toward creative realization is not taken into account, it will be treated using the tools of ego psychology: one will look for the right job or the appropriate career direction. But because this represents the ego’s appropriation of processes that are transpersonal in nature, all such efforts begin to fail. The ego and the soul have different desires, and when the soul awakens, the desires of the ego begin to be thwarted.
These people had heard the call, but they had not yet reached the place from which it arises. Their journey toward themselves was only at its beginning, and first it had to pass through the realm of Ereshkigal, until they were freed from their ego-claims—claims that threatened to usurp authorship over energies of which they were meant to be conduits. The return to the Upper World begins only when, hanging on the hook of our own helplessness, we are ready to humbly acknowledge the transpersonal forces we wish to serve.
Eckhart Tolle also writes about this theme, distinguishing between primary (inner, soulful) and secondary (outer, concrete) goals. He adds something particularly important: although the aim of every person who has heard the call is to contribute to the creation of a New Earth, not everyone does so in outward, extroverted forms. Some people work on an outer level, while others work on an inner one. The latter Tolle calls “frequency holders,” because their role is “to anchor the frequency of the energy of the new consciousness on the planet.” They do this not by changing their jobs or reforming their external circumstances, but by “generating consciousness through everyday human activities, through interaction with others, and simply by being.” They can follow their calling while continuing to do their ordinary work, by “giving deep meaning to what appears insignificant.”
“Their task is to bring spacious stillness into this world by being fully present in whatever they do. In what they do—even in the simplest action—there is consciousness and therefore quality. Their purpose is to do everything in a sacred way. Since every human being is an integral part of the collective human consciousness, they affect the world far more deeply than is apparent if one merely skims the surface of their lives.”
— Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”
Thus, in the search for one’s calling, we may encounter much of the opposite of what we are seeking. This, however, is entirely natural—if we understand it and view it from the right perspective. To see in it an awakened spiritual impulse: a call of the soul toward the creative realization of the potential with which it came into the world. This marks the beginning of a long process of spiritual transformation, in which the main supports are (1) understanding the meaning of what we are going through, (2) trust in inner processes, and (3) patience—great, great patience, and taking small steps.
In the end, there comes a moment when the fragmented pieces of our experience begin to connect (see Fatima and the twists of fate), and we realize that all along we have been living our calling. That the goal was the walking of the path itself.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
