The Only Thing That Matters Read Free Page A

we’re not careful, we’ll all wind up exactly where we’re headed.”
    Today the earth is populated with billions of people desperately hoping to “get somewhere,” but having no idea of where they’re going.

    The first step in moving into clarity on where you’re going is moving into clarity on where you are right now , on who you are to begin with, and on why you are here .
    On Earth, that is.
    What are you doing here? What is the point of this? What is Life’s purpose?
    These are the questions that have to be answered before you can begin to make decisions about The Only Thing That Matters—to say nothing of living your daily life focused on that. So the next few chapters— Part Two of this book—will be devoted to a deep investigation of these very questions.
    As you move through these next pages, know that this is an exploration for which your Mind has earnestly yearned. Your Mind, you see, has been trying for years to make sense of a life that makes no sense at all . Now, thanks to the Knowledge of your Soul, you will be placing everything that is happening in your life into a new context—a context in which life finally does make sense.
    (NOTE: If you’re a bit impatient at this juncture and do not wish to engage in this investigation right now, but would rather move directly into a discussion of what it looks like to focus your life in such a way that 98% of what you do does matter, feel free skip ahead to Part Three of this book. But just to let you know: you’re very likely to wind up going back to Part Two eventually, reading through the deep explorations in Chapters 5 – 18 , because it is there that the whole construction of Life—which is what makes The Only Thing That Matters matter —is defined and described.)

Part Two
    Explaining life’s biggest
mysteries, and why there is
only one thing that matters.

    Oh, yes … and also revealing
what that is.

5

Back to Basics
    D EAR S WEET AND G ENTLE B EING … As we move more deeply into this exploration, let us step back and take a look at some fundamental concepts, including this one: You are on a journey here. And no, it is not the journey from birth to death. It is a journey from way before birth to long after death.
    The importance and the implication of this Journey upon which you find yourself can barely be comprehended by your Mind. It can be comprehended … but barely.
    Is this because your Mind is so incapable, so inefficient? No. It is because your Mind has been given so little information about the Journey itself.
    We learn about it in a very indirect way. Not because our elders and our teachers sit us down and tell us everything we need to know about it (they have, after all, been given no more information than they are giving us), but because our art has done the best it can to fill the gap.
    It is humanity’s culture that tells us about the experience in which we find ourselves. (And this is why, by the way, the movement to remove “cultural pursuits”—music and drama, art and other creative expressions—from our schools, leaving classrooms full of children to look only at our history, is so crushingly damaging to our sense of who we are and why we are.)
    We need culture and esoterics—story and song, movies and plays, fiction and poetry, and really good television—to tell us about ourselves in fuller ways.
    The American poet Em Claire did just this, capturing the essence of our journey, when she wrote …
    I left The Home so long ago now
that I would not recognize my own face.
I constructed the Boat of my Life
and I set out
into the open sea
waving to all who knew
that the seas would give me
everything I could handle
and everything I could not
and yet they waved, and I set out
into the open sea
In the Boat of My Life:
built from Soul, crafted by Heart
and with great innocence I pushed off
into the open sea
and have been away from my