Deciphering Your Calling

Your attention both creates the world (as you perceive it) and it creates you. (It is for this reason that you should attend to meaning and not gratification, beauty and not utility, play and not power). Unconsciously, as you attend to the facets of reality that call to you, you develop visions of the future. This is an inevitable consequence of thought - it is thought itself. Every once in a while, a vision permeates the unconscious so much that you become aware of it as a goal. At this point the approach by which you decipher your calling becomes crucial. 

How does a calling present itself for you to decode it? It seems like initially, it does exactly that. It’s a bush that burns in the darkness or a pillar of darkness that attracts you during the day. It’s a rock of order in an ocean of chaos or the snake of chaos in the garden of order. Naturally, you follow it, observe it, evaluate it, and construct a representation of it in your mind so that you can interact with it without consequence. This way you can go deeper into the burning bush without being burned.  Eventually, a substantial image has been instilled. As a consequence of your investigation, you can imagine the world you were called to live in and this gives you hope for the future. 

What could you make of that? Often it remains dormant, serving as an ideal that we unconsciously reach up to. Sometimes (when regarded with humility and curiosity) it imbues life with meaning, and sometimes (when regarded with pride) it brings us bitterness and resentment, painfully revealing our inadequacies. But if we are to interact with it consciously, what is the best way to analyze its content (the meaning is not implicit although it is often mistaken to be so. The worst mistake is to presume to know what it means). Firstly, to determine whether or not it is pathological, it can be fractionated into a set of desires and ambitions. It’s possible that this vision only emerged because it was the most convenient way to piece together and represent the puzzle of your desires. For example, if you (consciously or not) desire social status and admiration, you want to be wealthy and productive, and you grew up around doctors, medicine might call to you despite not being best for you. Social status and admiration might be too big a piece of that puzzle. They might need to be substituted. While you can’t analyze the image and each piece with perfect precision, it would be beneficial to do more than zero deconstruction or analysis.

Assuming you’re not disconcerted by the breakdown of this vision, you must now differentiate the person in the vision from their primary function. I don’t think you’re called to perform a particular function. You’re called to become the person who performs that function. Those are more different than they seem. Moses wasn’t called to lead his People out of tyranny, but to become the man that leads a People out of tyranny. For this reason, when he failed to be the man of the Calling, he wasn’t allowed to complete his function. He prioritized the function over the man. 

So, if you envision your future self as a doctor, it is very tempting to labor over the particulars of your future function. This is important to do, but should not be done first. The priority is to identify and evaluate the person you’re envisioning - you probably admire them. This person is your calling and, since they exist conceptually, they can be subtracted from that vision and applied to a number of completely different functions. Imagine if you created five “equally” satisfactory visions of the future. The characteristics that all of these visions have in common can be abstracted and compiled into a meta-vision. This meta-vision, obviously, doesn’t include a function. At this moment, this is who you are called to be. If you pursue becoming the person you admire within the framework of that person’s particular function, you limit growth. Pursue the person first and then when you can see through their eyes, see what function presents itself.