Mark Thurston - Discovering Your Souls Purpose: Finding Your Path in Life, Work, and Personal Mission the Edgar Cayce Way

T HE PUBL ICATION OF this second edition of my 1984 book, Discovering Your Souls Purpose, gives me pause to think about my own engagement with these ideas and principles. I discovered the work and spiritual philosophy of Edgar Cayce when I was a senior in high schooljust seventeen and full of wonderings and uncertainties about my own calling and mission in life. Studying and applying these ideas, especially during my college years as I swerved from one academic major to another, profoundly helped me find a directiona professional focus in psychology, but more important was a direction for the kind of person I aspired to be. Even in this period of my emerging adulthood forty-five years ago, I had already started to appreciate that discovering your souls purpose is more about being than doing. The doing-ness of a well-chosen occupation was going to be fine, but more critical was finding an optimal way to be in life.

The journey to fulfill my own mission took me to Virginia Beach, Virginia. I was given extraordinary opportunities for learning and service as I worked for more than three decades at the very organization that Edgar Cayce had founded in 1931. One tremendous professional gift was the opportunity as a writer and teacher to pick topics from the Cayce material and develop systematic ways that those topics can be studied and applied: dream interpretation, meditation, and the intuitive mind, just to name a few. But for some reasonand maybe it was because of how influential the material had been in my own decision making about my careerI latched on to the Cayce principle that simply states, For, each soul enters with a mission... We all have a mission to perform (3003-1). I decided that I wanted to make a truly in-depth study of how Cayce had served as a spiritual director to hundreds of people, helping them to see and claim their own spiritual calling, their personal mission.

As an educator and writer for the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) I had many opportunities to share what I was able to mine from the extensive archival records of Cayces work as an unconventional, gifted spiritual psychologist. With my own freshly minted Ph.D. in psychology, I was no doubt overly confident that together Edgar Cayce and I could come up with a foolproof system of self-study that would yield a revelation of soul purpose for anyone committed enough to give it a try. I was especially proud of a one-day workshop course that I created, with the same title as this book. This workshop was a full day of experiential learning about oneself, culminating in a guided process to craft the first draft of ones mission statement. A.R.E. conferences sent me to at least forty different cities in the late 1970s and early 1980s to offer the workshop, which probably averaged one hundred people per event. Eventually I presented the program in six other countries. The feedback that I received from many of these thousands of course participants allowed me to refine the presentation and the exercises, and by 1984 the timing seemed right to put these ideas into the original edition of Discovering Your Souls Purpose.

So, why a new edition of this book more than thirty years later? One reason is that there is a growing interest in this theme. Eighty years ago Cayce was one of the few who spoke so specifically and eloquently about each person having a particular soul purpose. Admittedly, there had long been a tradition, especially within Protestant Christianitywhich was Cayces own rootsthat everyone could find in his or her occupational work a means to glorify God. In other words, a calling was not reserved for those whose vocation was in the church or a religious order. You could be a farmer or a teacher or a business owner and fulfill your calling, if you pursued that career with the intention to serve the greater good and glorify the Creator. However, Cayces spiritual advice to seekers in the 1930s and 1940s helped to pioneer a broader understanding of soul purpose, and that expanded notion has caught on here in the twenty-first century. The broader view is that each of us is born with a gift; that is to say, a set of talents, aptitudes, and inclinations that equip us as individuals to do something special. That something special may very well never lead to fame or notoriety, but we each have a purpose in life that involves making a contribution to the greater good that no one else can do in quite the same way we do.

We dont have to look far nowadays to find this kind of language about finding a purposeful life. And thats good news. Cayces work is not alone in having spurred this kind of thinking, but it certainly played an invaluable role. And the expansion has reached not only into mainstream books, articles, and television programs. There is even an expanded interest in these kinds of themes in social science research. The topic here is meaningnot so much What is the meaning of life? because thats a philosophical and religious question; instead, theres growing interest in social science research about what makes life meaningful and how people find and pursue meaning, especially through their work.

To illustrate this growing interest, even among academics, here is one example. What are the implications of choosing a career that feels deeply meaningful and yet is likely to be undervalued in society, not pay very well, and have considerable workplace stress? Two researchers decided to investigate this riddle, and they chose zookeepers as the subjects of their study. Now at first most of us might be quick to dismiss such a study, simply because we dont have much interest in cleaning out monkey cages or lugging around huge crates of food for a hippo. However, this social science investigation does have relevance for any of us inclined toward a career in teaching, nursing, social work, and a whole host of other fields that involve care for others. In their 2009 peer-review journal article, titled The Call of the Wild: Zookeepers, Callings, and the Double-edged Sword of Deeply Meaningful Work, researchers J. Stuart Bunderson and Jeffery A. Thompson describe an aspect of the human spirit that compels people to sacrifice pay, personal time, and comfort in service to work that they feel they were born to do. And as we see from the Cayce archives, his spiritual advice to many individuals was to listen for and follow just that sort of calling to meaningful work.