The Inner Purpose of Your Life’s Journey

by Eckhart Tolle

When you are on a journey, it is certainly helpful to know where you are going or at least the general direction in which you are moving but don’t forget: the only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment.

That’s all there ever is.

Your life’s journey has an outer purpose and an inner purpose. 

The outer purpose is to arrive at your goal or destination, to accomplish what you set out to do, to achieve this or that, which of course, implies future. 

If your destination, or the steps you are going to take in the future, take up so much of your attention that they become more important to you than the step you are taking now, then you completely miss the journey’s inner purpose, which has nothing to do with where you are going or what you are doing, but everything to do with the quality of your consciousness at this moment.

The outer purpose belongs to the horizontal dimension of space and time; the inner purpose concerns a deepening of your Being in the vertical dimensions of the timeless Now. 

Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one; the step you are taking right now. 

As you become more deeply aware of this one step, you realize that is already contains within itself all the other steps as well as the destination.

This one step then becomes transformed into an expression of perfection, an act of great beauty and quality. 

It will have taken you into the Being, and the light of Being will shine through it. This is both the purpose and the fulfillment of your inner journey, the journey into yourself.

eckharttolle.com