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We are here to learn by expanding our awareness about the world and about ourselves. Learning about the world helps us to succeed. Learning about ourselves helps us to evolve. Our challenges in the arenas of relationship, health, and finances are all part of the curriculum. Daily life teaches us all we need to know for the next step on our journey. Each and every day, we find new lessons to learn.

Q: We grow up, attend school, earn a living, maybe get married and raise a family, go on vacations, provide a service, and live until we die. Isn’t this enough? Why all this interest in spirituality? What’s the point?

A: Most of us agree that life is a school in the sense that we learn many lessons. But if death is the end, what is the purpose of living in the first place? Questions about death may lead us to wonder about our lives. Are we a random experiment or part of a much bigger picture? One question leads to the next and all questions end in Mystery. Some of us turn to belief and faith; others simply wonder. And in this field of wonder grow the seeds of spirituality.

The greatest teaching is to live with an open heart. —Anonymous

At some point we may glimpse one of the fundamental lessons in the school of life: Our awareness resides, moment to moment, in one of two separate realities, each with its own truths. The first is conventional reality, which you describe in your question. The second is a transcendent reality—the spiritual dimension.

Most of the time, conventional reality monopolizes our attention with the stuff of everyday life—the challenges of education, earning a living, relationships, family, and health—everyday experience. Our dramas, played out in the theater of gain and loss, desire and satisfaction, seem entirely real and important. Conventional life involves the natural pursuit of satisfaction and fulfillment, which depends upon events unfolding in line with our desires, hopes, and expectations. In trying to make things work out, we suffer the pangs of attachment, craving, and anxiety.

We are involved in a mystery that passes understanding, and our highest business is daily life. —John Cage

Then one day—maybe through a trauma, a death in the family, an injury, or other adversity, we notice that conventional reality, even at its best, leads to dissatisfaction. We feel frustrated when we don’t get what we want, when we get what we don’t want, and even when we get exactly what we want, because in this world of mortality, we will lose all that we love.

Your daily life is your school, your temple, and your religion. —Kahlil Gibran

Adversity and psychological suffering stimulate a yearning to transcend the conditional world, to wake up and find the higher wisdom that uplifts our soul even as we live in the conventional world. Life’s challenging lessons generate a willingness to make a leap of faith, to relinquish familiar truths that no longer serve, and to venture into the unknown. As Anaïs Nin wrote, “Finally the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” In the school of daily life, spirituality is not separate from this world; it allows us to live an ordinary life while remembering the transcendent truths that set us free.

Q: I’m on a vision quest—searching for more in life than news, weather, and sports. I take yoga classes and meditate; last year I completed a four-hundred-mile bike trip in the hopes of triggering a spiritually elevated state. The trip gave me a temporary high and a sore butt. Still, when I push my body to the limit things happen. Am I going in the right direction?

A: Extreme physical feats—depriving the body of food and water, and other ordeals—can generate altered states and temporary highs, but to what end? Years ago, I traveled to the East and pursued many paths, until the search consumed itself and I came to rest. Today, numerous shamans, gurus, and guides are only too happy to take you on a tour of their chosen path. But all such paths are only classes in the School of Daily Life—part of a great adventure that teaches us all we need to know, never revealing what the next day will bring. This brings to mind the following story:

Each day shapes our lives as running water shapes a stone. —Anonymous

Near the end of World War II as American forces occupied Germany, two young men were captured and shipped to a U.S. POW camp. Interrogation failed—they would not or could not speak to American authorities and remained silent even among their fellow German prisoners, who insisted that they knew nothing about the pair. An expert in Asiatic languages soon determined that they were Tibetans. Overjoyed that someone was finally able to understand them, they told their story.

In the summer of 1941 the two friends, wishing to explore the world outside their tiny village, crossed Tibet’s northern frontier and wandered happily in Soviet territory for several weeks, until Russian authorities picked them up, put them on a train with hundreds of other young men, and shipped them west. At an army camp they were issued uniforms and rifles, given rudimentary military training, and loaded with other soldiers into trucks heading to the Russian front. Raised in a nonviolent Buddhist tradition, they were horrified to see men killing each other with artillery, rifles, even hand-to-hand fighting. Fleeing, they were captured by the Germans and again loaded onto a train—to Germany. Then, after the Normandy invasion—as American forces neared the German border—the hapless pair were forced into auxiliary service in the German army, given guns and told to fight. Again they fled from the carnage, until they were captured by the Americans and their puzzling wartime ordeal ended.

We often learn great lessons in simple and everyday ways. —Pearl S. Buck

The adventures of these two wanderers reflect our own travels through the school of life. Consider the twists and turns in your own journey—how daily life is your vision quest and school, revealing what it means to be human. This life, this moment, is your hero’s journey, your moment of truth, your near-death experience. Relationships, family, work, health, and finances are God’s Challenge Course. If you seek adventure, pay attention to each moment and find the miraculous within the mundane. Choose your courses from the Catalog. Find creative ways to serve family and community. In doing so, you discover the greatest vision quest of all.

Personal Applications

Your course work in the School of Life gradually reveals your unique purpose here. You will discover smaller, more immediate purposes, such as making breakfast, doing the laundry, driving to work. You will also find larger, long-range purposes, such as improving your body or your relationship, and making a contribution to your family, friends, and world. As we all learn life’s lessons and pursue our purposes, large and small, we acquire wisdom in the process.

 List three immediate purposes you wish to accomplish today.

 List, in order of priority, three larger purposes, goals, or dreams you would like to accomplish this year, this decade, or this lifetime.