Why Are You Here?

The question of your lifetime.

As old beliefs fall away and the scaffolding of a life built on accumulation and achievement starts to feel less solid than it once did, a question surfaces that no amount of achievement can answer.

Why am I here?

This question is arriving more and more. I receive it in emails, podcasts, Zoom talks, audience events and it isn't slowing down. Most of the time the question sneaks in with a quiet or even silent desperation. The usually unsaid or what I can psychically feel in the question screams: "I am suffering!!!" Followed by a visceral statement of: "Why am I here if I already had understanding there!? What is the point of any of this?"

It is one of the, if not the oldest questions about this existence. But I want to offer you a different entry point into it.

Not "why are you here" as a philosophical or spiritual problem to be solved. But "why are you here" when, on the other side, you already have everything?

I know this question from the inside because of the NDE. What I was shown there did not just answer the question, it removed it. What I want to offer you here is the same dissolution.

The Question Behind the Question

If you have experienced any degree of spiritual opening, or if you've sat with the accounts of those who have, you begin to sense that what awaits us on the other side is not just reward. It is completion. It is the full experience of what we are.

Unconditional love. Total acceptance. The end of the gap between who you are and who you thought you had to be, or who you thought you were.

So the real question becomes: if we already have all of that, why come here? Why take on a body, a name, a history, a set of wounds, and forget everything we came from? What is the point of the amnesia?

When I was on the other side, this was not a question I needed to ask. It was simply known. Known as experience. The way you know you are warm without having to think about it. Coming here, into a body, means losing that knowing.

The deeper understanding being, you are here to experience what you are by temporarily forgetting it.

The forgetting is not a punishment or a cosmic mistake. The not-knowing is precisely what makes the knowing real. You are here to experience what you are, and the only way to truly experience something is to first be without it. The amnesia is the gift. Not despite the suffering it causes, but because of the depth of recognition that it makes possible.

Experience Is the Point

Experience is the point. Not achievement. Not arrival. Not even enlightenment, as most people understand the word.

Experience.

But here is where most of you go wrong. You judge the experience. And you weigh it against some imagined alternative or expectation, and measure it for gain or loss, asking whether it's leading somewhere. Turning the experience into a performance. And in doing so, we miss the thing entirely.

You were not sent here to get it right. You were sent here to feel.

The Gift of Forgetting

I would like to share with you something about unconditional love that is easy to miss.

You can only truly feel something for the first time once. The first bite of something extraordinary. The first morning after a long grief finally breaks. The moment you fall in love.

But unconditional love, the love that is your actual nature, has a quality unlike anything else. Every time you return to it, every time you recognize it again after having forgotten, it feels like the first time. Not a diminished version or a memory. The full thing, fresh, new, deep, alive.

As an example, someone wrote to me about adopting an animal. The way you can fall completely in love in a single afternoon, with no conditions, no history, no negotiation. Pure. Open. Total. And then they described unconditional love as returning to that feeling through adopting a new animal every day, again and again, each time as if encountering that love for the first time.

That remembering is what you came here for.

You are here to experience unconditional love again and again. And every time you turn your back toward it, and then remember that love, it will be as full and as saturating as the first time you experienced it.

That is not an accident. That is the gift.

It Was Never Your Life

You might wonder: if you are here for your own experience of remembering love, how is that also service? The answer is that they are the same movement. Every time you return to love, you become it for someone else. You don't serve others instead of experiencing love. You serve others by experiencing it. Your remembering is their permission to remember.

It was never your life. It was never about your story, your progress, your arc.

Your existence here is of service to all. Every encounter you have ever had, every stranger, every difficult relationship, every moment of unexpected grace you offered without thinking, rippled outward in ways you will never fully understand. You were the experience someone else needed. They were the experience you needed. This whole thing is of a tightly woven single fabric.

You are here to serve others in their experience of life. You are here to be the love that others cannot find within themselves.

That is your true nature.

Your remembering is their permission to remember. And their remembering is someone else's. This is how love moves through the world. Through ordinary people finding their way back, again and again, and becoming the proof that it is possible. Not through grand gestures.

The Sun and the Sunflower

Imagine we are all at the source, God, The All. In this example I’ll use the sun. Pure light. Self-sustaining, self-radiating, complete.

But for the sun to feel itself, to experience what it is, it needed something that could walk away from it. Something with a body, with time and distance, with the capacity to turn its back through forgetting. Only then could there be the turning around. Only then could there be the recognition.

You are that. You are something the light created so that the light could be felt.

You are the sunflower, grown from a seed buried in darkness, pressing upward through soil you couldn't see, stretching toward a source you couldn't name. And one day you turn your face toward it and you know. You know. And it knows you. And in that recognition, love moves in both directions.

That is why you are here.

You are not here to escape the darkness found in the soil. But to grow through it, toward what you already are.

The Difficulty

The ego is not a flaw in the design of this existence. It is the design. Without it, there is no forgetting. Without forgetting, there is no remembering. Without remembering, there is no experience of love arriving new, unconditionally.

But it is relentless. Its entire orientation is away from love, toward comparison, grievance, hunger, fear. It will use everything available to it. Your relationships. Your ambitions. Your trauma. It is extraordinarily good at what it does.

However, this is not a reason for despair. It is a reason for compassion, for yourself, first. Every time you have been pulled away, you were doing exactly what you were designed to do. The question is never whether you will forget. It is only whether you will remember.

The forgetting is part of the design. But, so is the remembering.

Every time you find your way back, you are doing exactly what you came here to experience.

Suffering Into Love

If you arrived at this post suffering, if the question behind your question was really why does this hurt so much, I want to say this: your suffering is not evidence that something went wrong. It is not a sign that you are failing the experience. It is the depth of the forgetting, which is the correlation to the remembering that is possible for you. The further the sunflower has traveled from the light, the more total the turning toward it becomes. You are not behind. You are not broken. You are in the middle of exactly what you came here for.

There is nothing you need to become. There is only what you are, unconditional love, and the ongoing, endlessly renewable experience of remembering it.

You did not come here randomly. You came here to remember. And you are already doing it.

Love is what you are. This life is how you get to find that out, again and again, for the first time, every time.