It’s an interesting thing to look at ones life dispassionately. I watched a Google video of a lecture given by Jane Goodall, the one above, today in which she briefly talked about the idea that what we have, and maybe the only thing we have, is a life and the idea of nurturing that life. Anthony Robbins also talks about designing a life in The Time of Your Life programme, although most of it is spent discussing time management.
This is certainly not a new thought. Surely what destiny is is the most that we can do with our lives. The more we free ourselves from our conditioning circumstances the greater the potential and the greater our destiny.

I like this thought that we acquire a life and it’s our task to make the most of it that we can. Someone said to me recently that we get 4,000 weeks. Put that way it doesn’t seem so long. It creates a sense of having no time to waste. What will we have achieved with this life?

When our consciousness is decentralised from the life being ours to a life being something that we are a stewards of, and it is really only a project with which we’ve become endowed, then I think the possibility of service opens up. In Buddhist terms perhaps this is the Bodhisattiva path.

It seems clear to me that there is no separate individual soul and there is no separate destiny that is ours. Rather there is a combined destiny, a group service fulfilled according to ones environing conditions, and the flowering of the inner Buddha.

Ultimately I believe that we awaken, not for ourselves, but for all beings. There is no separate self to awaken for. Awakening here is itself a service, the service of serving humanity, the animal kingdom, the earth better.

Just a thought.