by Skyler Sage

Created on: May 17, 2008

Upon countless hours of quiet reflection, I have come to believe that we are here, as humans, on this planet, for three purposes alone:

To Love
To Learn
To Serve

This has been, for years, MY personal "holy trinity." With loving, learning and serving as my primary purpose this lifetime, I have found a rich and rewarding meaning for my life. If I frame each experience within this simple set of life principles, I find that whatever life hands me each day, I am able to see it through the eyes of compassion, self-love, and a sense of purpose far beyond what my little self-absorbed mind can see. With this life philosophy, I am finally able to understand myself as a "spiritual being having a human experience."

Before coming to this set of guiding principles upon which to focus my daily life, I found myself mired in self-centered fear, greed, longing, and desperate desire. I looked outside myself for validation from others upon which to rest my self-esteem. I viewed the trials and pain in my life from a place of self-pity and self-absorbed obsession about "what I did to cause this," or "what you did to me and how wrong you were to do it."

Rather than focus on what I could give to life and to others, I was consumed with what I could get from you and from life. If things didn't go my way, according to my plan, I was angry, sad, and felt life was meaningless. Life was just one ugly painful experience after another with a few high points mixed in to keep me going until the next bomb dropped.

The beauty of this trinity is that each principle stands on its own merit, while at the same time being intimately inter-connected with its two other points on the triangle.

On Loving:

I believe our cultural messages about love are deeply flawed, and deeply ingrained in our belief systems. From songs on the radio, novels, movies and all forms of media, the "white picket fence" syndrome creates for us a sense that "if I only had" THEN I would be happy and whole. If only HE/SHE/THEY loved me, my life would have purpose. If only that crowd accepted me, I would feel a part of the bigger picture of life.

But the masters of the ages have taught us that love is not just a feeling, but also an action and a choice. Love is magical in that the more we give, the more we get. Giving and receiving truly are One. And if I keep my focus on how I can express love, give love, flow love outwardly to the world, rather than on how I can get you/him/her/them to love me, I find the true meaning of the term. As

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