Watch the edited video Why Shared Purpose is the Future of Love and a Better World at https://youtu.be/8BC7WximNrE and download the Power Point Presentation here.
Similar to being in a healthy sustainable love relationship, living on purpose has many health benefits and extends our lives up to 7 years (see Sex Purpose Love page 206). So sharing our purpose in an Integral love relationship is the best recipe for a long, happy, healthy and (re)productive live and making the world a better place.
Before we can share our purpose in a love relationship that makes the world a better place, we need a deeper understanding of what our individual purpose is.
Humans have two purposes:
1. Our Biological Purpose or “biological imperative” (which we share with most animals) is to perpetuate our existence through self-sustaining processes such as metabolizing, pair-bonding, procreation, territorialism, competition, cooperation, quality-of-life seeking, group forming, and agency.
2. Our Transcendental Purpose is to create more goodness, truth, beauty, and functionality that are in service of our Biological Purpose and the well-being of others (beyond sexual selection), and is unique to humans. These four dimensions of our Transcendental Purpose began to become genetically encoded when early humans became self-conscious through exclusive pair bonds and females began to select males who were not only good providers and protectors, but also empathetic towards their partner, intelligent, creative, and practical. The offspring of females who selected for one or more of these additional fitness indicators in males had higher survival rates than those who selected "duller" partners, and the genes of the former where passed down in greater numbers to future generations.
These additional fitness indicators were later recognized by philosophers as the transcendentals of science (truth), the arts (beauty) and religion (goodness) and the corresponding philosophical disciplines of logic, aesthetics and ethics. Ken Wilber then added the forth dimension of functionality in his four quadrant model. It is interesting to note that no essential human domain exists outside of these four dimensions.
To this day, females desire partners who (in addition to good looks, power, status, and wealth), are kind/empathetic towards them, smart, artistic/creative (able to make her laugh), and/or able to fix things around the house, as indicated in almost every female dating profile.
As a consequence of these additional criteria for sexual selection, every human is born with different "levels" of genetically predisposed natural talents or capacities for Empathy, (cognitive) Intelligence, (artistic) Creativity, and Kinesthetic abilities, as shown by the EICK curve as a mountain metaphor below.
These natural talents are then either positively nurtured or negatively stunted as humans mature from conception to adulthood through the social environment of their mother, available nutrition, experience expectant and experience dependent learning, synaptic pruning, skill development, and myelination of synaptic connections, similar to how genetic and environmental influences come together to create an organism’s physical appearance and behavior. This development is illustrated by the towers (nurture and skill development) in the image below:
This is of course extremely simplified. For a more detailed explanation see the Purpose part in Sex Purpose Love or the book The Complexity of Greatness.
The combination of natural talents, nurture and skill development then lead to a multitude (literally thousands) of expressions as shown in the tree metaphor below.
As mentioned above, the ethical expressions of our Transcendental Purpose is always in service of the Biological Purpose and the well-being of others. A vivid example of the multitude of expressions of the four natural talents are the Nobel Prizes which honor and reward individuals and groups who create more goodness through peace, more truth through discoveries in physics, chemistry, and medicine, more beauty through literature, and more functioning through better economic sciences.
While some humans received the nurturing and opportunity to develop the skills to fully express their natural talents early on, most humans are not so lucky. They then use whatever capacities they have developed to most effectively live their Biological Purpose (or parts of it), but often feel unfulfilled and that their lives have no meaning or purpose. The results are seen in human suffering and the many environmental and socioeconomic problems that humanity is facing.
However, similar to spiritual awakening, humans at any age and stage of consciousness development or spiritual realization have the potential to awaken to, identify, and live their Transcendental Purpose, as indicated by the different names below:
Magic = Spirits Purpose
Egocentric = Unique Purpose
Mythic = Higher/God's Purpose
Rational = Real/True Purpose
Pluralistic = Soul's Purpose
Integral = Evolutionary Purpose
Transpersonal = Authentic Purpose
Traditionally, mostly males received the education and rights to express their natural talents in the public sphere, while females were relegated to responsibilities in the domestic sphere, which lead to traditional gender roles and sexual selection. This has of course changed in modern and postmodern societies in which most girls receive an equal or better education than boys and can later assume equal rights and responsibilities in the public sphere if they so choose (by competing with men and other women).
This obviously has an impact on the traditional sexual selection process in which women used to "married up" to successful and powerful males in the public sphere--leading to the "where are all the good quality men?" syndrome in modern and postmodern societies. This increasingly becomes an existential problem for humanity.
The solution is that a majority of people awaken to their Transcendental Purpose and use it as an additional sexual attractor for the formation of love relationships between equal and opposite partners who share the same rights and responsibilities in the domestic and public sphere to live their shared Biological and Transcendental Purpose to make the world a better place.