Dan Millman: Beyond the Peaceful Warrior Way
SANDIE SEDGBEER: I’ve always believed that the Universe, Source, has given us everything we need. And I think that the Spiritual Laws in your books—the truths, the gateways, all of the things you write about, which are so simple and fundamental that one has to recognize them as truths—are a part of that. And so is numerology, and astrology, and the other systems that exist for us to learn about ourselves.
DAN MILLMAN: Exactly. I’m in alignment with the idea that we are given all the resources, we just haven’t uncovered them all. Scientists might look at my book and say, ‘Well, it may work in practice, but does it work in theory?’ I can only say that someone else is going to have to come up with a theory that we haven’t embraced yet. How could the planets and the motions of the planets and our date of birth possibly lend such accurate information? So, I leave that to the theorists, but the book was a major task to put out. I’m always a bit self-conscious mentioning theory of my books, but if I’m a tree, these are my branches. They’re an essential part of my life and how my work developed. I’m working on my (probably) last long-form work right now. It’s going to tell the story of those four mentors and how they influenced my life and work. It’s really not just a memoir, which means it has no fiction, it’s as completely true as I can make it, but also, it’s a story behind the story and about my lineage. And it may inform others’ lives about this whole idea of the spiritual quest. So, that’s what’s calling me to work on this final book right now.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: You released an updated 25th-anniversary edition of The Life You Were Born to Live. What more did you want to add to it? I mean, in numerology, there are clear laws, and there’s a structure to that. What more can you add?
DAN MILLMAN: When the book came out in 1994, nobody ever thought about what it was going to be like after the year 2000. It was just too far in the future. So, there were 37 life paths, but it turns out that certain children born after the year 2000, some are now 19, almost 20 have a quite radically different life path. Some have a single-digit which, to those who understand numerology systems, is quite interesting. So, I wanted to include those. The new edition I felt needed to include all the life paths and some more insights I had recently about what we call master numbers, which hadn’t been communicated before as far as I know. So, that’s what moved me to sit down and work on significant revisions in the basic system.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: In 2011, you published The Four Purposes of Life – Finding Meaning and Direction in a Changing World. What are those Four Purposes?
DAN MILLMAN: Let me say, first, that we are all hard-wired goal seekers. When I watch my grandchild, as an infant, crawl the floor, they’re not just getting some helpful exercise, they want something. They are moving toward some toy or sparkly object. That’s true for any of us. In the Peaceful Warrior movie, the character, Dan, had this revelation and said to Socrates: ‘I just realized that it’s not the destination that makes us happy; it’s the journey.’ That’s a nice insight to have because most of our lives are the journey. Yet, without a destination in mind, without a goal or purpose, there is no journey. We just wander around.
So, from point A, we need a point B. I would define success and maybe some element of happiness as making regular progress towards a meaningful goal. Those working towards a goal, whether it’s interpersonal, financial, in a sport or hobby, have this absorption in life, this submersion that really connects us to life. So, that’s why I think the purpose is so important in our lives. There are many purposes, of course, but just as we divide the points of a compass into four primary directions or the days of the year into four seasons, by highlighting four purposes in that particular book, it helps us to make more sense out of our lives.
In brief, The Four Purposes are first, learning life’s lessons. That may not sound like much; we’re learning just from our life experience, but there’s more to it. I won’t go into it right now, but it has to do with twelve courses in the School of Life. We’re all studying, and we can’t fail at anything as long as we’ve learned a lesson. That’s the core of our lives; we’re here to learn and to evolve.
The Second Purpose is what we normally think of as ‘purpose’—our career and calling and how those two are different; calling doesn’t need to make money, whereas a career does. That’s central to the career, even if it has ancillary benefits. So, that’s important to all of us; how to choose through self-knowledge the most appropriate career and to reawaken our calling as well because they can be the same or they can be different.
The Third Purpose is the one I write about to provide a context in The Life You Were Born to Live: our life path, our hidden calling. What we’re here to do beneath the theatre and behind the stage of everyday life.
The Fourth Purpose may be the most important one of all, which is our purpose in each arising moment. I may not know my cosmic purpose. You may not either, but you and I both know our purpose right at this moment. Having a conversation. So, most of us can get grounded again with all this information we’re exposed to by saying, ‘OK, what do I need to do at this moment,’ which brings us back to this present moment and back on Purpose.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: Now, there’s a paradox there, too, because you also write about how many people are so goal-oriented they spend most of their time in the future and completely miss the present.
DAN MILLMAN: The Writer, Mark Twain, once said: ‘I’ve had many troubles in my life, most of which never happened.’ Most of our troubles are projected into the future, something we think we’re going to do, and it’s going to unfold this way. Or, our troubles are in the past. ‘I wish I hadn’t, I shouldn’t have done that, I wish I could change this.’ That’s why I bring people back to the idea that there is no such thing as the past and future except as concepts. Time is a convention. All we ever have is this eternal present, and this present, and this present.
Now, it’s impossible to grasp the present moment, as any physicist will tell you. How do you grab a Nano-second? A millionth of a second? What teachers like myself mean by that is to focus on what’s in front of us because what we call the past is a seven-neuro impression in our brain we call memory, but it no longer exists except in these impressions we carry. The future is simply our imagination. There’s no such thing as future happiness. Either we’re either happy now, or we’re not, because the future never comes. So, the more we become realistic and understand that all we have, our moment of power, our moment of reality, is right now, the more realistic and powerful we become. We have more presence because we are present, and we start to realize, just as meditators do, noticing that the waves of thought pass, we begin to see it and get a distance from it and get more in touch with what’s real and what’s right now. It makes us more effective and more functional in everyday life.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: There are many sentences and short phrases in your books that carry so much truth, I want to pin them on the wall. For example, ‘There’s no such thing as a future decision.’ I know people who struggle so much with making decisions that they become paralyzed and don’t make any. Then they bemoan the fact that they couldn’t make a decision, or they made the wrong decision, or they have to change and learn to make decisions, but they never do. Perhaps reading that phrase might be helpful to them.
DAN MILLMAN: Thinking about doing something is the same as not doing it. You might have heard that phrase: ‘We don’t want to act without thinking, and we don’t want to think without acting.’ There is a balance between the two. So, in several of my books, I share a method to make fully educated decisions, bringing in our imagination and our subconscious to make more appropriate, more holistic decisions. Many people fear to make the wrong decision which leads to paralysis.
Continue to page 3 of the Interview with Dan Millman: Beyond the Peaceful Warrior Way
