Do you know Matthieu Ricard? 
He is a great example to show that one’s purpose in life is often concealed and revealed only later. And also, that one must make real choices to reveal one’s purpose.
If you haven’t heard about him, you might want to take a few minutes to discover this personality. It’s a person worthwhile listening to with great insights for modern life.
One particularly interesting thing is that, being a young scientific researcher, son of a prominent philosopher, fully embedded in modern society’s elite, he decided as a young man to leave everything and seek spirituality as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. He left the comfort of Europe to join a spiritual quest. He became the disciple of great spiritual leaders there. He became prominent in the Tibetan Buddhist community.
Then around the year 2000 he somehow managed to reconcile his scientific mindset and his Buddhist monk experience, by being a key driver into the investigation of the brain activity of experienced meditators. Mind exercise is shown to change significantly the brain!
He is now a bestseller author, writing marvelous books about happiness and a number of other issues, gives talks worldwide.
Matthieu Ricard made a tremendous choice to leave modern society, living for 20 years with very little resources in remote places in Asia. He is finally contributing much more powerfully to the world and our understanding of ourselves than if he had stayed a PhD student and became a researcher like many others in a research institute. He probably could not anticipate this when he made his initial choice.
What a better example than this one to show that one’s purpose in life is often concealed and revealed only later? To show that one must make real choices to reveal one’s purpose? That otherwise it may stay forever latent?.
What REAL choice will you make in 2011?
Do you want to know more about Matthieu Ricard?
There are a lot of resources by him on internet – videos, pictures. You can visit for example Matthieu Ricard’s website or watch one of his videos on Youtube. For example, his video on “changing your mind – changing your brain” is a great insight into brain modification induced by training.
