A fulfilling job, a fulfilling career, a fulfilling relationship.

We’ve all heard these phrases many times. They are so much a part of our thinking and language that we seldom really notice them. When we think of fulfillment, these situations are the kinds of things that we imagine. We just naturally tend to assume that when we have the career we really want, or the promotion, or meet a truly compatible partner, or live in a nice house in an upscale neighborhood, or earn a degree, or have more money in the bank, that we will somehow be more satisfied, more content and more fulfilled.

It’s often true that when we get the things that we’ve been wanting for a while, it does give us a certain satisfaction. We feel tremendous happiness on the first day of our new career or our summer beach vacation. We are so excited on the day we get married, or move into our wonderful new home. We really enjoy the first bite of that delicious ethnic meal. But what we notice is that, disappointingly, these satisfactions usually dim as time goes by. The career becomes a job, the house becomes the place where we live, the vacation comes to an end, our partner doesn’t give us all we’d hoped for, and even after a truly delicious meal, we’re hungry again in a few hours.

When we don’t find the lasting satisfaction we expected, what we usually don’t do is question the belief that these kinds of things should fulfill us.

We imagine that we just didn’t quite get it right the first time around, and we need to try again. If we have a conflict with our partner, we might dream of another who will give us more love and understanding. We might move to an even nicer house in an even better neighborhood. We might quit and look for a higher-paid job. We might plan a more expensive vacation for next year. We might book a table at that incredible new restaurant we just heard about.

I am not saying that there is anything inherently wrong with good careers, nice houses, compatible partners or delicious food. The trouble is that we expect something from them that they actually cannot deliver. They cannot give us true, deep and lasting fulfillment, because fulfillment actually has nothing, truly nothing, to do with our possessions, our achievements or our lifestyle.

Why? Because only Presence can offer us true fulfillment. True fulfillment only arises when we are fully present in and as our divine soul.

When we are fully present as our divine soul, there is inherently a deep contentment, a profound sense that nothing is lacking and nothing is missing. There is no desire and no seeking – the very concepts seem foreign. And as we sit in this
contentment of Presence, we may find that an even deeper state of profound fulfillment arises.

We find that we actually are the essence of fulfillment, a state so gratifying that it is light years beyond even the deepest contentment we have ever experienced. A quiet pleasure permeates every last cell of our body, every tiny atom of our being, and we understand that this is actually the soul’s state of true fulfillment. We deeply relax, and there is a sense of a soft inner smile. All the usual motivations for doing things drop away completely, and we feel as though we could just sit in meditation, smiling gently, doing nothing, totally fulfilled, for a thousand years.

From this perspective, we see with total clarity that true fulfillment has no correlation with our achievements in the world. It is not something we can earn, or possess, or marry, or find. It is inherent in our Presence, the essence that we actually are, and only by living in Presence, can we truly know it.

It becomes clear that we have confused the satisfying of our ego’s instinctual and emotional needs with the satisfaction of our soul.

The ego’s job is to ensure the survival of the body, and the body does need to be fed and sheltered and safe. It needs to have times of play and relaxation, and to connect emotionally with others. It feels a natural, necessary desire for all these things, and a natural sense of satisfaction when they’re attained.

For the ego-body, these things are its fulfillment. The problem arises when the ego, knowing no better, convinces us that its satisfactions will bring us true fulfillment. But these gratifications cannot provide the deep contentment and satisfaction that all of us seek. They are not the fulfillment of the soul.

The tragedy is that we often spend much of our lives chasing the wrong rainbow, not understanding why our lives are successful but our souls are empty.

The true fulfillment of our soul is to live as our true nature. When we can take our place in the garden of the soul, it’s then that we feel an eternal, indestructible, joyful fulfillment that is beyond all striving and all achievement.

Just being ourselves, we are fulfillment.

As A.H.Almaas says,

This world we live in … (is) neither good nor bad. What makes it a place of suffering is that we are not present in it; what makes it a place of fulfillment is that we are present in it. For fulfillment is nothing but the fullness of our presence. (Diamond Heart Book 4, p34)