Educational articles

Photo by Jurga Tuskienė

Rasa Baltė Balčiūnienė
Founder of HAI Institute, business psychologist

Ontopsychology states that every person has a vocation, and the meaning of life is to recognise and fulfil it. By realising our vocation, along with material things, we also get what we call happiness. Happiness is a state of being, and if we are in harmony with our vocation, we will be both successful and happy.

What is a vocation? That is the acorn. We know that it will grow into an oak tree, not a birch tree. In the case of man, it is a kind of psychic endowment, in what way he is able to affect material reality. Some people have a sense of proportion: they create architectural, design things, and we enjoy looking at them. Others have a gift for sensing where demand and needs come together, and we say that they are entrepreneurial people, sensing where to hit the spot.

How to discern your vocation? There is a metaphor: Someone has put a brick on the growing grass. The grass is growing, but it doesn't have enough room to grow. So, first of all, a person needs, with the help of others, to remove the "brick" from himself - that which for him, out of context, is always good or bad, right or wrong. Man's problem is that he lives with that "brick". His world is narrow because he sees it only through good-bad (automatic emotional expressions) or right-wrong (automatic rational expressions).

The "brick" is our adaptation to our immediate environment. It is how the family we grew up in wanted to see us. Imagine: a small child comes into a big world and by the age of three "absorbs" all the information that is around him, with all the rules: good-bad, right-wrong. In psychology, this is called the reflective matrix, i.e. the "glasses" through which one sees the world. If he sees the environment as threatening, this matrix will be activated in difficult circumstances, and he will see nothing but confirm to himself that this is the case. If his "glasses" show him that the environment is unjust, he will see it everywhere: his mother, his husband, his client or his partner - all of them treat him unjustly. He will be firmly convinced of this.

The other part of the "brick" is the "accessories" of society (what is right-wrong). I believe that there are no X, Y or Z generations. It's just that some people are more authentic, based on the fundamental, immutable laws of life; and others are very much subject to the stereotypes of society. That is the fundamental difference.

It is not so easy to remove the "brick". And we do not remove it completely in our lifetime. Maybe, rather, not "bricks" but "glasses". When one begins to understand the "accessories" of sociality, one is overwhelmed with euphoria, because one begins to see things in context. This is already a big step and a change in a person's life, because he or she rejects the cultural stereotypes that have been imposed. However, in order to make a fundamental change, a person needs to understand the "glasses" (reflective matrix) through which he sees the world - what has been formed in childhood on the basis of the concept of "good-bad". This is a long process. Probably after a year, the person will begin to see more in context and will be able to shed the "accessories" imposed by society. But it will take about seven years to make a profound change, i.e. to consciously take off the "glasses" of childhood. By then, one can say that one is becoming more and more authentic, i.e. acting out of one's vocation and not by adapting to the system. The important thing is that, after twenty years and under certain circumstances, one can put on the same 'glasses' again. So one needs to be attentive and vigilant throughout life.

Where is the pleasure in life? When a person starts to see reality without his reflective matrix (childhood "glasses"), he comes up with interesting ideas and projects. For novelty and diversity are one of the manifestations of the logic of life. We are amused when new things appear and very bored when they are repeated. The most crushing to human motivation is repetition. When we rely on outdated stereotypes - cultural or childhood stereotypes - that is repetition. When we rely on what is born from within, from our vocation, interesting things happen. And when it's interesting, everybody has fun.