What Is Your Life's Work vs. Soul Purpose?

What is my life purpose? That’s what everybody wants to know. Some people think it’s their job or career. Others know it’s not about the job, but don’t really have a clue. What if there was a way to figure out not just your life’s work but your soul purpose?

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” – Mark Twain

What is your life purpose?

There are many levels and layers to answering this question, as discussed in What Is Our Life Purpose? – Big Picture Questions.com & What Is the Point of Life? – Big Picture Questions.com).

Wendy Kennedy said your purpose is to experience more joy and to be of service.
Churchill said we make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Anandamayi Ma said the supreme calling of every human being is to aspire to self-realization, and that all other obligations are secondary.

These are all good for describing incarnations in general, but they really don’t get into the heart of why we have chosen this particular incarnation, as alluded to by Mark Twain.

Life is more than just incarnating or taking on form. It’s about experience and learning.
It’s as if we come in with a picture of ourselves in a puzzle, that gets scrambled by our family, friends, foes, society, etc. through imprinting, conditioning and programming.
We spend the rest of our days unscrambling that puzzle, trying to put all the pieces of our true self back together. Some people get further along than others. Some choose to be in families or groups where they’re the first one to awaken to bring the others along.

But in all cases the birthdate or entry point into the game is carefully chosen among the circle of family members, friends, enemies and others. Why? Because there is no quicker path to higher consciousness than relationships, according to Richard Rudd (“Gene Keys”).

What is your Life’s Work vs. Soul Purpose?

One way to figure it out is to get a free “hologenetic profile” at Rudd’s website (Gene Keys Network | Hologenetic Profile). It gives you an idea of which I Ching gates (“gene keys”) you are working on in this lifetime. You don’t have to join any groups or buy anything to do this.

The profile is calculated based on your time and place of birth and can be downloaded to view the 11 gates (or spheres) of significance in your current lifetime (see sample below).
Your Life’s Work is the sphere at 12 o’clock. Your Soul Purpose is the sphere at 6 o’clock.

The profile (below) shows the Life’s Work as Gate 11, which is about Obscurity-Idealism-Light at the shadow, gift and siddhi levels, respectively. The Soul Purpose is Gate 25, which is about Constriction (shadow) becoming Acceptance (gift) and Universal Love (siddhi) as you evolve.

According to Rudd, these two spheres are two sides of the same coin:

Purpose describes who you are here to BE, or the true spiritual purpose of your lifetime.
Life’s Work describes what you are here to DO, or how your core purpose gets expressed in the external world in service to others or in service to the whole.

The 64 keys and their Shadow, Gift and Siddhi frequencies are summarized in the chart below (click to enlarge; Source: Richard Rudd’s Gene Keys Network | Free Resources):

“Embrace the Shadow, Release the Gift, Embody the Siddhi.” – Richard Rudd

What is your Line?

When we incarnate, we wish to experience things from several different perspectives. In the I Ching system, each of the 64 gates can be expressed in 6 different versions or lines.

There are 384 basic archetypes (64 gates x 6 lines) of Life’s Work to choose from.
The moment of birth determines the gates and lines in your profile. Every lifetime is a unique setting with its entry point into a specific family, geography, era, purpose, etc.

For example, the profile above shows the Life’s Work is 11.6, which means gate 11 and line 6. The Purpose is 25.2, which means gate 25 and line 2.

How does the Line affect your Life’s Work?

The line gives a more refined understanding of your Life’s Work, as summarized in the Table (below). You will express the gate differently depending on the line associated with it:

We may identify with all the lines, because they may be part of our profile in this or other lifetimes. They may be also be played out by others in our personal or collective field. Rudd explained that our Life’s Work is not really about us.

It’s not about: What’s in it for me? How awesome am I with my gift or genius? 😉
It’s about serving others. We are here to work on ourselves, to raise our own frequency, so that we can express a higher frequency version of ourselves to those around us.

We activate them by association with us, when we offer them our gift or higher frequency.

Final Thoughts

I’ve only scratched the surface of this wisdom teaching here, but I hope you can see your Life’s Work and Purpose in a new light and as a catalyst for change. This work is never done. Rudd suggested that we ask ourselves these questions:

What is the deepest service I can offer to the whole?
What is the highest zenith my life could reach?
What will my legacy be? Whose lives will my life touch?
What does it mean to live a life of greatness (not to be mistaken for a career)?

“Personal ambition without a higher vision of service is essentially a form of corruption. It robs the world.” – Richard Rudd

That may sound radical, but he explained that Ambition is the shadow of gate 54, which must become the gift of Aspiration and the siddhi of Ascension, where you carry your life onto another plane. That was Paramahansa Yogananda’s Life’s Work (54.1, Ascension) and Purpose (51.3, Awakening), as beautifully told in his “Autobiography of a Yogi.”

My soul expands when I help others. I am service.