Part One:

Origins of the Life-Purpose System

For centuries, observers of human nature have sought common denominators to better understand the forces that shape human personality and destiny. Numerous tools of insight from both psychological and mystical traditions have emerged at different times and in different cultures. All of these methods and maps of consciousness represent our attempts to demonstrate that our universe and our individual psyche aren’t random or chaotic, but have a certain structure and order.

This book, introducing the Life-Purpose System, provides a clear, objective method for understanding any individual’s life path and purpose — providing that individual has a known and accurate date of birth and was born after 1750, when the modern calendar was widely adopted.

This system’s ultimate source is veiled in mystery, but its origins most likely date back to the Pythagorean school of ancient Greece. Pythagoras is best known as a mathematician, one of the founders of geometry. According to World Book Encyclopedia, “Pythagoras taught that number was the essence of all things. He mystically associated numbers with virtues, colors, and many other ideas that he may have embraced during travels in the East.” As the Encyclopedia Britannica states, “More probably the bulk of the intellectual tradition originating with Pythagoras himself belongs to mystical wisdom rather than to scientific scholarship.”

Like other holistic thinkers, Pythagoras embraced many facets of human consciousness in the same way modern physicists now enter realms once relegated to mystics, philosophers, and theologians. He spoke of cycles, patterns, and waves that existed long before the dawn of humanity, and of how our life paths reflect great and eternal laws, whose origins and purpose remain hidden within the mystery and mechanics of existence. In exploring the fundamentals of form and frequency, he discovered relationships between mind and matter where before no such order had appeared to exist, and he pointed to hidden numerical patterns that served as keys for unlocking secrets of the psyche.

Although the Life-Purpose System resembles some other numerology systems — in the sense that it works with numbers to derive meaningful information — you may find the material in this book especially clear, specific, and applicable to everyday life. The following section describes where I first learned the core elements of this system.

Inceptions of the Life-Purpose System

Despite many decades devoted to exploring the human psyche, insight traditions, and metaphysical models of reality, I remain an empiricist at heart. The scientific method — using controlled experiments to test theories — helped pull humanity out of the dark ages of superstition. I apply critical thinking and skepticism to magical thinking and untested notions. Still, the mind is like a parachute; it works best when open.

I hadn’t even considered the existence of a higher calling or life path until 1984, when I met a man — the warrior-priest I mentioned in the Acknowledgments — who became my mentor, colleague, and friend. He had read my first book, Way of the Peaceful Warrior, and we shared our experiences and compared perspectives, while he offered his own unique guidance.

Not long after our initial encounter, this warrior-priest offered me an hour-long life-purpose reading. He revealed in-depth information that clarified my past, present, and potential future, including details that rang true and proved amazingly accurate. It was as if his words removed a veil that had previously obscured my vision, and revealed to me the life I was born to live. I was astonished that he could have such insight into my life but had no idea how he gained access to such information. I was well versed in the cold-read techniques used by so-called psychics. But the warrior-priest claimed no psychic abilities, stating only that he’d been trained to know “where to look” for such information. He would say no more about it at that time.

In the months following that session, I began to learn life’s lessons with greater ease and openness, and to engage with life in a way consistent with a new sense of clarity, as if a hazy picture had come into sharper focus. Understanding what I was here to do, I set out to do it. My family’s financial situation improved as I refined an approach to living that I called the peaceful warrior’s way.

Meanwhile, I remained fascinated with the warrior-priest’s method. So when he announced an advanced training he was offering in Hawaii, where he would teach, among other things, the basic elements of the system that gave him such uncanny insight into people’s lives, I was the first to sign up. I could hardly believe that I might learn to do for other people what he’d done for me.

At the training, I sat with about twenty other participants as he began a series of lectures on this mysterious system. The first thing he revealed was an objective method of adding up the digits of anyone’s date of birth, and then deriving meanings that provided insight into that individual’s life.

I was initially disappointed by this revelation, the way we sometimes are when a magician shows how a wondrous illusion is accomplished with mirrors or sleight of hand. Besides, using people’s birth dates seemed like numerology, an occult art that had never attracted me. It made no sense that adding the digits of someone’s date of birth could yield accurate information about central qualities of that person’s life.

The warrior-priest explained that such methods had been passed down in various cultures over the centuries, but that they differed in their focus and degree of accuracy. He added, “Once you learn more about this approach, you can determine for yourself the validity of the method.” He then spent several evenings presenting basic information that pinpointed key issues for each life path, highlighting innate drives, challenges, and gifts, which for most people remain unseen or obscure.

I took careful notes from the warrior-priest’s lectures, outlining in about twenty typewritten pages the fundamental elements of the system. As soon as I returned home, I offered free life-purpose readings to family and friends, using the basic information from my notes. Within a few weeks I had internalized the information and no longer needed my notes. Eventually, after working with many hundreds of people and providing recorded readings (which I called Spiritual Law Alignments), my insight deepened and expanded.

Eight years later, I trained a small number of therapists, health professionals, and life coaches in the fundamentals of what I came to call the Life-Purpose System, and eventually I went on to write the original edition of The Life You Were Born to Live.

I can’t claim that the Life-Purpose System is based on a scientific theory, nor can I logically explain how people’s seemingly arbitrary date of birth on the modern calendar could possibly reveal valid, reliable information about their life path and purpose. I only know, with a confidence based on years of empirical testing, that the material in this book can bring people’s lives into focus.

The Life-Purpose System is distinctly different from the Tarot, I-Ching, or Runes — traditional oracles that offer symbolic images or poetic generalities that might apply to anyone, and on which individuals then project their own meaning and wisdom, applying it to their particular situation. Certainly someone could use this (or any) book in a similar way, flipping open to any page to find something meaningful. But the life-purpose material isn’t intended as an oracle, nor does it contain vague, generalized information.

Rather, it offers specific and distinct insight into the issues of each life path. The more you study your life path and the paths of others, the more you can appreciate this material’s power to enhance insight, self-knowledge, understanding, compassion, and transcendent humor.

Perhaps the validity of the Life-Purpose System stems from the holographic nature of the universe, in which each part mirrors and contains the whole, and in which the individual psyche fits within a larger pattern of order. By distilling complex variables into essential patterns, this system reveals the hidden forces behind our personality, furnishing a clear lens from which to view the bigger picture of our life. Trying to explain it in logical terms is like attempting to derive the square root of a sonnet. I can only feel a sense of awe and wonder at laws yet undiscovered.

A Guide to Finding Your Life Purpose

The revised and updated, 25th anniversary edition – Now Available in paperback, everywhere!

One of Dan’s most popular books due to its uncanny accuracy in revealing and clarifying each reader’s core talents, and hurdles. Explore the Life Purpose System, a modern method of insight based on ancient wisdom, that has helped hundreds of thousands of people find new meaning, purpose and direction in their lives.

• an objective method to determine the life path of anyone born between 1750 and the present — including single-digit birth numbers for certain individuals born after the year 2000
• the strengths and challenges of each life path in areas of health, money, and sexuality
• key spiritual laws to overcome the hurdles on each life path
• guidelines for finding a livelihood consisted with your drives and abilities
• the hidden dynamics of your relationships
• how to live in harmony with the nine-year cycles of your life
• original insights into what makes a “master number” and why
• new examples of well known people on each life path
• how the author learned this system and why he chose to share it