Aim/Goal
Contents
Definition
Applications
Sermon on the Mount
To aim at the highest good. If you configure your life so that what you are genuinely doing is aiming at the highest possible good, than the things that you need to survive and to thrive on a day to day basis will deliver themselves to you. That’s a hypothesis and it’s not some simple hypothesis. Because what it basically says is, if you dare to do the most difficult thing that you can conceptualize your life will work out better than if you do anything else. Well, how you’re going to find out if that’s true? Well, it’s a Kierkagaardian leap of faith. There’s no way you’re going to find out whether that’s true unless you do it. So, no one can tell you either, because just because it works for someone else, I mean that’s interesting and all that, but it’s no proof that it will work for you. You have to be all-in in this game and so the idea is: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.” ( Matthew 6:33 ) That’s actually a fairly important caution when you’re talking about not having to pay attention to what you’re going to eat or what you’re going to wear. It’s like, what it’s essentially saying is those problems are trivial in comparison and the probability is that if you manifest yourself properly in the world that those things will come your way is extraordinarily high. And I believe that’s exactly right. I mean, I’ve watched people operate in the world and I would say there is no more effective way of operating in the world than to conceptualize the highest good that you can and than strive to attain it. There is no more practical pathway to the kind of success that you could have if you actually knew what success was. And so, that’s what this sermon is attempting to posit. It’s like in the story of Pinocchio, you know what happens in the beginning of the story of Pinocchio is that Geppetto wishes on a star, and so what Geppetto does is align himself with the metaphorical manifestation of the highest good he can conceptualize. And he makes a commitment let’s say; he aims at the star and for him the star is the possibility that he can take his creation, a puppet, whose strings are being pulled by unseen forces, and have it transformed into something that’s economist and real. Well, that’s a hell of an ambition. And we’re wise enough to put that in a children’s movie but too foolish to understand what it means. It’s just an interesting juxtaposition that we can both know it and not know it at the same time. You can go to the movie, you can watch it and it makes sense. But that doesn’t mean that you can go home and think, well, I know what that meant. People are complicated right? We exist at different levels and all the levels don’t communicate with one another. But the movie is a hypothesis and the hypothesis is, there’s no better pathway to self realization and the ennoblement of being than to posit the highest good that you can conceive of and commit yourself to it. And then you might also ask yourself, do you really have anything better to do? And when you don’t, well why would you do anything else? Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what that meant too. Because it’s another one of those lines that can easily be read as pro grasshopper and anti ant. The ant works and the grasshopper fiddles. The ant has a pretty good time in the winter and the grasshopper dies. It says that if you orient yourself properly and then pay attention to what you do every day, that works. And I actually think that that’s in accordance with what we’ve come to understand about human perception. Because what happens is that the world shifts itself around your aim. You’re a creature that has an aim. You have to have an aim in order to do something, you’re an aiming creature. You look at a point and you move towards it. It’s built right into you and so you have an aim. Let’s say your aim is the highest possible aim, that sets up the world around you. It organizes all of your perceptions. It organizes what you see and what you don’t see. It organizes your emotions and your motivations. So you organize yourself around that aim. And then what happens is, the day manifests itself as a set of challenges and problems. And if you solve them properly, then you stay on the pathway towards that aim. And you can concentrate on that day, and so that way you can have your cake and eat it too. Because you can point into the distance, the far distance. And you can live in the day. And that makes all the moments of the day supercharged with meaning. [1]
Lower The Damn Judge If It’s Too Much
You can pick an ideal that fulfills the role of ideal for you. You can say, “well, if things could be set up for me, the way I need them to be, and if I could be who I needed to be, what would that look like?” And you can figure that out for yourself. And then instantly you have a judge. And I also think that’s part of the reason people don’t do it, right? Why don’t people look up and move ahead? And the answer is, you start formulating an ideal. You formulate a judge. It’s pretty easy to feel intimidated in the face of your own ideal. That’s what happened to Cain versus Abel, for example. Then it’s really easy to destroy the ideal instead of try to pursue it because then you get rid of the judge. But it’s way better… lower the damn judge if it’s too much. If the current ambition is crushing you, then maybe you’re playing the tyrant to yourself and you should tap down your ambitions. Not get rid of them by any stretch of the imagination. But at least put them more reasonably within your grasp. You don’t have to leap from point 1 to point 50 in one leap, right? You can do it incrementally. But I really like this idea. I think it’s a profound idea that the process of recapitulating yourself continually is also the process of… it’s a phoenix like process right? You’re shedding all those elements of you that are no longer worthy of the pursuits that you’re valuing. And then I would say the idea here is that as you do that, you shape yourself ever more precisely into something that can withstand the tragedy of life. And that can act as a beacon to the world. That’s the right way of thinking about it. Maybe first to your friends and then to your family. It’s like it’s a hell of a fine ambition. And there is no reason that it can’t happen. Everyone of you knows people who are really bloody useful in a crisis and people that you admire, right? Those are all… you can think of all those people that you admire as partial incarnations of the archetypal Messiah. That’s exactly right. And the more that that manifest itself in any given person, then the more generally useful and admirable that person is in a multitude of situations. And we don’t know the limit to that but people can be unbelievably good for things. It´s really something to behold. [2]
Develop a Noble Vision
“Don’t overestimate yourself now, but *don’t underestimate who you could be. start now, develop a noble vision of who you could be, develop discipline, familiarize yourself with the great works, learn to read,write, speak, to think you will be deadly.”[Citation Needed]
Interpretations
You see what you aim at. What you aim at is what manifests for you in the world.
The higher the goal, the greater the kick. But don’t set the goal so high that you are always failing.
Specify your goal and a transformation process which will get you there. If you persist with very small improvements, you will eventually win.
You must have direction, because direction causes positive emotion. You must have a goal, a direction, value structures
See Also
References
