The Goal and the Method

 

I believe most of us have certain major goals in life that dominate our spiritual operating system and become our life priorities. Goals such as doing good for humanity, loving as much as possible, affording independence to our children,  accumulating all kind of spiritual or tangible wealth, being beautiful, and on and on.  Once our fundamental goals have been established,  I am not sure that they change much over the course of our life. We then develop methods, disciplines that help us progress towards retrieving our goals.

So, step one, we set the goal, and step two, we develop and implement an appropriate method. I am concerned that, as time goes by, the method tends to precede the goal. We spend our lives living, breathing, executing on our method, and the dominant goals fade out of our consciousness into unconscious autopilot. The method essentially takes over. We become “a method”,  acting processes nearly automatically with numerous triggers deciding our acts. It may well be that, as our environment evolves, our method may not be optimal to reach our goals, and may even be counterproductive, taking us further and further away from our goals. For example, in protecting our children to make sure they become independent, we may in fact turn them into dependency from us. Trying to be generous to humanity, we lose closeness to our family, etc.

 

We may be well served to examine our method on a regular basis before it takes possession of us, at the detriment of our goals. A good goal might well be to not have a systematic method. In any case, we need to reassess our methods on a regular basis.