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The dynamic goal and your happiness

Am I raising my standards too high by saying you should make it your life purpose to pick up the phone? Or are you thinking that it is stressful to make everything you do into your life purpose?

On the contrary - it is the key to a stress-free life. But let’s tackle the positive side first.

If you are “doing” a dynamic goal, your happiness can never end, for you only stop doing when you want to - and why would you want to, unless you’ve found something even better?

Now: What about unhappiness? Making everything you are doing into your life purpose removes all inner resistance to it. That way you can never hate doing anything again. Isn’t that wonderful?

Back to a more everyday example. A couple days ago, I had agreed to a long and tedious favour for my aunt, typing up some marketing material for her company. Other deadlines were rushing closer, and I was getting stressed and frustrated.

It was building to an unbearable breaking point when I suddenly remembered to see my primary life purpose as typing her marketing material. My secondary life purpose was to help her company achieve success.

Why? Not because she asked me to; not because I was trying to be a good nephew; but simply because that was what I was doing then. It was empowering – the material came out as good as I could make it - and most importantly, I had no inner resistance to it, and it could not make me unhappy. I have covered this before, in this article How to be a rock in a chaotic world.

The misunderstanding of Aristotle

Before we continue, let me return quickly to Aristotle’s works.

I believe a flawed interpretation of his philosophy is the result of much anguish in our society. If you simply look at his works without going in-depth, you will think that unless you have health, wealth, and a perfect body while living the life of your dreams, you are a miserable failure.

His greatest statement is that happiness lies in the doing. Health and wealth, simply allow someone to “do” better and capitalise on opportunity to do so better. This is common sense. But many people make mistaken it to mean that you NEED all those things. You don’t. If your love is to fly, you’ll just as happy flying in a rickety crop duster as you would be in the latest jet fighter.

You are always living your life purpose

Back to the life purpose. Why did I mention that misunderstanding? It causes far deeper pain and misery in the world than my simple example of a favour I didn’t want to do.

I was recently watching a video of Byron Katie working to counsel a depressed woman. The subject’s pain was obvious in her features even though she did her best to hold them in.

She had been sick and grossly overweight, stuck in her room for the past few years. As a result, she felt the same way many of us do - that life has passed her by, and that she had wasted precious years of her youth. She also felt that she was so fat that she couldn’t attract a mate, and would probably die lonely.

Isn’t she a victim of a wrong interpretation of Aristotle, who has possibly influenced most of our current society? Further, her pain comes from her static goal, an image of herself as she should be. Do you recognise any of this pain in yourself?

When she was sitting alone at home with a static goal, she saw herself as a bedridden, hideous hag, dying a slow death, floating further and further away from what she wanted.

It would have been different with dynamic goals. When she was lying in bed, too sick to do anything but watch television, her primary goal was to lie in bed and watch television. Her secondary purpose was to find a mate, and lying in bed as she recovered was the only thing she could do to fulfil that.

With that mindset, she could enjoy the process and not resist it or make it wrong. There is no unhappiness in the search for a lover. There is no unhappiness is being alone, obese, or in bed, except when her thoughts make it wrong. Happiness, as modern medicine is starting to recognise, is one of the best fixes for ill health, and her acceptance would have sped her recovery.

Thinking any other way is the seed of suffering. Resisting what she had to do would be fighting Life, fighting Reality, fighting what is. And you cannot win against life. We have discussed this before, but it is helpful to revisit the concepts with a more painful example.

Many people also think that non-resistance means putting up with whatever is happening to you forever - they would have thought non-resistance means that she should lie in bed for the rest of her life. I hope this example would explain otherwise.

One more example to drill it in and clear up any possible misunderstanding (forgive me if I err on the side of caution). Someone is bound to ask - if a tribe of cannibals is torturing you, is that your life purpose? No - being tortured is what is happening to you, which is very different from what you are doing. Your secondary purpose is to write or fly or whatever, your primary purpose in this moment, to fulfil that, is to get the hell out!

Can you grasp what I am trying to say? It’s the same as the example of my aunt, just on a deeper level. If you can understand it, isn’t it the end of sadness?

For the metaphysically minded (others can ignore the next two paragraphs), another reason she was in such deep pain was her ego. Again, this was covered in detail in the ego post. In fact, we’ve actually been talking about the ego all along - for the ego goes away when you are in the mode of true doing.

Her ego caused her to compare herself and the other women she sees - If everyone around her was fat and alone, would she be suffering so? She wasn’t lacking anything, only her ego told her she was lacking something. Her ego was telling her that she needed to be slim and married to be happy. In the end, Byron Katie helped the poor woman see past the ego. I think, and hope, she has found some genuine peace.

Another error people make (unless they’ve read Part 3) is the idea that their highest good is external. Often times the highest good is internal - a sense of happiness, a sense of peace. Why do you want to be in love? So you can feel happy.

If your highest good is an internal state, you can achieve it by removing the ego as covered in the ego post. In that state, all the external things, lower on the pyramid, would be mere “icing on the cake”.

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