How the Highest Goal Pursues You

What about you? Have you remembered an instance in your life that defined the highest goal for you? How would you characterize the highest goal for yourself right now?

Even if you can’t remember such an experience, take comfort in knowing that this highest goal pursues you. In fact, when you experience discomfort and aimlessness in your life, you are resisting the pull to live for the highest goal. But if you keep at it and don’t get distracted, the difficulty will draw the highest goal into your life.

I’ve seen that movement from difficulty to insight and new movement over and over again with the famous and not-so-famous people I have worked with. The highest goal will give direction, especially when times are tough. I’m not talking about anything mystical here. I’m talking about a natural process that occurs if you are forced to draw upon your inner resources. Something clicks in. You draw upon resources that you didn’t know you had. You have experiences that remind you of your highest goal. And, for a period of time, you are in resonance with it.

I know because I’ve experienced this cycle myself. I went through a time when my career and business were going well, but personally I was lost. Even though I had experienced a resonance with the highest goal, I slid into feeling very low and close to depression.

After a great deal of work on myself, pushed on me by this difficult time, I experienced an awakening, a new sense of the highest goal. It happened quite unexpectedly.

I attended a meditation-intensive day at an ashram to support a friend. As I sat in meditation in what was for me an unfamiliar environment, I suddenly felt and saw a bolt of lightning shoot up from the base of my spine out the top of my head. It forced me to recognize something great within me. And that recognition led to an experience of joy unlike anything I had ever had before. I was whole. I was full of love. The problems I had been having and the low opinion I had of myself seemed miniscule in relation to this awareness of my own divinity. I had been taking courses that were enormously useful in getting me to this point, but now I was shifting beyond anything these courses could have hoped to give me.

For some reason, perhaps my sense of masculinity at the time, I tried to stop crying for joy and my throat hurt with the effort. But I couldn’t stop it, and tears of joy flowed without restraint. Then my legs started to vibrate and shake. Their shaking caused me to bounce on the floor in an almost involuntary way. Then I became still and went into a black void that seemed to be all of existence. I sat there for a long time in that state until the end of the meditation session.

I see now that everything that has evolved in my life in the last twenty-seven years since that moment of awakening came from that insight into the highest goal. I understood in that instant that there is a reason and foundation for everything that happens. Because of that experience I was able to see the other clues to my connection to the highest goal that I’ve mentioned.

And I understand now that I really don’t do anything. I just stay tuned to that connection with what is transcendent in the world. If I keep at it, exactly what is supposed to happen takes place.

Just as a composer or artist gets an insight and then spends years implementing that insight, I have been working through the result of that awakening experience in my life. I have been discovering ways that all of us can recognize the awakenings in our lives and apply them to the business of living.