The Highest Goal: The Secret That Sustains You in Every Moment

When you experience flow and act on your inner resources, naturally, without thinking, you have achieved the highest level of this live-with. If this happens even once during your practice, don’t forget it. You can bring the sense of this experience into other situations. That will help you break the illusion that you are small and inadequate. As y

So take a few minutes right now to think about, contemplate and even relive a situation in which you experienced resonance with the highest goal. Concentrate on one of these situations, whether it happened recently or a long time ago.

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks within, awakens.

If you live for the highest goal, you are living a life of the spirit—whether or not you consider yourself to be on a spiritual path. If you consciously notice the larger aspects of life, always consider whether what you are doing coincides with these aspects, never forget the times when you were enlivened by the power of the highest goal, use thos

None of this is possible unless you have integrity and take action on the basis of what you know to be true. And that is hard precisely because of the Voice of Judgment, or the VOJ—that internal critic that promotes the fears—stopping you from seeing the possibilities in your life.

In a similar spirit, if you can stay open to all the approaches of this book and try them with openness and diligence, you are bound to find your own idiosyncratic, but ultimately effective path to the highest goal.

When you experience a fear, like the ones on your list, what do you do about it? The great psychoanalytical theorist Karen Horney identified three ways people deal with fear: move away from it, fight it or move toward it. Most people move away from their fears—an act of denial or avoidance psychoanalysts call “repression.” And the consequences of s

Try living with the admonition “Do Only What You Love, Love Everything You Do” for at least a week.

the highest or optimal that we can attain. In other words, we settle; we sub-optimize.