The Highest Goal

The Secret That Sustains You in Every Moment

Michael Ray

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781626564626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Développement personnel
• Subtopic: Amélioration personnelle

For over 25 years, Michael Ray taught the celebrated Personal Creativity in Business course, mainly at Stanford University but also in non-academic settings. Over the years, Ray began to realize that the course was having a more profound impact on graduates than he'd ever intended. It went way beyond helping them in their careers. People who'd been through the course seemed to blossom-to have access to some secret source of energy and inspiration. They found new ways to contribute to their organizations. They thrived on diversity, fought gracefully, treated others with compassion, acceptance, appreciation, and respect. As one graduate put it, "This is transformation that works and lasts." What was going on? Ray came to realize that his creativity course was helping people discover what he calls their "highest goal." Your highest goal is what gives real meaning to your life-it is what speaks to the very core of your being. It's what makes you feel connected to something higher than yourself, whatever you call it-God, Truth, Spirit, Being. It's what truly motivates and sustains you, although you may not be able to put it into words, or even be consciously aware of it. It has nothing to do with worldly success or achievement, but Ray found that all of the successful people who had been through his course had a sustained connection to it. In fact, it was what they ultimately attributed their success to. In The Highest Goal, Michael Ray shares what he learned through decades of teaching his creativity course to help you discover, and live by, your highest goal. Throughout the book, Ray offers exercises, stories, and reflections that will help you get in touch with your highest goal, follow a path in tune with it, and let it inform every aspect of your life. Your highest goal is a source of power and wisdom that can vastly improve not only your own life, but the lives of everyone around you. Ray shows us how to open this inner font of creativity, compassion, and courage.

1
Go Beyond Passion and Success

ALMOST WITHOUT FAIL, when I ask people to tell me their highest goal, they give me what a company would call a purpose, a part of its organizational vision. People are often magnanimous, saying they exist to improve the lot of others, to leave the world a better place or simply to serve. Sometimes they refer to their own personal development. One person, for example, told me her highest goal was to adapt.

If I keep asking the question in different ways—“That’s good, but what goal do you have that supports you in living out that purpose?” or “What allowed you to get past that difficult time that you had last year?”—most people eventually begin to get at their highest goal.

Few people say their highest goal is something material—the very nature of the question goes deeper than a desire to win the lottery or own a beach house. Still, very few people talk about the highest goal that probably has been with them from the beginning of their life and that has been supporting them in everything they do. I suspect that is because we are conditioned to talk about our highest goal in terms of our potential contribution, rather than about the force that helps us to make that contribution.

Your Early Experience of the Highest Goal

Researchers tell us that all of us have a defining experience of the highest goal early in our lives, usually around the time of puberty. We each have an experience that we are great, that we have a connection with everything, that we have potential. That is the moment of exultation captured by Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

This experience, if we accept it and remember it, can catapult us beyond the socialization and comparisons that deter us from living the purpose of our lives. This experience, this earliest awareness of the highest goal, can be the starting point for living with a conscious connection to it.

A friend of mine shared an experience that this illustrates: When she was about eleven, her family was on a tour of Italy. One day they were visiting the St. Paul’s Outside the Walls Church in Rome. She was a bored kid, who, in her opinion, had been through too many churches on the trip. But as she went into a side chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene, she experienced energy and a feeling of connection that she remembers to this day. Curiously, she didn’t tell anyone about this until later in her life when she happened to be talking to a scholar of Mary. That conversation opened her to a consciousness that was her highest goal and that she could see had been part of her life since that day in Rome.

I urge you now to remember and contemplate a time when you experienced the nature of your highest goal. You have had such an experience, maybe more than once. Do you remember it? Push yourself a little here, because it is worth it. Recall a time, probably in your early life, when you had an epiphany about your own potential, about who you really are in a powerfully positive sense, about your connection to all beings and all nature.

Perhaps I’m using words that don’t quite fit for you. Remember I’m talking about the experience of the highest goal itself, which is personal and diverse. Some people get a sense of themselves and this connection when they see something in nature, such as mountains or an ocean, for the first time. Sometimes they have this deep feeling about who they really are in a religious setting, in a sports competition, as the result of a powerful dream, or after great exertion. But often it’s simply a gift that is given to us early in our lives. It just happens when we least expect it.

Once you start thinking about it, you may be able to think of several times when you have had such an experience. Concentrate on the earliest, most powerful one you can remember. Look beyond the nature of your experience to focus on what it told you about the highest goal. Please take some time to reflect on it, jot some notes about it and/or talk to someone about it. If you can resurrect this memory and nurture it in terms of your own highest goal, you have something extremely valuable for the journey we are taking in this book.

I remember walking barefoot along a gravel road in Wisconsin. I was ten years old. It was a beautiful summer day, and I was walking toward a beach on a lake. I recall this sensation of connection with everything. I experienced the whole—from the bright sun, vast blue sky and tall trees to the pebbles under my feet and the grasshoppers leaping up as I walked forward—as being part of me. I felt huge. I knew that I was put on earth to do something great. I also felt a sense of sadness because this life would have to end sometime. I began to get a sense of change and the flow of great forces that I was a part of. All this happened in moments, but the experience was powerful and touched every part of my being.

Of course, I put aside that experience as society kept telling me what to do and who I was. Just like my friend who felt the highest goal as a connection to Mary Magdalene, I didn’t talk to anybody about what had happened. But I remember it now.

Most people seem to forget the memory of their early connection to the highest goal, but the memory is still there. You only need to concentrate to bring it up. A great many people have told me about recapturing this memory: One fellow remembered his father telling the young boy forcefully that he was great. A woman recalled helping with the birth of a calf on her aunt’s farm, and afterward she got a sense of the meaning of her life. Still another slipped out of her home early in the morning when she was two and a half years old. She walked into an Episcopal Church down the block, and she discovered, as she put it, “the existence of grace.”

After a seminar in which I urged people to remember their childhood moments, a woman came up to tell me she remembered a time walking in the mountains when she was an adolescent. She suddenly felt the connection and energy I am talking about. In her case, it gave her a sense of the control she had in a difficult family situation. She said that unlike her older sister, who was tormented endlessly by their parents and ended up embittered by her childhood, she was able to make choices that kept her free. To this day, she goes to the mountains for renewal and always remembers the power she has. It has helped her deal with stress and problems with relationships, as well as take advantage of opportunities that present themselves.

What happened to you? Do you remember an experience of connection? If so, don’t forget it now.

Obstacles to Grace I: Sub-Optimizing

Most people forget their youthful experience of greatness and purpose or at least put it aside somewhere deep in their memory. It happens to all of us: We sub-optimize.

By sub-optimizing I mean that we may have an experience of the highest goal in our lives, but we quickly pull back to the lesser goals that society calls success. We often get frozen in our accomplishments, which may be great, but not the highest or optimal that we can attain. In other words, we settle; we sub-optimize.

In every moment we have a choice: Will we act from our highest goal or recede to something less? For instance, sometimes in meetings I speak my truth no matter what the consequences for me. On other occasions I pull back to a comfortable silence and miss chances to make a real contribution. When the latter occurs, I always feel sad, but I try to learn from it.

Sometimes we keep doing the same thing that brought us success in society’s terms. When this happens early in a career, I call it the tragedy of early success. Some people—athletes, entertainers, entrepreneurs, artists, writers, and scientists, for example—have tremendous success early in their careers. The media lionize them, and these initially successful people keep trying to do the same thing over again. But they can never get beyond that early success. They develop no further and sub-optimize their lives. It is something that can happen to all of us.

Obstacles to Grace II:
The Cruel Grip of Socialization and Comparison

Of course, the most powerful obstacles to living in resonance with the highest goal come from the media, our schools, our parents and friends—our society. All of them tell us to chase a successful life that will be admired by others.

That influence invades our dreams and our deepest thoughts. It holds us with a cruel grip. We buy into the game that society convinces us we should be playing, even if it draws us away from who we are at core. We miss some of our greatest moments. We rationalize them away. We can’t put them together into a consistent way of living our lives because we allow ourselves to be distracted by the picture of success and the good life that these forces of society offer us.

We constantly compare ourselves with others. And when we do this, we lose control of our lives because we are no longer living from our core. We are living according to someone else’s idea of what life should be or what we should be doing. We lose the power that comes from doing what is right for us.

Beyond Passion and Success

Over and over my students tell me that they yearn to have passion in their work, but they just don’t know how to find it. This must be true for many people, because books on finding your purpose and bringing it out into the world seem to proliferate in bookstores everywhere. Still, people complain they haven’t been able to find their passion the way others have.

I trace the difficulty and anguish to the human propensity to make comparisons. Instead of diving into who they are and what that means for their work, people look to those who seem to be successful and seem to have passion in their lives. Instead of discovering how they resonate with the highest goal and applying that to their life, they put themselves down and sink into frustration when their life isn’t the way others’ lives seem to be.

Once I got so tired of hearing this wail about lack of passion that I told my class that it was overrated. I thought I would give them some peace because they wouldn’t have to keep worrying about other people who had the passion that they didn’t. They could just concentrate on themselves and what was really happening in their lives. They could begin to build on their own experiences.

But my “magnanimous” gesture didn’t seem to help. They filled their papers and presentations with diatribes on the importance of passion. They told me in many ways that I had let them down. Like all of us, these students desperately wanted something in their lives, but they didn’t know how to get it.

The students’ angst about passion represents something we all feel, particularly when we act in accordance with the way we have been socialized to act rather than from what is right for us. We get our dream job and then find out it just doesn’t give us fulfillment. We take a class or enter a course of study that we think is sure to give us what we need to be a success and find that it has just brought us new questions about what we want to do with our life. We don’t get as much pleasure doing the things that we have staked our lives on. We get excited about something for a while, but then it becomes humdrum and doesn’t give us sufficient reason to get out of bed. We feel inferior when we see other people who seem to have such energy for life, while we wake up too many mornings without any zest. Or, even worse, we start thinking that life has passed us by, that it is meaningless, and that we’ll never make the contribution or have the life we imagined when we were younger.

Taking Your Own Path

The alternative is so close at hand: If we focus on our highest goal, our passion comes to us effortlessly. We know at some deep level that we have a distinctive contribution to make. But, as Carl Jung said, we make the mistake of going outside to find direction:

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks within, awakens.¹

The highest goal is part of the human quest. Eastern traditions call life purpose “dharma,” or right livelihood. India’s The Bhagavad-Gita, for example, focuses almost entirely on dharma and the search for it. In it Lord Krishna says to his pupil Arjuna, “Better one’s own dharma, however imperfect, than the dharma of another perfectly performed.”

In this society we almost never follow Krishna’s advice. Too often, our parents, teachers and the media train us to define happiness in terms of external rewards.

We take one of the two paths in life shown in the figure below. Doing someone else’s dharma well starts when you do what society says to do, even though it is not something you like. Over time, you get experience with it and get good at it. So you get opportunities to do more of this work. You get promoted. You become the boss, the partner or a top executive. Everyone honors you and wants you to do more of something that isn’t right for you. And you experience your life getting more and more meaningless and unsatisfying.

The path of doing your own dharma starts with doing what you love and what is meaningful to you. In time you gain both experience and skill. You get very good at it. And, because of that, you get more opportunity to do the kind of work that represents who you really are. Even though you might get the trappings of success—money, fame, promotions, and awards—the work itself remains its own reward. Your life keeps getting more and more fulfilling. And your satisfaction gives blessings to your friends, family, community and the world.

TWO ALTERNATIVE LIFE PATHS

Do what you don’t like, but should	Do what you love and find meaningful
Get experience doing this	Get experience doing what you love
Become great at doing what you dislike	Become extra good at you doing what you love
Gain opportunity to do more	Gain more opportunity to do what you love.
Live life empty of meaning	Live life full of purpose and meaning

Mahatma Gandhi taught that only service done with joy can have meaning. Here, I’m calling this joy a resonance with the highest goal. If you have that, your service will have meaning beyond what you can imagine. Specifically, Gandhi said

Service can have no meaning, unless one takes pleasure in it …

Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served.

But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service that is rendered in the spirit of joy.²

Remembering Your Own Highest Goal

Sometimes this idea of the two possible paths in life upsets people. Students who have already accepted jobs that they know are not fulfilling wonder if they have made an unalterable error. People who are already working at something that doesn’t give them joy and meaning can wonder if it is too late to do anything about it. Yet even when they want to go in a new direction, they don’t know their highest goal, so they feel lost.

All of this confusion comes from not holding onto your own highest goal. We all glimpse it from time to time, but only if we are attentive to this guiding star when it appears can we steer by it. I know this from my own experience.

When I was twenty, I wasn’t used to doing much on my own. I had done well as a student. But I was treated by my family...