On her Awakened Dreamer blog, Lori Ann Lothian recently posted an article about goal-setting called The 4 Types of Goal-Setters Pre and Post Awakening: Which One Are You?
“Recently someone posted on an enlightenment FB group, the question, “Do you have goals?” If this were any place else, the query would have seemed strange and the answer would be “Of course I have goals.”
What happened next were dozens of comments along the lines of “No goals here. No one here to set goals.” That is like asking, do you breathe? And people say, “No breathing here, no one to breathe.””
She goes on to describe 4 broad categories of approach to this. I thought it a useful explore to share. As I’ve noted here before, some of this attitude of “no one here” is a phase (Lori mentions) but also a teaching for monks. For someone in the world, it’s not a helpful phase to hold on to nor to try and culture. And yet it’s become rather widespread as a ‘supposed to’. Some teachers even encourage an unhealthy disassociative state. Similarly, culturing aversion moves us more into suffering rather than healing. As better teachers have emphasized, this is about integration of mind, body and consciousness, not their disconnection. It’s about connecting at a much deeper level, not disconnecting.
As I note in comments, it’s also useful to recognize that there’s lots of grey area here. Stepping into the flow is a learning process with layers to unfold. So it’s not always a tidy black and white process. But it is a remarkable journey to step out of struggle and difficulty and find everything is just fine.
Davidya