The DK Foundation

The Ten Commandments of Everyday Living: 2  

Have your intention always before you - set goals for the day and at regular intervals during the day realign yourselves with them and confirm intention.

By setting and accomplishing goals, the personality prepares itself to act as an agent of spiritual will and to be a creative force in the world of manifestation. Accomplishing goals is not a happy accident; it is the product of discipline and application.  At first, any goal or target will do in order to train the mind, emotions and the physical vehicle to co-operate with each other to secure its accomplishment. The goals set and rewarded by society are adequate for this.

There comes a stage in development, however, when the quality of the goals themselves does matter. Much rebellion and alienation occurs at this stage when the emergence of spiritual awareness creates a different set of values and priorities. An individual, who is beginning to respond to the alternatives, no longer has the same interest or belief in the goals that are supported by conditioning, and may resent and resist making time and energy available for them.

As a rule, rebellion is not handled intelligently. It is viewed as a punishable offence and the signs are not read for the insights that they could provide. This is as true when we condemn ourselves for what we are not achieving as when chastisement comes from an external source.

As KH says in his answer to GH, published this month, ‘spirit has ever challenged form to yield up the highest of which it is capable’. By means of the goals set by our mental faculties, we invite into our personality life the challenge of spirit.

Conditioning can keep a person in thrall to values that will never make the best of the opportunity that is a lifetime. Much of the client work undertaken by DKF involves encouraging people to find out what is their true relationship to the goals to which they say they are committed. Often those goals are lacking in authenticity and, from the point of view of an individual’s development, without value.

Those who have committed to spirituality are as prone to adopting inauthentic goals as those who have not. A basic lack of understanding of the process of spirituality itself and a want of perspective concerning the true level of development can, and often does, result in wholly unsuitable goals.

What are suitable goals for spiritually aware people? Suitable goals are those which do justice to the developmental requirement of a lifetime. The informing life of the personality, the solar angel, constructs the plan for an incarnation around an intention to take new ground for consciousness and, at the same time, balance out tendencies within consciousness. This intention and the nature of the new ground to be taken are discernable through the natal chart. But we need not make ourselves reliant upon astrology readings: we can learn to hear and understand the quiet voice of the soul speaking through the events and experiences of our lives. In practice, however, the promptings of the soul are so quickly drowned out by the voice of conditioning, which makes us fear and condemn any unforeseen and unwelcome development and makes us cling to the comfort of conforming to socially accepted goals.

Even if we take the astrological route, it does not mean to say that every single decision has to be checked out against a chart. There will be many routes to the same place. We will have intelligent choices to make.  At the point of making a decision we have to develop the habit of asking ourselves whether the decision is in line with intention and whether it will take us further in our rightful direction. This is as important in small things as it is in large ones, because longer term goals are either served or frustrated by the quality of our immediate goals. If we do not know where we are taking our lives, what do we use as our terms of reference?  Do we sign up for conventional goals or will we try and co-operate with the intention built into our lives? What do we decide if the two are incompatible?  The choices that we make will determine how fast we move along the path of evolution.

To become a better person is not suitable as a goal because it is imprecise but, hopefully, such an aspiration will be realised as the result of achieving more specific goals that are compatible with the design of our lives.

Choosing goals is one aspect of intentional living. The other is disciplining self to perform in line with intention. Most likely, we will  try to avoid the stages in training that we find boring or taxing, but basic disciplines like doing housework, keeping on top of correspondence, keeping temper and irritability under control and demonstrating awareness of others are essential pre-requisites. Any no-go area is a fatal flaw in the structure which, at any time, may bring down the rest. Blag and bluster about how we don’t care / don’t see domestic disorder and enjoy ‘creative chaos’ is simply self-delusion. The outer reflects the inner and a person who lives amongst chaos is in a state of inner chaos and that is a source of suffering even if it has not yet been recognised. Arrogance and unkindness towards others is never justified and is utterly unacceptable when directed by those with spiritual aspirations towards those with none.

Not liking something is not the same as not seeing the value of it. The person who would be effective has to be able to make this distinction and to enable his sense of what matters to override his dislike. In its own way, this is a form of liberation which no-one who has ever lived in chaos will ever underestimate. Rebellion brought about by not liking something is petulance; rebellion brought about by genuinely not seeing the value of something is in a different league. Can you make the distinction between the two in the context of your own life?

There are three golden rules connected with effective goal setting:

1.       Do not even start trying to commit to goals to change your life until have you imposed physical order upon your domestic and working environment and until, at the very least, you subscribe to the concept of respect for others. Without these basics in place you will simply waste your time and do damage to your faith in your ability to change your life.

2.       Do not commit to something in which you do not believe. You may be in situations – many of them - in which you consider that you have to comply. This simply means that the things to which you can commit remain to be found.  Compliance is no substitute for commitment.

3.       Do not commit to anything about which you are uncertain. Ambivalence is as big a saboteur of effort as outright doubt and yet more subtle in its working. Take more time and explore the matter some more before committing, so that you are not battling with a divided mind in addition to an intransigent emotional and physical self.

The emotional and physical aspects of self each has their own ability to react to anything imposed from the mental level and will do so, usually without enthusiasm, once the novelty has worn off.  Know the inevitability of this and be prepared for it by being able to remind yourself why you have decided to commit to this particular goal. If we cannot remember or we are ambivalent about its value then we will almost certainly give up.

And maybe we all have to have the experience of giving up on certain goals in order to know how very important they are to us. They keep our lives purposeful. Humans who have moved beyond the subsistence stage of existence and who are without purpose are skittering around the void. Purposelessness is a source of profound suffering as human consciousness becomes more responsive to the mental level. Yet we Westerners live in a world where our societies and organised religions are less and less able to give self-conscious individuals the goals in which they can believe. This being the case, we have to set them for ourselves and find from within ourselves the motivation to keep going. To live in accordance with intention is one of the greatest gifts that we can give to ourselves. It is a gift from spirit.

To have our own goals does not mean we cannot be flexible or responsive to others and no spiritually aware person can afford to set goals that are separatist in intention, but to have a clear intention enables us to know what we can and cannot compromise/sacrifice, and how to set boundaries without which we will turn around on the spot like a boat with a broken rudder. In this position are the countless numbers of people who are trying to ‘become better’ and who, having identified egotism as the problem, are unsure how to think in any positive way either about themselves or about being assertive. In consequence, their lives are simply a series of reactions to external demands made by other people, taken on indiscriminately and often involving them in contradictory stances. People in this position are almost always confused, disappointed and deeply angry.

We have no business throwing upon others the responsibility of the direction of our lives. When we meet with this statement mostly we will agree readily with it, but we will often not recognise what we are doing in everyday life when we allow others to commandeer our time and energy and pull us into things in which we do not believe or in which we should not be involved. There will always be distractions to erode intention and they will not always appear as the Seven Deadly Sins. Beware of those that pluck at your sleeve and ask you to become involved where your help is not really required.

A problem shared, a problem halved chirps the proverb.  Discernment is aware that a problem shared around can be a drama in the making. Be alert to the sentimentality which afflicts the spiritually minded and makes us see things as other than they are.

Suzanne Rough