luc said:
Joe said:
Right, so in that sense when he says that if you have an aim that everything you do in daily life can be imbued with meaning, the things you do every day are the aim in themselves, in effect.
Yes, that is one part I think. But for your daily life activities to be imbued with meaning, they need some kind of direction - they need to be
aligned with an aim. That could be something like "living a life in service to others" or something more concrete and immediate derived from it.
Yep, that’s what’s important about the word 'can' in Joe’s quote. Things
can have meaning if they are aligned with and aim/aims. What that highlights is the importance of bringing things to our conscious attention, that everything can have importance and meaning if it is set within the framework of an aim. So yes, from ‘cleaning your room’, to helping others ‘clean their rooms’ and/or working to ‘clean house’ in the world in general in some small way each day.
What that brings up then are thoughts around our living mechanically, or living with conscious intention/attention, also Castaneda’s descriptions of ‘impeccability’ comes to mind here too. The same act can have meaning for us or no meaning depending on what we bring to it, what the aim is.
So what is the highest possible aim then, to be conscious in all things. And the path toward it, bring conscious attention to the small things, and keep working on them and adding as we go. I’d love to be conscious in all things! But as has been said already it’s a long way off, getting back to working on what’s in front of us to do, working on relationships, family, the wider social connections in small ways can all add up. The point being to have a larger aim but not to overly fixate on it, realising that it may take many many years of slow and steady progress so better get down to working on the smaller scale on what is right there and available to us.
But that process can be a wonderful thing, not a ‘I can’t possibly reach or do that so why bother’ or ‘why do I keep failing’ kind of experience. To work on and improve one small thing, brings new meaning to it, which can then carry over into bringing new meaning to the next thing, and so on. The whole area of looking at the relationships between the thoughts of aim, meaning, consciousness, fulfillment, etc is fascinating. Great food for thought.