There is an irony that we all must face which is that we can’t get what we want unless we know what it is. This seems obvious until we reflect on the amount of work we have done in the service of outcomes that we don’t really want. If you’ve ever had the experience of working really hard for something only to be left with an empty feeling when you get it than you would know what I’m talking about. In actual fact, you never really wanted what you were working for.
Given the risk involved in hard work, it makes sense to be certain about what you want before putting in all that effort. Too often, the cause of our suffering is a lack of understanding about our spiritual needs rather than an inability to meet them. Therefore, our most urgent priority is to accurately define our goals in a way that we are certain that we are not wrong about them.
One way to do this is to make them more general. In its most general form, we can define a goal that everyone can agree with: everyone wants to feel satisfied. It feels good to be happy with the way things are without wanting to change them to make them better. This is a hallmark of a peaceful mind, a mind that is content and comfortable. This kind of a mind is also the kind of mind that is flexible and can easily give rise to creative and effective solutions. Therefore, when such a mind is developed our secondary or lower order problems can therefore also be defeated.
It may seem as though satisfaction is too general a goal to be useful but a closer inspection reveals something more interesting. If our goal is to be satisfied, that necessarily excludes many of the worldly pursuits that occupy our thoughts most of the time. We would then need to assess our actions on a different metric and ask ourselves, does the action that I’m engaged in help me to achieve my goal of satisfaction? If the answer is no or we are unsure, we should demote that action on the scale of our priority list. If the answer is yes then the action should be promoted on our priority list. That is the reason that meditation practice should be our top priority. If we have trained ourselves in meditation, we will begin to have a more peaceful abiding which is most conducive to overcoming the challenges of life.