Noddy's Trove

Aim at the Highest Good, Take Incremental Steps (JBP)

July 24, 2021•1,391 words

I said at the beginning of the lecture series that the Bible is a hyperlinked text, and everything refers to everything else. There’s utility in reading it in linear order, but it’s not a linear document. There’s an infinite number of pathways that you can use to walk through it. All of the document expands upon and refers to all of the rest of the document. And so I’m going to switch to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think is probably the key document in the New Testament.

I think it’s the closest thing we have to a fully articulated description of what it would mean to walk with God, so that you’re in the ark when the flood comes. It’s the most fully articulated realization of that idea that leaps out of the metaphorical. If I say, well, you should conduct yourself like Noah, walk with God, and build an ark, obviously those are poetic and metaphorical suggestions. It’s not that easy to bring them into practice. There’s a big distance between you and the archetype. It isn’t obvious how to manifest it in your own life. What has to happen is the archetype has to be differentiated and articulated so that it becomes sufficiently practical and personal, so that you can actually implement it.

I’m going to take apart some of the Sermon on the Mount. It starts in Matthew 5, and I’m not going to talk about Matthew 5. I’m going to talk about the end of Matthew 6 and most of Matthew 7.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow;
they toil not, neither do they spin.
And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon
in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field,
which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven,
shall he not much more clothe you,
O ye of little faith?
Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat?
or, What shall we drink?
or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

Those are famous lines, and that’s sort of Christ the hippy. It’s like, hey, let it all hang out—that’s an old phrase. Do your thing, and everything will come to you. These lines have been interpreted in that manner many times. But that’s seriously not the proper interpretation, because there’s a kicker with this injunction. The kicker is this:

... for your heavenly Father knoweth that
ye have need of all these things.
But seek ye first the kingdom of God,
and his righteousness;
and all these things shall be added unto you.

That’s a lot different than the hippy thing, right? There’s a very, very, very interesting idea, here. It’s certainly one of the most profound ideas that I’ve ever encountered. The idea is that, if you configure your life so that what you are genuinely doing is aiming at the highest possibly good, then the things that you need to survive and thrive on a day-to-day basis will deliver themselves to you. That’s a hypothesis, and it’s not some simple hypothesis. What it basically says is, if you dare to do the most difficult thing that you can conceptualize, your life will work out better than it will if you do anything else. Well, how are you going to find out if that’s true?

It’s a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. There’s no way you’re going to find out whether or not that’s true unless you do it. No one can tell you, either: working for someone else is no proof that it will work for you. You have to be all-in in this game. The idea is, "seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness." It’s like, that’s actually a fairly important caution when you’re talking about not having to pay attention to what you’re going to eat or what you’re going to wear. What it’s essentially saying is that those problems are trivial in comparison.

The probability—if you manifest yourself properly in the world—that those things will come your way is extraordinarily high. I believe that’s exactly right. I’ve watched people operate in the world, and I would say that there is no more effective way of operating in the world than to conceptualize the highest good that you can and then strive to attain it. There’s no more practical pathway to the kind of success that you could have if you actually knew what success was. That’s what this sermon is attempting to posit.

It’s like in the story of Pinocchio. What happens at the beginning of the story of Pinocchio is that Geppetto wishes on a star. We talked about that a little bit. Geppetto aligns himself with the metaphorical manifestation of the highest good he can conceptualize. He makes a commitment, let’s say. He aims at the star. For him, the star is the possibility that he can take his creation—a puppet, whose strings are being pulled by unseen forces—and have it transform into something that’s autonomous and real. Well, that’s a hell of an ambition. We’re wise enough to put that in a children’s movie but too foolish to understand what it means.

It’s such an interesting juxtaposition that we can both know that and not know it at the same time. You can go to the movie; you can watch it, and it makes sense. But that doesn’t mean that you can go home, and think, I know what that meant. Well, people are complicated. We exist at different levels, and all of the levels don’t communicate with one another. But the movie is a hypothesis, and the hypothesis is that there is no better pathway to self-realization and the ennoblement of being than to posit the highest good that you can conceive of and commit yourself to it. And then you might also ask yourself—and this is definitely worth asking—do you really have anything better to do? And if you don’t, why would you do anything else?

Take therefore no thought for the morrow:
for the morrow shall take thought for
the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day
is the evil thereof.

I spent a long time trying to figure out what that meant, too, because it’s not one of those lines that can easily be read as pro-grasshopper and anti-ant—you know, the old fable of the grasshopper and the ant. I’m not going to tell it, but the ant works, and the grasshopper fiddles. The ant has a pretty good time in the winter; the grasshopper dies. This is like a pro-grasshopper line, but it’s not. It says something else. It says that, if you orient yourself properly and then pay attention to what you do every day, that works. I actually think that that’s in accordance with what we have come to understand about human perception. What happens is that the world shifts itself around your aim. You’re a creature that has an aim. You have to have an aim in order to do something. You’re an aiming creature. You look at a point, and you move towards it. It’s built right into you. And so you have an aim.

Let’s say your aim is the highest possible aim. Well, that sets up the world around you. It organizes all of your perceptions, and it organizes what you see and what you don’t see; it organizes your emotions and motivations. So you organize yourself around that aim. Then what happens is that the day manifests itself as a set of challenges and problems, and if you solve them properly, then you stay on the pathway towards that aim. You can concentrate on the day. That way you get to have your cake and eat it, too, because you can point into the far distance and live in the day. It seems to me that that makes every moment of the day supercharged with meaning. If everything that you’re doing, every day, is related to the highest possible aim that you could conceptualize…Well, that’s the very definition of the meaning that would sustain your life.

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