Your Early Experience of the Highest Goal

Researchers tell us that all of us have a defining experience of the highest goal early in our lives, usually around the time of puberty. We each have an experience that we are great, that we have a connection with everything, that we have potential. That is the moment of exultation captured by Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

 

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

 

This experience, if we accept it and remember it, can catapult us beyond the socialization and comparisons that deter us from living the purpose of our lives. This experience, this earliest awareness of the highest goal, can be the starting point for living with a conscious connection to it.

A friend of mine shared an experience that this illustrates: When she was about eleven, her family was on a tour of Italy. One day they were visiting the St. Paul’s Outside the Walls Church in Rome. She was a bored kid, who, in her opinion, had been through too many churches on the trip. But as she went into a side chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene, she experienced energy and a feeling of connection that she remembers to this day. Curiously, she didn’t tell anyone about this until later in her life when she happened to be talking to a scholar of Mary. That conversation opened her to a consciousness that was her highest goal and that she could see had been part of her life since that day in Rome.

I urge you now to remember and contemplate a time when you experienced the nature of your highest goal. You have had such an experience, maybe more than once. Do you remember it? Push yourself a little here, because it is worth it. Recall a time, probably in your early life, when you had an epiphany about your own potential, about who you really are in a powerfully positive sense, about your connection to all beings and all nature.

Perhaps I’m using words that don’t quite fit for you. Remember I’m talking about the experience of the highest goal itself, which is personal and diverse. Some people get a sense of themselves and this connection when they see something in nature, such as mountains or an ocean, for the first time. Sometimes they have this deep feeling about who they really are in a religious setting, in a sports competition, as the result of a powerful dream, or after great exertion. But often it’s simply a gift that is given to us early in our lives. It just happens when we least expect it.

Once you start thinking about it, you may be able to think of several times when you have had such an experience. Concentrate on the earliest, most powerful one you can remember. Look beyond the nature of your experience to focus on what it told you about the highest goal. Please take some time to reflect on it, jot some notes about it and/or talk to someone about it. If you can resurrect this memory and nurture it in terms of your own highest goal, you have something extremely valuable for the journey we are taking in this book.

I remember walking barefoot along a gravel road in Wisconsin. I was ten years old. It was a beautiful summer day, and I was walking toward a beach on a lake. I recall this sensation of connection with everything. I experienced the whole—from the bright sun, vast blue sky and tall trees to the pebbles under my feet and the grasshoppers leaping up as I walked forward—as being part of me. I felt huge. I knew that I was put on earth to do something great. I also felt a sense of sadness because this life would have to end sometime. I began to get a sense of change and the flow of great forces that I was a part of. All this happened in moments, but the experience was powerful and touched every part of my being.

Of course, I put aside that experience as society kept telling me what to do and who I was. Just like my friend who felt the highest goal as a connection to Mary Magdalene, I didn’t talk to anybody about what had happened. But I remember it now.

Most people seem to forget the memory of their early connection to the highest goal, but the memory is still there. You only need to concentrate to bring it up. A great many people have told me about recapturing this memory: One fellow remembered his father telling the young boy forcefully that he was great. A woman recalled helping with the birth of a calf on her aunt’s farm, and afterward she got a sense of the meaning of her life. Still another slipped out of her home early in the morning when she was two and a half years old. She walked into an Episcopal Church down the block, and she discovered, as she put it, “the existence of grace.”

After a seminar in which I urged people to remember their childhood moments, a woman came up to tell me she remembered a time walking in the mountains when she was an adolescent. She suddenly felt the connection and energy I am talking about. In her case, it gave her a sense of the control she had in a difficult family situation. She said that unlike her older sister, who was tormented endlessly by their parents and ended up embittered by her childhood, she was able to make choices that kept her free. To this day, she goes to the mountains for renewal and always remembers the power she has. It has helped her deal with stress and problems with relationships, as well as take advantage of opportunities that present themselves.

What happened to you? Do you remember an experience of connection? If so, don’t forget it now.