View, Awareness, and Conduct
As with any other action, when we begin to practice meditation, it is essential to clarify our motivation. For it is our motivation—altruistic or self-centred, vast or limited—that direct our journey and influence its results. When effecting any real change, there will be challenges and obstacles. True transformation requires continuous effort and commitment. We cannot just wish to have better self-awareness, clarity and inner strength. That is no more than wishful thinking and will not translate into real change.
Let's generate a clear vision and recalibrate one's motivation, and we definitely need to put our aspiration into practice. They enable us to make everyday choices based on a clear idea of one's own possibilities.
What is your vision of a good life?
- What is your vision of a good life, your vision of what would truly bring you happiness, a sense of fulfilment, satisfaction and meaning?
- In order to realize your own vision, your own aspirations for genuine happiness and fulfilment, what would you love to receive from the world around you?
- What tendencies, habits, hold you back, perhaps harming yourself and others? What qualities would help you on the path of your own genuine happiness?
- Your own happiness is intricately intertwined with others' happiness. In order to lead the most meaningful life possible, what would you love to offer to the world?
The course will help you connect the dots between where you are today and accomplishing the path.
What would you love to offer to the world so that when you come to the end of your life, and you're looking back, you will do so with the certainty that you've offered your best?
—Alan Wallace, Conative Intelligence and Flourishing course
Useful Definitions
- Conation: the mental faculty of purpose, desire, and volition;
- Conative intelligence: the ability to discern which desires and intentions truly lead to one’s own and others’ wellbeing and to then adopt them, while releasing desires and intentions that undermine one’s own and others’ wellbeing.