Through his analysis of personality and psychic development, honed over many years of practice, Alfred Adler proposed the notion of the fictive final goal as the organizing principle at the core of personhood. The fictive final goal is a vision of completion, the ultimate end that holds the aim of all striving; it is the teleological arch of ontogenesis, the imagined course of a human life. As a fiction, the final goal is a product of the psyche, a construct that propels the subject toward a projected ideal. Adler writes: “Like a character drawn by a good dramatist, the individual’s inner life is guided by what occurs in the fifth act of the play.” (The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology). A young business student conjures thoughts of future wealth; a musician is lulled by dreams of commercial success. The trappings that furnish the fictive final goal suggest the deeper longings of inner life: a feeling of substantiality, completion, self-importance, affirmation and unassailable worth.
However, Adler noted that the fictive final goal often grows out of dissatisfaction, a festering inferiority from which compensatory efforts ossify into personality. Embittered by indigence, a child raised in poverty seeks after wealth to countervail feelings of insignificance. Likewise, superciliousness in speech and deportment can mask a trembling ego that generates the illusion of its greatness in belittling others. Because the fictive final goal is conjured from the furtive stirrings of inner life, no material or event can bring about definitive settlement. There is no solution, material or eventual, to problems created by a troubled consciousness. Inferiority spins tales of pending resolution, but its fulminations are integral to its function and parcel to its vitality. By constructing the fiction, dissatisfaction keeps itself enthralled. In striving for resolution, the problem reifies itself. Dissatisfaction underscores its own weight by making a foil of itself, packaging and exporting to the future a resolution that intensifies present malaise.
Those who struggle with anxiety and depression often harbour a longing for health that further burdens them with anguish. In the grip of affliction, they look to others who appear unaffected by mental troubles, and thus feel further battered by their affliction. The weight of inferiority adds duress to existing anxiety and depression. To be sure, the longing for health and wholeness can have salubrious effects: one must want to be well in order to reach wellness. At the same time, the risk lies in the pernicious underside of compensatory striving: by dreaming of goals that always elude grasp, one reinforces the belief that the present is less than acceptable, that life is not complete unless met by a few more conditions, that perfect happiness is available only if we acquired one more experience, accolade, or glittering gadget. Under the cloud of anxiety and depression, the longing for a fictive wholeness untouched by suffering makes life less tolerable, and engagement less viable.
A device of the inventive psyche, the fictive final goal appropriates all manner of narratives to furnish its teleological arch. Enlightenment, realization, kensho, satori, nirvana, can be subsumed within the scheme of fictive striving. Enlightenment, in this sense, represents the end of human struggle, the ultimate relief from dis-ease and affliction. Under this fictive regime, meditation is conceived as the means to a more perfected existence, a state of imperturbable poise, an idyllic tranquility unspoiled by suffering. Under the sway of this illusion, meditators are liable to see themselves as wiser, more polished, more compassionate, and superior to their unawakened peers. Worse, meditative practice can be woven into identity and thus become an ostentatious display that warrants broadcast, a stake in the ground that announces the ego’s claim. Practice becomes an ornament, a mark of distinction. There are few pitfalls more harmful to the contemplative life.
Speaking to the expectations that we unconsciously harbour in our practice, Charlotte Joko Beck outlined a trajectory of maturation:
Later on another crisis may arise, perhaps after five or ten years of sitting, when we begin to understand that we are going to get nothing out of sitting—nothing whatsoever. The dream is gone—the dream of the personal glory we think we’re going to get out of practice. The ego is fading; this can be a dry, difficult period. As I teach, I see people’s personal agendas cracking up. That happens in the first part of the journey. It’s really wonderful, though it is the hard part. Practice becomes unromantic: it doesn’t sound like what we read about in books. Then real practice begins: moment by moment, just facing the moment.
Beck lays bare one of the inevitable passages of practice: the ego softens and we relinquish our designs on reality, including what we expect from sitting. Practice becomes ordinary. Effort flows in honest engagement with what is, in facing the magnitude of the mundane, living in full countenance of that which is hardly worth utterance. There is nowhere to go, nothing else to be. Life is exactly what we live. Nothing else. Fictive striving subsides. Slowly but surely, we disabuse ourselves of the notion that a more ideal life shall relieve us of current discontent, which is none other than the unbridled manifestation of life. Without announcement or notice, we let go of our ideas of what life should be and start to live it exactly as it is.
Meditation is neither a raiment of merit, nor a badge of esoteric achievement. Sitting in the silence of a remote forest, or in a crowded subway train; practice lies in remaining in the flow of life in the fullness of awareness. Making tea in the cool of the evening, prostrating before the Buddha after the last sitting of the day, neither is more sacred than the other. Sitting on the toilet, running after the bus, flossing in front of the mirror. . . where else shall I look for the essence of life, except in the present? Where else, when else, shall I realize the nature of life except right here, right now?
It is both prudent and productive to have goals and projects, ways to aim our efforts and improve our station. Earn a degree. Plan for retirement. These projects make use of our intelligence and reaffirm our agency. They instantiate efficacy in that which lies within our power. However, confusion and disappointment await those who believe that such projects dispell once and for all the discomfiting, chaotic, bruising nature of life. The messiness of reality that upends our tidy designs shall always grate on a psyche that cleaves to security. The agitation of living with unremitting uncertainty means that no external conditions ever fully placates inner discontent. To believe that someday, something will make life better is to misplace the locus of human flourishing. The fictive final goal can never truly satisfy because its authors are inferiority and dissatisfaction: each idyllic narrative sign-posts the deprivation suffered by the soul. Movement and opening occurs when we soften into each moment, exactly as it is, when we no longer look for an escape, a rescue, or something other that will whisk us away from the uneasy business of human life. When we learn to relax our white-knuckled grip, life does not feel as jagged – it doesn’t dig into our flesh the way it used to, though it will never cease to test our boundaries of comfort and control. Thus, we become more fully alive in the present, rather than partially invested in a fictive future conjured by the smallest parts of ourselves.