The Ultimate Goal in Mindfulness Training is an End to Personal Development because Clear Mental Focus is a Self-Perfecting Lifestyle.
In Mindfulness training, if done effectively, once the present moment and its value are understood, personal development training is no longer needed.
The present moment is the ultimate finish line for anything within you that sees the need to chase perfection because it feels and believes itself inadequate.
I'm not talking about the necessity to acquire specific job skills, or training related to craft, efficiency, passion, or other healthy interests. That's practical and necessary, though it must be done with Attention in order to be successful.
Painful Drives Behind Our Quest for Personal Development.
I'm talking about the dark, hidden, secret sense that you don't measure up or that you're not good enough, smart enough, or the wrong color, sex, height, weight and the like, driving you with the promise that if you find the answer, you can be what you need to be to feel different and know yourself differently.
I'm talking about a painful illusion - delusion - that makes achievement an unhappy journey, one wherein we carry around the burden of an illusory lack thinking that someday it's weight will make us strong enough to let it go. It comes and goes, and strikes at the strangest moments, often coupled with its compatriots resentment, envy, and self-pity.
Comparision, Inadequacy, or Conformity - All Lousy Fuel for Motivational Focus.
Referred to as 'It' because it is a psychological reaction playing itself out in the meat of the brain and physical body. 'It' is not the human being experiencing its thought-based imagery and unpleasant physical sensations coursing through the body.
It merely FEELS like you're the one contemplating your lot in life and feeling lousy about it. No, that's not you. That's IT, once again, running amok like a wild untamed river.
Inadequacy Born of Imagination.
If the human being experiencing the mental event - the biological reaction (basically, fear, complete with pictures and emotions) - is asleep at the wheel of Attention, they are 'UNAWARE,' in robot mode, then they can be led around like a puppet like that all day long, drifting in walking hypnosis from thought to thought without ever stepping into Attention, without ever waking up to concentrate Awareness and come back to NOW.
Such a person (you and me, we're that person) DOES NOT KNOW they are stuck in imagination mode because Awareness is in 'Park' rather than 'Drive.'
Mindfulness Accesses the Present Moment and Negativity Cannot.
Once one gets word of and finds the present moment, the journey is complete, and inadequacy dies as Attention is detached, and you take that Attention with you from imagination into the real world, into the space where your body is, where inadequacy does not exist (because it only does in imagination).
Seeking, need, desperation, greed, any source of emptiness and pain...
...all ambition will drive you toward the ultimate answer, if you are exceedingly fortunate, but you have no choice but to leave it at the door (it falls away) as you enter the Garden of the Here and Now. That is...
True Mindfulness is a Delightful Discipline of Constant Attention to Reality.
Until forgetting to keep watch on yourself, falling asleep at the wheel of Attention, thus permitting the next such mental experience to creep unnoticed into your imagination - triggered by something that initiates the reaction - steals your Attention as you slip into 'default automaton mode,' and starts the answer-seeking process again as a way to escape the pain it feels.
The emotional tension and pain YOU feel and experience happens because your imagination isn't supposed to be operating the body. You are supposed to be in charge of your body, and that can only be achieved through ATTENTION.
You can't do that if you're mentally asleep, walking around on 'Automatic.'
Personal Development Succeeds and RETIRES at the Doorway of Now.
After you've finally found your way into the Garden, things are different thereafter because you know…YOU KNOW…that the deepest knowledge in all human history always leads back to Attention and the fundamental power of MENTAL FOCUS.
The ultimate focus is devoid of thought and feelings.
It has no room for lower-level activity...'Now' MANAGES them.
It is crystal clear, uncorrupted, and unstoppable...as long as you have contact and are Aware, Awake in the real world.
Great knowledge, philosophy, or faith always teaches Concentration and Focus in its learning because with its mastery, something of significance can be achieved.
The Present Moment - the ability to use what little Attention you have at hand to turn it upon yourself and hold it there until the door out of the prison of imagination unlocks, and you walk out of it and back into the room with yourself, into the here…and NOW, in the real world.
You KNOW that if you step out of the dream - the Matrix - and into the real world, Reality, whatever inadequate feeling drove you there, has no power to enter with you.
That's why The Garden of the Present Moment is peaceful because the higher mental level you enter operates on different brain circuitry than negative emotions or even the drive to be more than you are.
THE BIG PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT SECRET:
Really, it's the Golden Ticket
...Attention is What You Seek.
When you are driven by the need to become a superior version of yourself, the better version you seek can only be achieved through FOCUSED ATTENTION.
Without focused attention, you cannot be a better version of yourself. That better version would have to, by definition, have excellent Attention Control Skills and Mental Focus, otherwise, it wouldn't be superior to the current self-image you hold.
The unquenchable urge you have to be more than you are is your central nervous system's natural response to your living too much in your imagination where its undisciplined, unguided habits create the idea that you are inadequate, and YOU ARE INADEQUATE, LITERALLY at every such instance of the experience, because when you experience it...you are not in control of your Attention.
Think about it logically. If you are not in control of Attention, you are, in such moments, inadequate. Step into Attention, BOOM, a sense of adequacy immediately follows, because there is no contradicting thought crowding your Awareness to say or make you feel otherwise.
It changes everything because, unlike most people, you can know that you know that you know that you know you have a choice. Most human beings have no choice because they are untrained in watching for imagination's unproductive, distracting tricks.
Training allows you to learn what it feels like to make one one choice versus the other - to choose imagination and mental slumber OR mental clarity and operating in the here...and Now.
The more you choose clarity and control over Chaos, the stronger grows the habit of choosing profitable, pleasurable sanity over endless, exhausting running in circles.