Inconsistency of motive is dishonest

How consistently do you live your motive? Motive is an all-ornothing affair. When you only apply your motive at certain times or certain situations in your life, you will find yourself actively fighting against what you say you want, rather than boosting it.

A constant motive is referred to as “making your eye single” in the scriptures: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” (Matthew 6:22) When your desire becomes unified in all times and in all places, you will experience a shocking increment of productivity, power, and meaning in your life.

The alternative to a unified motive is to be “double-minded”:

21 You will desire what you most value.
22 What you seek determines the amount of light you receive. If your motive is clear, honest, and united, light will flow into and fill you without impediment.
23 But if you seek multiple motives at once, or are besieged by hidden motives, you will be filled with darkness. If what is meant to be your source of light becomes a source of darkness, you will be in great darkness, indeed. (Matthew 6, Author’s Reflection)

Double-mindedness is so serious that it is described as a heinous sin. Consider how James describes it as the opposite of purifying your heart, which literally means to adopt a focal desire:

Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded. (James 4:8)

Double-minded people are volatile.¹ They are inconsistent and unprincipled. “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.” (James 1:8) Their fragility stems from the fact that in order to maintain mutually exclusive desires, they must live in a state of constant denial of reality. Because any person, information, or situation that calls attention to what they really want causes a cascading collapse of every part of their delusional life, they live in a state of self-imposed blindness to rationality. They live by every fleeting emotion, passive subjects to their physical body’s response to their environment. They are “like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.” (James 1:6) You can’t predict their actions or rely on their character, other than to assume it will be bad. Because a double-minded person reacts to rational invitations for improvement with emotional responses, they can never move forward until they become honest about what they desire, and reprioritize the truth over feeling good. One who is in an emotional state literally can’t reason until or unless they calm down and stop interpreting the truth as a personal attack.² Their counterarguments, which almost always involve deflecting arguments against the person who dared to try to help them, are almost never valid, relevant, or true.

As you flicker between motives from moment to moment, you are actually practicing a form of dishonesty, and while doing so, will open yourself to all the negative effects of doing so.