Goal vs. Purpose pt.8

The whole thing is you can constantly struggle to get this. You know if you're going to buy a house, you worry about getting financing for it,; and as soon as you get it, you worry about how you're going to pay for it. You want to buy a car, you wonder if you can get the credit to get the car, and when you get the car, then you begin to worry about how you're going to pay it paid off.

And as soon as the kids are born, the first thing you say is, "I'll sure be happy when I get them all through college". I've heard that from you, dear one. Does it get the kids through college any better with you being miserable? No. It even adds a few doctor bills with your worry and stress.

Somebody is ill and they say, "As soon as I get well, I'll sure be happy". You get 'em well and you hear, "I hope it never comes back".

So the disintegrating factor is the struggle toward an illusion of the ideal or goal.

Now is there any goal you can conceive of necessary? Did you start to drive your car away from here this afternoon and have the goal to get it home? - to dangerous to be on the road. But if you have the purpose of driving in your little spot on the highway, everything will work fine, won't it? You drive in your little box of space. There's a lane over here, and a lane over there, and there's a little space in front of you that you're responsible for every moment, right now. And you have the purpose of not bumping anything in the little slot you got there.

(That's a goal).

No, it's not a goal, it's that you have as your purpose not to be bumping right now, not to do it later, but now. Now is the present. A goal is then.

If I'm going to try not to have an accident for the next year, now I have a goal okay? And the justification is so that we can keep our insurance rates down. And, of course, you bump everything in site, and drive in a constant state of anxiety.

So we begin to see that we we are producing constantly all the conditioning we have. It is not built in, we set it up. But we have reenacted it everyday of our lives by continually being a goal seeking animal.

Now as soon as we see the joke in that and cease to be a goal seeking animal, we can be a living human being with a purpose - a purpose of whatever you want - but let's say being peaceful at this moment. That's not a goal for the next moment, just this moment. Now this moment I can do. But when I worry about how I am going to be peaceful this afternoon, or tonight, or tomorrow, now I've got a goal and and I have all sorts of have to's come up.

(to be cont'd)