Eat When You Are Hungry, Sleep When You Are Tired

This old Zen saying describes the way in which a trainee practices Zen; no striving, no ambition (to become enlightened), no goals . . . only sitting quietly. As a matter of fact, Zen considers goal making a disease of the mind! Quite a contrast from modern life where without goals we would be rudderless ships drifting on a vast ocean of possibilities.

We are forever setting goals to push ourselves. We save for a vacation, for the kid’s education, for whatever. Goal setting is the foundation of just about everything we do. How could we get by without setting goals?

But imagine for a moment that we were not allowed to set goals, that congress passed a law against them or something! What would we do? I know what I would do; I would sock all my money away and be ready for whatever emergency came up! I might even forgo a vacation or two just in case I needed the money for something more important. My desires would certainly be restricted, (and goals are all about desires, and maybe greed as well).

Why couldn’t we accomplish everything we needed to accomplish without ever setting goals? What if we just saved all of our money and used it only when absolutely necessary? Or, if our goal was to become a manger at our company, why couldn’t we become a manager without setting a goal to become one? Probably because since we would have to shift some energy from our actual performance to some clever manipulation of our higher ups, a plan of action is necessary!

When you think about it, a goal is no more than a reminder to discipline ourselves so that we will accomplish whatever it is that we have programmed ourselves to do, to get what we desire. But what if we could magically do the right thing at all times without having to remind ourselves to do it? If we have some money in our pocket, why would we need a goal to remind us not to spend it? If we are doing a good job and are happy, why strive to be a manager, unless we are bored with our job, or desire more money and control?

Is it possible to live without satisfying every desire, including our desire for more and more money, control, and power?

We might actually never need goals if we had the awareness to see exactly what is happening with ourselves in each moment. For example, we might set a goal to send our kids to a good college, and in pursuit of that goal, miss the most important thing a child needs for a balanced development, which are parents that have the time and insight to help the kids understand themselves.

This is more important than understanding anything else, for if the child never understands itself, he or she is destined to follow well-trod roads that lead nowhere. Rather than live life on autopilot, as her parents may have done, a kid might expand her horizons to the point of seeing the futility of counting on a degree for her happiness, and all the wealth that a degree promises. What if at the end of the struggle she will go through; the education, the career, the family, the relationships . . . she is not happy? It means that she has never really understood herself, or what her real needs are.

But if the parents never really took the time to understand themselves, how could they show their kids how to do it? Have you ever heard of such a thing as teaching a child about themselves, rather than about a typical education?

It doesn’t take a shrink to understand yourself, only an interest, and the interest will develop when you see that things we pursue outside of ourselves, or outside of our understanding of ourselves, just do not work as well as we think they should. Just look at the divorce rate, a stunning example of people not understanding themselves at a very fundamental level.

There is a certain freedom in not making goals. This is where life is lived on the edge, and in the moment, rather than lived by a stale plan. Sure, we might accomplish every goal we set, but the proof of the shallowness of these goals is that we must immediately make more goals because of restlessness. There is never the understanding of the ultimate goal, the goal of goallessness, at least not within the current consciousness or awareness of ourselves.

It takes courage to live without goals, and discipline as well, but if we understand ourselves, we will find that discipline is automatic.

Goals deaden our experience of our moments. If you understand a “moment,” you will see that there is no time enclosed within each moment. Each moment is actually timeless, a glimpse of ete
ity, and therefore when we are not in our moments, we are caught in time.

When we set goals, which limit us to time, it is as if we plan out our lives from some lifeless set of blueprints; a draft that we can never deviate from no matter how our vision of life expands. Actually, goals prevent our vision from expanding, because goals are always set by yesterday’s mind, and all our yesterdays are dead

Perhaps the reason we set goals is not because of our desire for achievement, but because of our desire to feel alive, to feel real, as we imagine ourselves moving through life accomplishing things. This idea of a self moving through life is an illusion. Life just is. The desire to feel alive and real is a sign that we really don’t understand ourselves at all, and then we wonder why we end up so unhappy.

The art of living, as our sons daughters might discover someday (if they take the time to understand and discover themselves instead of becoming automotons for industry), is to become free, free from themselves. The desire to be alive and real is a subconscious desire to experience ultimate reality, and ultimate reality is the only thing that will ever free us.

As a wise man, Albert Einstein, once said, “The True Value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.” n