No Purpose – In Gita Verse 17.12 But the sacrifice performed for some material benefit, or for the sake of pride, O chief of the Bhāratas, you should know to be in the mode of passion.
Krishna says that as soon as you shift your focus on purpose you will miss Life.
Man has been conditioned down the centuries for goals, destinations, purposes, meanings – that’s how man has lived hitherto, with the goal-oriented ideology. Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan, communist, it doesn’t matter – all ideologies are goal-oriented. It is always tomorrow that you have to look to, or the next life. It is always somewhere else: the goal, the meaning, the bliss, the paradise – it is never now, here.
Because of these ideologies you cannot allow yourself to relax in the moment. They go on goading you…you have to attain something, you have to achieve something. Your whole education system is a strategy of poisoning your consciousness; it is a strategy of driving you crazy after goals, it is a strategy of creating ambition in you. And ambition is neurosis. But this has been done for so long that it has become part and parcel of the human mind.
That’s why you go on thinking in terms of goal or destination. It is not you: it is the society that goes on thinking in you, through you; it is your parents, it is your priests, it is your politicians, it is your pedagogues, who go on thinking through you, and you are identified with them. You don’t know that you are separate.
The first thing that you will have to learn is to be a witness to all that goes on in the mind, because the mind is a social phenomenon – it is not a God-given gift. It is social exploitation; it is society that makes a mind in you, and through that mind controls you, keeps you imprisoned, chained, reduces you to a slave. And you are not the mind! You are the witness who can see the mind very easily. You can see the thoughts moving in your consciousness – those thoughts are the content of the consciousness but they are not consciousness itself.
And this is what meditation is all about: creating a distance between you and your mind.
Once the distance is there, you will be surprised that the whole mind structure is your imprisonment – you are free from it because you are separate from it. Once you start enjoying the freedom from the mind all goals will disappear, all destinations will disappear.
Mind can only live in goals, because the mind can only exist in the future. Mind cannot exist here-now – try to be here-now and try for the mind to continue. You will find it impossible. Either the mind continues, then you are not herenow; or, you are herenow and the mind is no more there. Mind has no present tense at all; either it is past or it is future – it is always in the non-existential. And God is that which exists. God is not a goal, nirvana is not a goal, enlightenment is not a goal, it is not an achievement – just the contrary. When you have forgotten all goals, when you have dropped the whole achieving mind, enlightenment is – enlightenment is a state of no-mind.
And enlightenment is nothing special. It is the most ordinary, natural phenomenon. It looks special because you make a goal out of it. Buddha is the most ordinary human being – ordinary in the sense that he has no mind, he exists in the sheer present. He has no ego, how can he be special? He cannot compare himself with anybody else, he cannot be inferior or superior.
In the present moment, he is not – but a totally different kind of presence happens, which does not belong to the person; it is only a presence, not a person at all. And how can he be special? – Because in the present moment he finds that there is no purpose in life. The whole purpose is mind-imposed.
The trees are there for no purpose at all, and the stars are there for no purpose at all. Purpose is a man-created concept. Rivers are not flowing for any purpose, and the oceans are there not for any purpose. Except for man there is nothing like purpose anywhere else. Life simply is. Existence utterly is – it is not a means to some end; it is an end unto itself.
That’s what I mean when I say there is no purpose.
I am not saying that it is purposeless, because to use the word “purposeless” brings the purpose in. It is simply transcendental – neither purpose nor no purpose, neither meaning nor no meaning. It is not going anywhere. There is no goal in life, and if you have a goal then you are going against life, and you will suffer – because you will be trying to go upstream. You will have to struggle, and all struggle is dissipation of energy, and all struggle is stupid, because all struggle is destructive. It simply destroys you. You cannot win against the whole. Relax…there is no goal to be achieved. Simply, there is no goal!
I am not telling you, “Don’t try to achieve goals” – I am telling you there is no goal whether you try or not. If you try you will be simply wasting your time and energy. If you don’t try you will start feeling ecstatic, because the whole energy that is wasted in struggle becomes available to you. And energy is delight. Just to have it is enough to be full of joy. When there is energy, overflowing energy, you are a dance, you are a celebration.
There is no meaning in life. Life is utterly beyond meaning. So don’t bother about the meaning. Don’t ask the question: “What is the meaning of a rose flower?” – There is none. “And what is the meaning of the sunrise?” – There is none. There is beauty, but no meaning. There is immense beauty, but no meaning at all.
Life is not a logical process. It is poetry, it is a love-song – without any meaning, yet it is utterly beautiful. In fact, when something has a meaning, it can’t be beautiful – it is utilitarian. The rose is beautiful because it has no utility at all. Its sheer being is enough; it need not have any other significance. But a hundred-rupee note has no beauty; it has utility, it has meaning, it has purpose, it is a means to some end.
Krishan says live a life which has no idea of purpose, which has no search for meaning.
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