What is one's ultimate goal in life? || (2015)

Questioner: How do we understand our ultimate goal?

Acharya Prashant: Your ultimate goal is to come to goalessness.

As you are, you are bound to have goals. I cannot advise you to not have goals. Because it is impossible for you. It is impractical for you. You will need goals. Given your constitution, your stage in life, the makeup of your mind, you will need goals. And if you must have a goal then the goal must be goalessness.

Till the time you have goals, keep telling yourself - “I am not yet done.” You have reached the goal when you forget everything about goals. You will have goals and if you must have goals then this is the goal to have - “Can I go beyond this goal? Can I really see what this goal is?”

Whenever you will enquire into a goal, you will only see its falseness. But that does not mean that you will quickly become goalless. Maya is not so easy to defeat. She will come up with a more lucrative goal, a more secure goal, and a more impenetrable goal. You cannot penetrate it or argue against it. Now you will have to raise yourself up. Bring yourself to a point where you can defeat even this goal, where you can see that even this goal is not worth it. That will require effort, that will require dedication and that will require a lot of sharp intelligence.

When goals present themselves then the foolish ones start chasing them and the really intelligent mind examines it. In the process of examining it, it may even move a few steps towards it, which is alright. If I want to examine something, I might want to go towards it, but it never blindly rushes towards the goal. When you examine the goal, you go beyond them. A point comes when goals are no longer relevant and that is the ultimate goal.

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