What comes to mind is the ridiculousness of punishing kids for their own good, which in its extreme form is justification for dropping bombs for peace. I strove in my schooling to accomplish certain goals, and my striving and schooling were clearly at odds with some of my goals. Such paradox! It's comic, if not crazy. I'm much more aware of my goal-directed time, of which there is still a lot and too much, and being aware of it helps me stay sane and I do spend more time goallessly. I agree that enlightenment is ordinary/natural/simple, it's just that we have gotten far away from that kind of ordinary/natural/simple living. Enlightened living is simple, it's just not easy especially in our goal-directed frenetic doing way of being, and I think a lot of people find simple goalless time in meditation. "If you spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live," said Lin Yu t'ang. I've been alive a lot of years and sadly have spent only a handful of afternoons in that way. Striving is probably always at odds with the purpose of the striving, and awareness of that has helped me get a little bit past it. When I'm being goal-directed I'm being manipulative, and it behooves me to be very suspicious of and careful about any goal-directedness and manipulativeness, especially when well-intentioned.
On Feb 23, 2013 david doane wrote :