The Benefit of Living With No Purpose | Alan Watts
I want to provoke you… Bhagwan (Osho)’s motto was: “Live here and now.” Enjoy this moment. The past is over, and you can’t live in the future. Alan Watts would agree — and so would Zen philosophy. But what happens when we set goals and believe that once we achieve them, we’ll finally be happy and fulfilled? I used to think that when I earned my engineering degree, everything would change. Yet on my way to that goal, I had a Near-Death Experience — I left my body, saw it from above, and couldn’t even recognize that it was me. When I came back, I realized that I had been suffering my whole life. My childhood was hell — daily abuse. But life, I realized, should be the sum of happy moments. When I finally got my degree, I was seriously ill. My degree — my lifelong dream — suddenly meant nothing. Even though becoming an engineer had been my childhood goal, it no longer held any meaning. Can you relate to that? I’m not against setting goals. I’m against suffering for goals that don’t serve u...