Insight, Meditations and Reflections

A reader commented on my blog: "In all seriousness, maybe picking the goal is the greater battle."
In world sacred writings, life on earth is seen as a fierce battle.

In the Hymn of the Blessed One or  the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu sacred book, we read of the great battle in which Prince Arjuna goes to battle with his own relatives, friends and teachers. Krishna teaches him the art of war and victory. In this scripture the battlefield is an allegory in which the soul, Arjuna, representing what is most sacred in man, sets out to fight evil.

To say that choosing the goal is ife's greatest battle rings true. If we fail to select a worthwhile life goal towards which we channel our energies then on our dying bed we will be like Leo Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich who, at age 45, member of the court, died while asking himself: "What if my whole life has been wrong?"

Under the twilight zone of clarity between life and death Ivan Ilych thought  to himself:

It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend.

What then, is that one supreme goal that should concern the living? Should it be a desire to change the world? Or amassing wealth and guaranteeing that our children's children are well cared for when we are gone? Should it be a pursuit of fame, the wielding of power over others? Is there an ultimate goal of life that everyone can pursue?