You ask me: “I am always in a hurry, and always worrying whether I will be able to reach or not.” Where do you want to go? What do you want to reach? The seeker is the sought. To know the one who is hidden inside you is all that is needed, and for that you need not go anywhere. For that you need not even open your eyes. For that you need not even take a single step. That’s why Lao Tzu says, “If you seek, you will miss. Don’t seek, and you will find.”

Seeking is desiring. And once you start seeking you will go on going astray – from one goal to another goal. Sometimes it is money that is the goal, sometimes it is power; then sometimes it is meditation and sometimes it is enlightenment and God and nirvana. The name changes but the goal remains. And you remain tense because time is slipping by. How can you avoid tension? Time is slipping by and the goal has not come yet, and life is becoming less and less. Energy is being lost and the goal has not come yet. How can you be happy? You become more and more hectic, more and more hungry for the goal. Death is coming and the goal seems to be nowhere.

Naturally, as you grow in age you become more miserable. It is not death that makes you miserable and it is not old age that makes you miserable – it is the impossibility of the goal. When you are young you can hope. Enough time is there, enough energy is there, the body is healthy, and you have not tasted frustration yet, and dreams look beautiful. By and by, as you grow in age, you will grow in frustration. All dreams will break somewhere. And you will go on creating new illusions because you cannot live without an illusion. Death comes close and the goal does not come – that is what misery is. That is what frightens.

But if you don’t have any goal, you will not be frightened by death. If you don’t have any goal, you will not be frightened by anything – nothing can be taken away from you. You cannot miss in the very nature of things! It is impossible to miss.

The modern mind is even more addicted to goals because the modern mind is educated, civilized. The more you are educated, the more ambitious you become – because all that education does is to create a subtle mechanism in you for ambition. Education corrupts you, corrupts your sources of joy, gives you great ambition, ego trips. The more the world has become educated, the more panicky people are – and nobody is certain whether he is going to make it or not.

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, there is this beautiful piece:

“Cheshire Puss,” said Alice, “would you tell me please which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the cat.

“I don’t much care where,” said Alice.

“Then it does not matter which way you go,” said the cat.

“So long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Ah, you are sure to do that,” said the cat, “if you only walk long enough.”