I think that when most of think of goals we think of personal goals. Group goals are usually secondary if they exist at all. Even when we work as a team we are usually really only team oriented insofar as our personal goals coincide with those of the team.

Having a family is perhaps an exception to this rule; spouses make sacrifices for each other; parents make sacrifices for their children and occasionally children make sacrifices for their parents; friends and siblings occasionally make sacrifices for each other. Yet this seems to be the limit for most of us.

Can anyone honestly say that they have goals that extend beyond this limit? I think professions that involve education and scientific research, perhaps the medical profession, perhaps the military, perhaps the arts, are sometimes orientated more in this direction.

Does anyone honestly think more in terms of our goals than in terms of my goals? I'm interested in making that shift and I am looking for advice.

(Try not to get all spiritual about your advice if you can help it. I recognize that religious traditions old and new, east and west point in a similar direction but I'm looking for other less superstitious approaches.)

Hockey? Football?

Can anyone honestly say that they have goals that extend beyond this limit?

My goal is not to characterise spirituality as superstition. I am doing OK with it. If you want any tips let me know.

Can anyone honestly say that they have goals that extend beyond this limit?

What is wrong with spirituality being superstition? Perhaps superstition is the wrong word, but the way I see it, spirituality is the placebo for life. It has no medical documentation that is substantial but there are obviously psychological and even physiological effects from spirituality. Or maybe spirituality is the result of psychological or physiological differences.

I just read this article on patients which had brain tumors removed. A study conducted on the before and after effects as well as the location and severity of the tumors. Each patient was given a standard evaluation check list of how they felt about certain elements of their lives. Like how connected they felt towards people in general and other such questions. The results indicated that those who had tumors removed from the posterior area of their brain exhibited heightened spirituality after their operations where as those who had anterior portions of their brains removed exhibited a reduction in their spirituality. They also included other such behavioral and emotional shifts as well but I found the spirituality shift most interesting.

Of those two, I'd go with hockey, but I'd rather play baseball.

My goal is not to characterise spirituality as superstition. I am doing OK with it. If you want any tips let me know.

I think that when most of think of goals we think of personal goals. Group goals are usually secondary if they exist at all. Even when we work as a team we are usually really only team oriented insofar as our personal goals coincide with those of the team.

Having a family is perhaps an exception to this rule; spouses make sacrifices for each other; parents make sacrifices for their children and occasionally children make sacrifices for their parents; friends and siblings occasionally make sacrifices for each other. Yet this seems to be the limit for most of us.

Can anyone honestly say that they have goals that extend beyond this limit? I think professions that involve education and scientific research, perhaps the medical profession, perhaps the military, perhaps the arts, are sometimes orientated more in this direction.

Does anyone honestly think more in terms of our goals than in terms of my goals? I'm interested in making that shift and I am looking for advice.

(removed the bit about religious traditions and superstition.)

The extreme psychological manifestation of Western individualism is a disconnected, psychic desolation best described by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim as anomie, translated as ''without a name''.

So if spirituality is a placebo for life, what are placebos a placebo for, and how come they work so well?

Incidentally I don't think the general question of purpose or goals in life is at all academic. Many people, I think, suffer from a sense of purposelessness. There is a pretty poignant article on suicide in today's Sydney Morning Herald which states, in part



Source

I had a very vivid experience in my early teen years when I suddenly had a sense that there was something I had known, in some distant past, that was the most important thing to know and the one thing never to be forgotten. For that moment, I thought: what was that? When I knew that, I swore never to forget it - and now I've forgotten it.

The moment passed and life went on, but I still remember that experience. And I think the course my life has taken has been influenced by it. I think, now, it was what Plato called anamnesis. I don't know if it is any use to anyone else, but that is how it happened to me.

I don't think I would confuse anomie with the Tao.

I think Our goals are going to have to get a lot clearer, what with a population of 9 billion looming and the need to unprecedented cooperation on many fronts.

But isn't it a lament for community, for society, and a sense of fellowship? I mean this is what the world used to be built around, wasn't it? I just have this sense of the world fragmenting into billions of pieces and loosing all coherence. After all the net sum of a great deal of so-called post-enlightenment philosophy really is the pursuit of self-interest. We have nothing beyond me, my family, my job, this moment, what I want, or maybe the country or the company.