Intel­li­gence means reach­ing our goals. Some fur­ther cri­ter­ia of intel­li­gence are adapt­ing quickly, hand­ling del­ic­ate situ­ations well, and being the best – yet without a crys­tal-clear spir­itu­al inten­tion all this would be mere egot­ist­ic­al ambi­tion.

It is said that goals hold people togeth­er, that a goal is one of the strongest motiv­at­ing factors. If a mul­ti­tude of goals drives you, you can get lost among them and still not know where you are head­ing. What is more, things seem to be get­ting mixed up nowadays, and means have taken the place of goals. This causes fatal con­fu­sion. What people take for goals today – suc­cess, hap­pi­ness, money, a part­ner and the like – hardly func­tion as goals at all, sadly. Suc­cess often merely plugs the gaps or, worse, lays the found­a­tion for a fall to come. Hap­pi­ness is only the wish of begin­ners; the wise long for con­tent­ment, and they know that hap­pi­ness is not a goal at all, but a con­sequence. Nor is money a goal in itself, for wealth must be used either to sup­port noble goals or to sus­tain one­self, oth­er­wise it crushes a man. For many men the goal is to find a woman, but she too is only a means, a help­er in reach­ing a lofti­er goal, which is either an heir who car­ries one's intel­lec­tu­al her­it­age for­ward, or a shared spir­itu­al path walked to its end. Some­thing like this is worth mak­ing a pact for…

Goals are low and weak, while ideals are high and strong. That is why it is not a mul­ti­tude of goals that must be real­ised, but the ulti­mate goal, which stands above all. For when such a goal is real­ised, it brings every inter­me­di­ate goal to ful­fil­ment too. That is why the admon­i­tion in the title names a single goal, The Goal, and this can be noth­ing other than the real­isa­tion of some last­ing goal above man and nature, which is no longer a goal at all, but an ideal. Noble ideals will have noble con­sequences, but they also demand much of us. Cheap goals you can buy for small change…

If you long for hap­pi­ness, ded­ic­ate your life to ideals rather than to people or things. And the highest hap­pi­ness will spring from the ful­fil­ment of the lofti­est desire, from your soul find­ing its way home, but words alone are not enough for this. It takes a plan, an inten­tion, an ideal, or, if we put it simply: a goal. Who­ever has a pro­gramme for this life is not neces­sar­ily just an ego­ist; he may already have found his call­ing. If a plan exists, it can also be car­ried out. Yet Seneca said long ago that for the ship that does not know which port it is bound for, no wind is favour­able. If we reverse this stern admon­i­tion, we receive a far more splen­did sum­mons: for the ship that knows which port it is bound for, every wind is favour­able… the sage catches the wind in his sails.

If you do not yet know where to head, first seek out your goals, then reduce them to a single goal, and finally refine it into the highest ideal, the ideal of your life that sur­passes all else. When you have found it in this way, put it into words as well, set your goal – now your only one – and strive to identi­fy as closely as you can with your goal, your ideal. Once these steps are taken, move on towards the next three levels: under­stand­ing, first-hand exper­i­ence and real­isa­tion. Seek­ing out and set­ting your goals and your ideal belong to the sphere of under­stand­ing; use your reas­on to weigh up where you are head­ing. Identi­fy­ing with your goal already falls with­in the sphere of first-hand exper­i­ence; it is prac­tice that leads to exper­i­ence. Then your ideal is no longer a the­ory but a lived exper­i­ence known at first hand, and from here it is only one step fur­ther: real­isa­tion. Then a dis­tinct­ive inter­play arises between you and your ideal: just as you live and exper­i­ence and cul­tiv­ate this goal, so – you will notice – your goal also cul­tiv­ates you, shapes you, ennobles you and makes you bet­ter, moulds you to itself and holds you in its pull. To the extent that you serve the ideal, the ideal serves you. In real­isa­tion the ideal is by now a lived real­ity, and it is then that it becomes clear that real­isa­tion is the only atti­tude your true goal deserves.