ISX 1.01 - A Goal-less Goal

A GOAL-LESS GOAL: AN INTERVIEW WITH ACHARYA, MOH HARDIN

Michalik: I'm curious. You mentioned questions or a question. What was your question or questions, in specific terms? Or were they just vague longings?

Hardin: I can't say that I had a question that was well defined in my mind. It was more a sense of vague longings. I suppose I could tell one anecdote here. In hindsight it's what really precipitated my search, you might say. I grew up in the South, and grew up in the church. When you grow up in a situation like that, you're conditioned into that situation. That is the world from your point of view. I was spending a summer at the Methodist Assembly Ground for the Southeastern United States. I was working in the cafeteria and living in a dormitory. One of the other boys who was living in the dormitory, who was a little older, he was in college, was going to be a minister. We had a long talk one day, and he was struggling with this particular question. So I asked him what it was, and he said, "As long as somebody is in Hell, how can anybody be in Heaven?"

Michalik: Good question.

Hardin: It was like a stick of dynamite. It just exploded my view, that conditioning. Everybody has a view of life, a view of what reality is. And I had this view, which I had been brought up with, and that's all I knew. So that question immediately exploded the whole thing. I thought, 'Yea, How could that be? If people are suffering in Hell, how could anyone be in Heaven?' In terms of poking or penetrating my view of what existence was or what my life was, that opened up the space for a question. That was the question. It's not particularly the question I set out to solve. But when he asked that question, it was like an explosion in my mind. Suddenly my view of the world didn't quite work anymore. So then I was looking for something, but it was not well defined.

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