It may be different in the sense ‘becoming’ a lawyer takes technical training, a path, desire to attain the goal, etc. the desire to become happy say moves me away from what my present state is and I search for a ‘way’ to realize happiness…up ahead. I pursue an image or memory of what happiness is to me. Technical thought is misplaced here it seems. There is no ‘path’ to happiness but there is a path to becoming a lawyer. 
Hi Dan, I wasn’t talking about becoming happy but rather becoming an expert in the teachings for the same motives as becoming a top lawyer - the gaining of status and respect from others. That’s not to say that being passionate about the teachings and exploring them to the best of our ability is a bad thing.
Don’t we want ‘to be’ psychologically because there is a sense that we are nothing. An emptiness, a fear of loneliness, of being lost, disconnected, etc. This dread arises clearly in my dreams as I try to get back ‘home’, to familiar settings, familiar people and never make it. K saw this fear of loneliness as what lay behind our need to attach ourselves to people, things. My son as a child had a piece of blanket that he would go nowhere without… it was just a shredded rag when he finally gave it up. Is our fear of insecurity, loneliness just ‘covered over’ by our attachments and hints of its lasting presence arise occasionally in dreams and when our sense of psychological security / comfort is threatened?
I would say, Yes, but I can’t verify it because I’m too afraid to live honestly lost and clueless. I have to believe I’ve got a clue because without hope, I am desperation.
I ask myself upon awakening from one of those dreams what makes that feeling of sadness at being so isolated, so disconnected so dreaded. I just want to get back ‘home’…is it a feeling that goes back in time to before the neo cortex evolved? To our animal ancestors? Wasn’t the greatest punishment in some early tribal cultures to be ostracized and put outside of the tribal circle?
Yes, it was a death sentence. We’ve evolved to be tribal, closely knit members of a community.
K said, “the brain must have complete security”. What he meant by that, I don’t know, but complete security can’t come from belonging to a group of other insecure humans.
Obviously not the security that comes with ‘belonging’, ‘attachment’ which can never be “”complete” . Maybe only ‘complete’ when the myth of ‘security ‘ is seen through. The myth that there is such a thing as complete security?
Complete security is the denial of the desire for complete security?
You’re guess is as good as mine.
K made the statement to a small group of people in the seventies at Malibu (Peter Fonda was present), and I brought it up here in a post that generated a lot of answers, arguments, and the usual blather.
The video is on youtube but I haven’t been able to find it since. Maybe you can find it and see what you think K was referring to.
Doing good has nothing to do with being good…
Examiner,
So, what is right action to you?
Well, there is definitely a huge empty space that we seek to fill with all kinds of entertainment but I was talking about the enjoyment we get from status and power. I would say there is an attraction to wealth, power and status because they are seen as providing great enjoyment and pleasure.
Including being able to murder, rape and plunder with no consequences.
For most people, the enjoyment of power, status and wealth is on a bit of a smaller scale I would say Dan. My point is, how clearly do we see that “being someone” is a shallow business? I would say we probably don’t really see this at all.
Not only “shallow” but divisive in that a hierarchy is created based on the society’s ‘value’ of who or what you’ve ‘become’. It seems quite pernicious to me. We all need food clothes shelter to get by. The greed created by a society based on competition to ‘get ahead’, ‘be somebody’ deprives those who can’t ‘keep up’, of even the basic needs. Goodness as well as common sense, is overshadowed by greed.
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And greed is a desperate reaction to insecurity. When one is lacking in intelligence, talent, strength, beauty, or inherited wealth, one is unworthy, a pawn, a slave, a mendicant, a disposable person. This prospect is so unthinkable as to compel one to do whatever it takes to gain status, recognition, whether it be for admirable or contemptible behavior. Anything is better than nothing.
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The right action is to investigate that statement and find out why will which is concentrated thought can’t do good . And what does “being good” mean?
K said : evil is the desire to harm someone. By no means K was superstitious. Fear invents
the superstitions. Any rational person does not want to walk in the jungle alone at night.