The aim of Zen is greater insight into yourself. You need to understand that you are not an important personage but only an empty shell. This is not easy, because every human being feels he is a wandering warehouse, brimming with desires, ambitions, lust, burdens and a need for good wine. But anyway, the year has only just begun and new years resolutions are jostling for our attention, and a healthy attempt at self-improvement never did anybody any harm. But attention: if you did persevere and eventually manage to transform yourself into a hollow receptacle, your plight is about to get a whole lot worse.

Because then you are expected to start living a 'selfless existence'. You're there but at the same time you're not. You, in your new role as empty 'barrique', need to be filled, not with wine but with Karma. The principle that everything that we do, think or say will come back to us. Good acts will have good consequences, bad acts will have bad ones; you reap what you sow. Everything that happens to you is the result of something you have pulled off in this life. Or in you last one, because we're going to reincarnate. You are responsible for your own life: you decide your own gross level happiness.

If this karmic path is traversed successfully, you accomplish the main aim of Buddhism, Nirvana. This is not like some kind of heaven but a state of being in which the mind is 100% asshole proof; free of desire, ambition and passion; as clear as a dew drop at dawn. If you manage to reach this state of enlightenment, you will be invincible to emotional suffering and the highest form of happiness will be yours. You'll never again be pissed off when you're waiting in line for the supermarket check out, run out of money again or are ambushed by uninvited visitors. Your new life is filled with benevolence, wisdom, equanimity and a continuous state of cool, sunny peace. Unfortunately you'll have to make do without wine, which the Buddha- in spite of what his well-nourished physique might suggest- does not endorse. So that'll be a cup of green daisy-leaf tea.

Of course, time is money. But if you have to choose between the money that you're making and the time you lose making it, you'll find that time is everything but money. Many have found out too late that their time had run out but their money hadn't. Therefore we support the adage: