According to the Upanishads, as long as you think that life has a purpose and you run behind that purpose, you are an egoistic person. When you realize the beauty of the purposelessness of life, you have dropped your ego. The master is the one who makes you understand the purposelessness of life. Whatever you think of as being worthy now is not actually the true and worthy thing.

A man with ego searches with purpose and misses reality.

Death clearly shows that whatever mind you lived with has no real existence. When you realize the purposelessness of life, a new consciousness starts blossoming in you. The moment you experience that there is nothing to be achieved, that the diamonds you are protecting are not diamonds but stones, and that all your great things in life are mere toys, you will understand the purposelessness of life.

The real purpose of life cannot be understood by the ego. When the ego is dropped, you will understand the Divine purpose of life, the leelas or the Divine play, you will enjoy the drama. If you keep thinking that life has a purpose and wait to achieve something, you will miss life itself.

Life itself is the path and the goal. When you have a goal, you will run. Your feet will not touch the ground and you will miss the beauty of Existence or nature. When you drop the goal, the emphasis will be on the path.

When you understand the purposelessness of life, you understand the meaning of living. Until then, you are just a ‘living dead’ person. A person in a coma lying in the hospital bed and a normal person who has not realized the Truth, both live without proper consciousness. The master is the one who makes you realize this truth. The meaning of living is the meaning of life or Existence.

Drop the goal and enjoy life. Meditate on this teaching again and again. The Truth will dawn on you and the nithya ananda state will flower in you, the state that is the very meaning of life. Many times you may have seen, whenever someone says something to you, the first reaction inside you is a certain resistance, a ‘no’. When you say ‘no’, it is ego-fulfilling. You feel solid and firm inside yourself. When you say ‘yes’, you feel liquid and vulnerable. Your ego feels submissive, which is uncomfortable, so you say ‘no’.

This is also why you feel good when you break rules at home, school, in the workplace, or while driving. You feel boosted in ego when you say ‘no’ to rules. You can see this with small children. The moment you say they are not meant to have certain things, they will ask only for those things!

Whenever you try to live for your ego, you make your life and others’ lives miserable. Most of the time the miseries you face in your life are not created by others. They are unknowingly created by you. You may not even derive any benefits from them. But just to prove your ego, you create them.

In ordinary life, every average person thinks he is extraordinary. When you feel that you have undergone the maximum suffering, your ego feels good that you have been able to handle a tough life. Only when your enemy is big, you feel big. When your enemy is small, you feel small.

For the same reason, if your suffering is big, you feel good. Your ego feels satisfied. You measure life with the amount of your suffering. Unknowingly, you torture others as well as yourself. Suzuki’s master was extraordinary because he thought he was the most ordinary, whereas in this world, every other person thinks he is extraordinary.

God cannot send us out of His kingdom. The kingdom of god, enlightenment, the vibrant silence, is our birthright!

If you want to check whether you are average or not, do this experiment. If you feel extraordinary, be very clear: you are average. If you feel ordinary, you are extraordinary!

You all play different roles, use different masks in your day-to-day lives. You use one mask with your mother, a different mask with your father, a different one with your boss and so on. As long as you use the right masks with the right people, it is alright.

The moment you use the wrong mask with a person, be aware that your ego has stepped in.

All you have to do is switch masks efficiently and enjoy the show. Then you are a watcher. You can do this only when you know that you are something beyond the mask. Otherwise, you will get carried away by the mask and lose the whole charm of life. When you know that you are only using masks, your desires drop.

Just like when you grow up, you automatically drop your toys, in the same way, when you look at these masks intelligently, you don’t have any desire for them and simply use them as needed.

If you are a strong egoistic person, you don’t need a separate hell because the mind can exist only in conflict and discontentment. With contentment, with satisfaction, you will lose your boundary. That is why you don’t want joy or bliss. Please never think you want bliss. No! Actually you are afraid of joy and bliss. Whenever you go through a peaceful, no-worry feeling, just watch yourself. You feel you are missing something when there is nothing to think about! Unless you have something strong to brood over, you don’t have a clear-cut boundary in your inner space.

Your mind exists when it hits the corners of your suffering. You don’t feel your boundary or your identity unless you have enough suffering. If you look a little deeper, you will understand that many times you feel lonely if you don’t have anything to worry or suffer about. That is the way you believe yourselves to be, because by its nature, the mind can record only negative things. The mind can flourish, it can create more thoughts, it can more clearly identify with suffering, dissatisfaction and discontentment. The quality of joy is boundarylessness.

When you are in joy, you won’t feel your boundary. Whenever you don’t feel your boundary, you are in a state of joy, in a satisfied and contented mood.

Your ego cannot exist without your suffering. Suffering is the root of your ego. This is an important thing you need to understand. We always think that the ego is disturbed by suffering. No! Ego is enriched by suffering. One more important thing is that if your suffering is less, your ego is less. You feel you are too small, so you increase your suffering so that you can feel you are somebody.

The less the suffering, the lesser is the ego. The more you suffer, the stronger your ego becomes. So you always exaggerate your suffering. The problem is that after some time you forget that you exaggerated. Then you are also caught in the same net. You might disagree and say, ‘No, you don’t know my life. You don’t know my suffering.’ But be very clear, after some time you are caught in the same net that you yourself created!

Only when you don’t have ego can you really enjoy yourself. If you have ego, you can’t enjoy. Standing in front of the mirror, you may apply makeup so that others will enjoy you, but you can’t enjoy yourself. Only a person who does not have ego, who does not identify with the body and mind, can enjoy himself. If you think something is yours, you can’t enjoy. For anything that you think of as yours, you have lost the freedom to enjoy that thing or relationship!