The one sorrow under all the others
You have everything: a job, a home, relationships. On paper your life is complete. But inside, you know there is something you could have lived, and did not. If that feeling has ever brushed past you, this is for you.
Stop anyone on the street, or stand in front of a mirror tonight, and ask: am I living my full possibility? What you cannot do, you need not grieve. But what you can do and are not doing: that is the tragedy. That is a half-lived life. And the mind lives exactly this half-lived life. What I call the ego is the name of that half-lived life.
This does not make the mind an enemy. It is a road that goes only so far. A two-year-old should be building a mind; a fifteen-year-old should be building an ego. But a forty-year-old still run by mind and ego alone is being run by his own obstacle. The roads the ego built for happiness, the job, the business, the relationships, are exactly where the suffering starts to come from. To reach somewhere else you need another road. That road is meditation.
The ego runs on three fuels: fear, greed, or competition. Fear carries you only to the edge of the fear. Greed only to its milestone. Competition only one step past the other man. And all three lines were drawn by someone else. They are not your potential. They are a fence you have walked inside all your life.
The only way past the fence is to sit with yourself. Not to fix anything. Just to sit, and see what happens when the noise stops.