"Whatsoever you fix as the goal, the question will remain relevant about that. Why?

"If this is the goal of evolution, to realize godliness, then what is the goal of realizing godliness, the ultimate? Just ask that question and you are back to the same place. If enlightenment is the goal of life, then what is the goal of enlightenment? And then you can see the point: enlightenment will have no purpose. And if the ultimate itself has no purpose, then what is the point of saying that life has purpose and the world has purpose? If the ultimate is purposelessness, then that ultimate permeates all.

"This goal-orientation comes from the ego. The ego cannot accept that there is no goal. The ego cannot accept that there is no hierarchy. The ego cannot accept that minerals and trees and animals and man and enlightened people all exist in a great simultaneity – there is no gradation. You would like to be higher, you would like to be somebody special. You are man, not a mineral. But what is so great in being a man? What is so great in being an animal, or a man or an enlightened man? Why create the hierarchy? Finally the whole thing falls flat – in the end God has no purpose, and God is all.

"Those who have experienced, those who have not just been thinking about God, but those who have experienced will say godliness is nothing but the cosmic simultaneity of all. Minerals are exactly where man is, in their own way, in a different form. Trees are exactly where enlightened people are, in their own way, in their own form. Nobody is higher and nobody is lower. The ego cannot accept that, because if there is nobody higher, nobody lower, it cannot exist at all. The ego can exist only through comparison; it has to put somebody lower and somebody higher. It can exist only in the middle of these two falsities. It has to put somebody lower so it can feel good: 'I am special.' Then it has to put somebody higher so it can go on striving, so that it can go on achieving, so that it can go on ladder-climbing."