Meditation will bring you sensitivity, a great sense of belonging to the world. It is our world – the stars are ours, and we are not foreigners here. We belong intrinsically to existence. We are part of it; we are the heart of it.

Secondly, meditation will bring you a great silence, because all rubbish knowledge will have gone. Thoughts that are part of that knowledge have gone too…an immense silence, and you are surprised: this silence is the only music there is.

All music is an effort to bring this silence somehow into manifestation.

The seers of the ancient East have been very emphatic about the point that all the great arts – music, poetry, dance, painting, sculpture – are all born out of meditation. They are an effort to in some way bring the unknowable into the world of the known for those who are not ready for the pilgrimage – just gifts for those who are not ready to go on the pilgrimage. Perhaps a song, perhaps a statue may trigger a desire to go in search of the source.

The next time you enter a temple of Gautam Buddha or Mahavira, just sit silently and watch the statue. The statue has been made in such a way, in such proportions that if you watch it you will fall silent. It is a statue of meditation; it is not concerned with Gautam Buddha or Mahavira. That’s why all those statues look alike – Mahavira, Gautam Buddha, Neminatha, Adinatha… In the same temple you will find twenty-four statues, twenty-four tirthankaras of the Jainas, all alike, exactly alike.

In my childhood I used to ask my father, “Can you explain to me how it is possible that twenty-four persons are exactly alike? – the same size, the same nose, the same face, the same body.”

And he used to say, “I don’t know. I am always puzzled myself that there is not a bit of difference. And it is almost unheard of; there are not even two persons in the whole world who are alike, what to say about twenty-four?”

But as my meditation blossomed I found the answer – not from anybody else; I found the answer: that these statues have nothing to do with the people. These statues have something to do with what was happening inside those twenty-four people, and that was exactly the same.

And we have not bothered about the outside; we have insisted that only the inner should be paid attention to. The outer is unimportant. Somebody is young, somebody is old, somebody is black, somebody is white, somebody is man, somebody is woman; it does not matter, what matters is that inside there is an ocean of silence. In that oceanic state, the body takes a certain posture. You have observed it yourself, but you have not been alert. When you are angry, have you observed? – your body takes a certain posture. In anger you cannot keep your hands open, in anger…the fist. In anger you cannot smile – or can you?