Once in a while you are empty. In this moment you can see things with a clarity, with transparency. But when your mind starts, covered with your own thoughts, they protect you: they protect the dead against the living, they protect the static against the dynamic, they protect what has been given to you as knowledge against existential experience.
You are right when you say, “As I look around me, at the people that have answered your call, my spirit flies with joy with the knowledge that these, my brothers and sisters, are some of the most extraordinary people on the planet.”
If you are silent and your eyes are without any dust and your heart is just a pure mirror, this will be the experience of everyone. These people are certainly extraordinary! I am against the whole past, I am against all conditionings, I am against all ideologies, all organized religions. So only very few people, who have the courage to drop the whole past in its entirety, can have the opportunity to be with me.
To be with me is risky. It is dangerous – dangerous to your mind. To be with me finally means you will have to lose your mind. Of course it will not be a loss because you will be attaining something greater, something vaster, something unbounded. You will be attaining a state of no-mind.
Only a state of no-mind is an open door; without any judgment it allows you to see things as they are, not as they should be, not as you would like them to be, not to fit with you. Existence has no obligation to fit with your mind. But every mind is struggling somehow to make the existence fit with it. It is impossible; hence the misery, the frustration, the deep despair, the feeling of failure.
The great philosophers of the contemporary world, the existentialists, have lost all courage. They have lost their very nerve for the simple reason that they are the most refined, cultured, educated, rational minds. From their minds they cannot see any beauty anywhere, they cannot see any joy anywhere, they cannot see any hope anywhere. They are utterly in deep anguish.
But existence is celebrating. It goes on bringing new flowers, it goes on bringing new stars, it goes on bringing every moment something new. It is continuously renewing itself, and there is a song that surrounds the whole existence and there is a dance that you can see in the trees, in the birds, in the animals, in the children, in the sages. But to see this you have to put your mind aside.
Sometimes it happens on its own. Listening to me, if you become too attentive, you slip out of your mind. Those few moments when you slip out of your mind, you will become aware of this extraordinary gathering of brothers and sisters.
These people have taken a tremendous step. They have risked their established mind to inquire into the unfamiliar and the unknown – and ultimately, the unknowable. They have put aside all their explanations in favor of the miracle and the mystery of existence. They have dropped their ambitions, their desires for money, power, prestige, respectability. Now their whole concern is simple and single: how to know, Who am I?