Who knows how late it is?

With these words our hero wanted to look at his watch but couldn’t find it. He searched with both hands in the left and right pockets of the infinite emptiness but could find nothing to touch.

I just paid two dollars for a watch, and here it has already disappeared. He thought to himself: All right. If the world went under, it went under. That I don’t care about. It isn’t my world. But the watch? Why should my watch go under? A new watch – two dollars – it wasn’t even wound.

And where will I find a glass of malted? There’s nothing better in the morning than a glass of malted. And who knows if my wife…I’ve slept through such a terrible catastrophe, I deserve the worst. Help... help…help! Where are my brains? Where were my brains before? Why didn’t I keep an eye on the world and my wife? Why did I let them disappear when they were still so young?

And our hero began to beat his head against the void – but since the void was a very soft one it didn’t hurt him and he remained alive to tell the story.

This is a story of human mind as such. You create a world around you of illusions. You go on getting attached to things which are not going to be with you when you die. You go on being identified with things which are going to be taken away from you.

Hence, the Hindus call the world “illusion.” They don’t mean by the world the world that is there – they simply mean the world that you have created out of your sleep. That world is maya – illusion. It is a dream world.

Who is your wife? The very idea is foolish. Who is your husband? Who is your child? You are not yours – how can anybody else be yours? Not even you are yours; not even you belong to yourself. Have you watched sometimes that not even you belong to yourself? You also belong to some unknown existence you have not penetrated.

Deeper in yourself you will come to a point where even self disappears...only a state of no-self, or call it the “supreme self” – it is only a difference of language and terminology. Have you not seen, deep down in yourself, things arising which don’t belong to you? Your desires don’t belong to you, your thoughts don’t belong to you. Even your consciousness, you have not created it – it has been given to you, it is a given fact. It is not you who has created it – how can you create it?

You are suddenly there…as if it happens by magic. You are always in the middle; you don’t know the beginning. The beginning does not belong to you, and neither does the end belong to you. Just in the middle you can create, you can go on creating dreams. That’s how a man becomes accidental.