Meditation is when mind is not functioning at all, when mind is absolutely silent and still, as if absent. In this absentness of mind your authentic being surfaces. Your mask disappears and your original face is encountered for the first time.

For the first time you know who you are.

And this experience of oneself is the experience of one’s divineness. Out of this divineness radiates love. It is not addressed to anyone in particular; it simply radiates to friend and to foe, to the familiar and to the stranger; it does not know any discrimination.

When the sun rises it does not rise only for roses and not for marigolds. It does not rise only for rich people and not for the poor. It does not rise only for the strong and not for the weak. It rises unaddressed. It radiates in all directions. Whoever has eyes will be able to see it. Having eyes simply means whoever is receptive, whoever is sensitive will be able to see it. The sun does not rise only for the blind.

Only a blind man can pass a man of meditation without feeling his love. I mean spiritually blind, one who does not have any idea of who is within his being; who knows himself according to others, what they say. His knowledge of himself is nothing but a collection of opinions of other people. He does not know himself directly, immediately; and because he does not know himself he remains closed; otherwise it was not possible to crucify Jesus.

Those who crucified Jesus must have been spiritually blind. The man was absolutely innocent, and he was full of love. He had not harmed anyone; in fact, he was trying to help everyone. But it is a strange world. Here there are more blind people than those who have eyes. And because the people who have eyes and receptivity are in a minority they remain silent. It is very unfortunate that the blind are very articulate and those who have eyes, seeing that the majority are blind, remain silent. They go on seeing that Socrates is being poisoned by the blind and they don’t protest.

In my eyes the people who poisoned Socrates or crucified Jesus or murdered Mansoor or assassinated Sarmad, they were less responsible than those who knew that what was happening was absolutely wrong but remained silent out of fear.

There is a beautiful incident…

When Al-Hillaj Mansoor, a Mohammedan mystic, was being very primitively assassinated…Jesus’ crucifixion is far more sophisticated; Socrates’ poisoning is even more sophisticated, but nobody has suffered as much as Al-Hillaj Mansoor. First they cut his legs – they killed him piece by piece, just to torture him as much as possible, to the optimum – then they cut his hands. Then they destroyed his eyes with hot iron rods – they went on piece by piece.