But Sharda said, “I am not married to the tradition, not married to the convention – I am married to this beautiful half-madman and I am going to follow him.” She did not cry. She continued using ornaments, glass bangles, colored clothes; she did not shave her hair.

People said, “We used to think Ramakrishna was mad; this Sharda is even more mad. She is a widow, and she is behaving as if she is newly married.”

And she would prepare the food with the same enthusiasm and would bring it to Ramakrishna’s room and sit in front of him with a small fan in her hands, as she used to sit – as for thousands of years in the East, wives have sat with a fan, so that no fly or anything can sit on the food.

People said, “You are mad. There is nobody there.” And twice every day the ritual was repeated, and she lived many years.

Whenever she was asked she said, “Whatever happens…I know he is going to come one day.” Such patience.

I reminded you of this incident because your fulfillment, your enlightenment, is waiting with infinite patience, for millions of years. One day you are bound to come.

Ramakrishna may come, may not come, but one day you will be sitting under a bodhi tree, enlightened – that is guaranteed. That is intrinsic, in your nature. It all depends on you: you can be lazy and you can reach to your own bodhi tree in many, many lives’ time. You can be total, your intensity can make you an arrow, and you can move with the speed of light.

And certainly enlightenment is nothing but your becoming light, your inner being becoming light.

Perhaps you are aware that the physicists say that if anything moves with the speed of light, it becomes light – because the speed is so great that the friction creates fire. The thing is burned, there is only light. The material disappears, only immaterial light remains.

Enlightenment is the experience of an explosion of light within you. Perhaps your desire to be enlightened is moving with the speed of light, like an arrow, so that your very desire, your very longing becomes a flame, an explosion of light. There is nobody who becomes enlightened, there is only enlightenment. There is only a tremendous sunrise within you.

You cannot borrow the experience from somebody else, but you can have the experience. Why borrow in the first place? You do not understand what enlightenment is? – you will never understand, unless you experience.

In the world the law is: first understand a thing and then move towards experiencing it. But in the inner world just a diametrically opposite law applies: experience first, then move towards understanding it.