I have heard about one centipede – the centipede has one hundred legs. The centipede was taking a morning walk and a spider became very much intrigued. The spider must have been a mathematician or something like that. He said, “Uncle, can you satisfy my curiosity? How do you manage? One hundred legs! Which one to put first and which one to put next and then…a hundred legs! You don’t fall, you don’t get confused? Do you keep counting inside? If I had one hundred legs I am certain I would not be able to walk. My legs would become entangled with each other, I would fall immediately.”

The centipede laughed. He said, “You mathematicians, you are always asking nonsense questions! You know that I am managing perfectly well – but I have never thought about it. Let me think it over.”

So he tried to walk and think – and he fell down immediately. He was very angry at the spider and he said, “Listen! Never ask a centipede this question again – now for my whole life I will be in trouble! I had never thought about it, things were going perfectly well. I had never looked into the matter. Now that you have asked me I will never be at ease until I have found the answer. Trying to figure it out…you see I am in a mess! Please never ask any centipede. You have crippled me for my whole life. Now I don’t think that I will ever be able to walk. One hundred legs! Of course you are right, and I don’t know how everything was being managed.”

If somebody asks you how you go to sleep, don’t try to find out the answer; otherwise you will suffer from insomnia from that very day. People who suffer from insomnia, all that they need is to forget about sleep; there is no need to worry about it. If you are not feeling sleepy, be happy, enjoy. Read something, listen to music, sing, dance, go for a walk – you are more fortunate than the people who are fast asleep and snoring. But forget all about sleep. Watch the stars, enjoy the stars, feel yourself far more fortunate than the others, and you will fall asleep without any effort on your part. But don’t make any effort.

Enlightenment is something like that. It is not a question of making effort.

You say, “To me it feels like a very slow process.” It is not a process at all – it is a jump, a quantum leap! And it has nothing to do with learning; it is unlearning. You are conditioned. Enlightenment means becoming unconditioned again, becoming a child again. You were a child once so you can be a child again. You have just to put aside all kinds of rubbish that you have gathered around yourself. You have to jump out of it, that’s all. It is not a question of a slow process of learning, it is simply a question of seeing the point.

But we are cunning, mind is very cunning. It can’t accept the simple fact that we still want to avoid enlightenment. We don’t want to be enlightened, we are afraid of the fact, but we are cunning and we cannot accept it. Hence we find out ways – ways to deceive ourselves that it is a slow process, a very slow process; that it takes not only one life but many lives to become enlightened. It does not take time at all, what to say about a life or many lives? It has nothing to do with time. It is immediate – it can happen now!