Preparation means that you drop all your conditionings, you drop your prejudices, you drop what you think you know and you do not know: you get as innocent as possible. Your innocence will be the preparation – that will allow you to enter into the university campus.

Then purification…. In preparation you drop the conditionings which were given by the society, prejudices which were given to you or caught by you from the surroundings; it was borrowed knowledge in some way or other. You go like a child – but even the child is not pure. That is something very significant to understand, because people take it for granted that the child is pure.

He is certainly innocent, but his innocence is equivalent to ignorance, and behind his innocence are all his feelings: anger, hatred, greed, jealousy. You can see, children are very jealous. If one child has a doll, the other becomes so jealous that they will start fighting. If some child has something, then the other child also wants to have it. They are very competitive. Even in the family children have a hierarchy, and they are constantly fighting to be higher than others. Whatever is needed to be done…if obedience makes them the most loved in the family, they will follow obedience. But they are not following obedience; they are really trying a power strategy.

So preparation simply takes away the layers that society has put on your mind. But you have brought with nature, with your birth, so many ugly instincts, that a purification is needed.

You have to understand that competition is meaningless. You have to meditate deeply and recognize that you are not like anybody else. Competition can be only among similar people – and everybody is dissimilar, unique.

Once the competitive mind disappears, many things change in you; then you are not jealous. If somebody has a beautiful face and somebody has more money, and somebody has a more powerful body, you simply accept the fact that a few trees are tall and a few trees are small. But existence accepts them all.

The disappearance of competitiveness will also help you to get rid of greed. People go on accumulating – they want to be in a better position than you, with more money than you, with everything better than you. Their whole life is wasted in that.

Purification is almost going through a fire of understanding in which all that is instinctive and ugly burns down. It is a great experience that only the ugly burns. That which is beautiful blossoms. In purification you lose all trace of hate, and instead, suddenly a spring of love bursts forth – as if the rock of hate was preventing the spring.

Once the cruelty…and children are very cruel. The idea that they are angels is just stupid. They are very cruel; they will beat dogs, they will beat cats. A small insect passing by – and a child will simply kill it for no reason, he just enjoys destruction. There is a destructiveness in him. Once that is gone, creativity arises.