When I destroy your hopes and your expectations and your ideas of God and your relationship with the world, naturally there is bound to be a small gap before you choose the right path. And the right path is not the existentialism of the West. The right path is the meditation that the East has been using for centuries and has completely worked out into a science.

You move inwards. God was preventing it because he was outside. Your prayer was towards the God who was not there. You are here. There is no need of any evidence that you are here, there is no need for any argument to prove that you are here, so why not explore this hereness, this presence that you are, this consciousness that you are? Why not explore it?

Those who have explored it have never come back saying that they are outsiders. They have not even said that they are insiders, because even an insider is separate. They have come out and declared, “Aham brahmasmi!” – I am the whole, “Ana’l haq!” – I am the truth, I am existence itself. There is no question of outsider or insider. Those are two sides of the same coin. The whole coin is dropped. Suddenly you find yourself one with the cosmic dance, a tremendous rhythm in which you disappear as a separate personality and you become one with the whole.

For a moment, every wave in the ocean thinks it is an outsider, it does not belong to the ocean. The next moment it disappears into the ocean. You will disappear in the ocean of consciousness the same way – you are just a wave. It does not matter that you have existed for seventy years. Perhaps you have become frozen and all that is needed is melting. Every day I am saying, “Melt, melt, melt like ice melting and become one with the ocean that surrounds you. You are living in the very ocean.”

I have told you about a young fish – very revolutionary! She started asking every other fish, “Where is the ocean? I have been hearing so much about it.”

No fish could answer. They said, “You will have to find some wise fish, some enlightened fish maybe, but we don’t know where this ocean is. We have also heard about it, and we believe it must be somewhere when everybody says so. And for centuries our forefathers have been saying the ocean is. So we believe in it.”

Then an old mystic fish got hold of the young fish and told her, “You idiot! You are in the ocean. You are the ocean! You are born of the ocean, and you will disappear in the ocean, and you will live in the ocean. You are just a wave that is a little more solid – but you will disappear in the ocean.”

This is the ocean in which you are living. Around you there is – just like air – the cosmic consciousness. You can’t see it, but it is continuously nourishing you. Your consciousness is nourished by the cosmic consciousness just as your heart is beating because of your breathing. The air that you cannot see is continuously giving you oxygen, keeping your body alive.