And he said to the wife, “Now see! And give this bottle to me; I will go all to those fools and take all the fees that they have taken from me! I have wasted thousands of rupees, and all that they did was they told me I am mad! And now I don’t feel the fly anywhere, because it is in the bottle!”

He took the bottle, he went to the doctors.

One of the doctors who knew me, he came to see me. He said, “How you managed? Six months a fly can live in the body? And that man has taken his fee back from me, because he was making such a fuss that I said, ‘Better give it back to him!’ And he proved that he was right!”

I said, “It is not the point who is right.”

Gautam the Buddha defines truth as “that which works”. This is the ancientmost pragmatic definition of truth: “that which works”! All the devices are truth in this sense: they work; they are only devices. The Buddha’s work is upaya; Upaya exactly means device.

Meditation is an upaya, a device. It simply helps you to get rid of that which you have not got in the first place – the fly: the ego, the misery, the anguish! It helps you to get free of it, but in fact it is not there. But it is not to be told…

And Krishnamurti has been doing that: he has been telling crazy people that the fly does not exist and you don’t need any doctor. I say to you: the fly exists and you need the doctor! Because just by telling to you that the fly does not exist is not going to help you at all.

For thousands of years you have been told the ego does not exist. Has it helped you in any way? There have been people who have told, in this country particularly, that the whole world is illusory, maya, it does not exist, but has it helped India in any way? The true test is there: whether it has helped, whether it has made people more authentic, more real. It has not helped at all. It has made people more deeply cunning, split, schizophrenic; it has made them hypocrites.

All the religions have done this, because they don’t consider you. And you are far more important than the ultimate truth, because the ultimate truth has nothing to do with you right now. You are living in a dreamworld; some device is needed which can help you to come out of it. The moment you are out of it, you will know it was a dream – but a person who is dreaming, to tell him that it is all dream is meaningless.

Have you not observed in your dreams that when you are dreaming it looks real? And every morning you have found that it was unreal. hut again in the night you forget all your understanding of the day – again the dream becomes real. It has been happening again and again: every night the dream becomes real, every morning you know it is false, but that knowing does not help. In the dream one can even dream that this is a dream.