Now the sleep researchers say that it happens continuously in your sleep: if you sleep for eight hours, you are not on the same level continuously, your level goes on changing, peaks and valleys. The whole night you are going up and down. Sometimes you are very deep in sleep where even dreams disappear – Patanjali has called it sushupti, dreamless sleep – and sometimes you are full of dreams. And sometimes you are just on the verge of awakening. If something shattering, shocking happens, you will be awake, suddenly awake.

That’s the effort of all the buddhas: waiting for that right moment when you are very close to awakening. Then a little push and your eyes open and you can see.

God cannot be explained but can be seen, can be experienced – can not be explained. Any explanation about God is nothing but explaining him away; hence, the more priests, theologians, professors there are, the less religion there is in the world. The more popes and the more shankaracharyas, the less religion there is in the world – because these people go on explaining and God cannot be explained. They have stuffed your minds with so many explanations, now those explanations are in conflict. Now it is almost impossible to figure it out, what is what, which is which. You are in utter confusion. Man has never been in such confusion before, because humanity has never been so close before. The earth has really become a village, a global village.

In the ancient days the Buddhist knew only what the Buddha had said, and the Mohammedan knew only about what Mohammed had said, and the Christian knew only about Jesus. Now we have become inheritors of the whole heritage of humanity. Now you know Jesus, you know Zarathustra, you know Patanjali, you know Buddha, you know Mahavira, you know Lao Tzu and hundreds of other explanations, other hints – and they are all jumbled up in you. Now it is very difficult to pull you out of this confusion. The only possible way is to drop this whole noise, not in parts but in toto. That’s what my message is.

And by dropping it, you will not be dropping Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha; by dropping it you will come closer to them. By dropping it, you will simply be dropping the priests and the traditions and the conventions and the exploitation that goes on in the name of tradition and convention. By being clear of all this, forgetting the Bible and the Vedas and the Gita, you will attain to a clarity, a cleanliness. Yes, you need a spring cleaning, you need a total unburdening of the heart. Only then, in that silence, will you be able to understand.

Buddha says:

How can a troubled mind
understand the way?