Ejaku is right as a common-sense approach. But I don’t agree, because I know you can be a buddha this very moment. All the wanderings in past lives into darkness cannot prevent you. It is like saying a room has been dark for centuries and you bring a small candlelight…the darkness cannot say, “I will not go so immediately. I have been here occupying this room for centuries. It goes against the constitution of India; you cannot throw away the occupant in a single moment. Go through a proper channel. First go to the court, claim that you have the right.” But the darkness does not say anything. You just bring a small candle, and the darkness disappears.

In fact the darkness has no substance. It is an absence. So when you bring the light, the absence disappears; it was the absence of the light.

If you can go in, pushing aside the whole crowd of habits – just like an arrow, with force, gathering your whole energy inwards – you can prove Ejaku wrong. Although what he is saying is out of compassion, perhaps most people will have to follow what he is saying.

The habits of erroneous thinking are so deep-rooted in you that it would be extremely difficult to uproot them overnight.

I say unto you it is extremely simple to throw them this very moment. Those habits have been formed in darkness and unconsciousness; they don’t have any substance in them.

I was talking to a friend. He was a professor in the same university I was, and he was continuously harassing me – “Do something! I want to drop this habit of smoking. Many times I try: one hour, two hours, three hours, and then it becomes too much. The urge…I think, ‘It is better to have a cigarette. Next time we will try in better conditions; right now I am too tense.’ So many times I have decided, but it fails. Every time, rather than being a success it has been a failure, and now it has become written in my memory that I cannot succeed. Just show me how to drop it.”

I said, “Are you ready?”

He said, “I am ready to do anything.”

Then I said, “Do one thing. Come with me to my home, and I will not let you out until this habit is gone.”

He said, “What do you mean? Are you going to torture me or something?”

I said, “No torture, just chain smoking. Sitting before me you have to smoke to your heart’s content.”

He said, “I never heard such a thing from anybody else. I have been talking about dropping this habit.”

I said, “You have been bragging. All this talk about dropping this habit is just a strategy of the mind to brag that ‘I am trying, but what to do?’ But today you are caught in a lion’s den. Just come and sit behind me in my car and forget the world. On the way we will purchase cigarettes – as many as the car can contain.”

He said, “My God, you will kill me!”

I said, “It does not matter. Either you will leave dead or you will leave the habit!”