And your juiciness about life is always a kind of dependence. You have a beautiful man, or a woman – you think life is so juicy. But even Cleopatra – who is known to be the most beautiful woman who has walked on the earth – within two, three days will be just an ordinary woman. All the juice will disappear soon, because a woman is after all a woman, and a man is after all a man. You will start fighting, quarreling, arguing, nagging, and you will wonder what happened to the juice.

It was all imagination; imagination cannot last forever. It was a hallucination; you cannot depend on it. And everybody is dependent on different kinds of hallucinations. Sooner or later there is frustration.

Enlightenment is independence: the juice is not coming from somebody else. If it is coming from somebody else it can be stopped any moment. It if is coming from somebody else, the person can change his mind – his juice can start flowing towards someone else, not towards you. That’s why there is so much jealousy. If your wife just looks at a beautiful man, stops on the street, forgets all about you – you are standing by the side – will you feel juicy?

Just look at husbands walking with their wives on the street in the marketplace, and you can immediately say whether this man is a husband or a boyfriend. There is no need to ask. The husband is burdened, sad, dragging somehow, wanting to escape – so many beautiful women are passing by. He cannot even look at someone, the wife is there watching, a detective. They both are watching each other, detecting something to fight about.

Anything that is dependent on something outside you…. You may be feeling very juicy because you have so much money, but soon you see you cannot eat the money, you cannot squeeze the dollar and take the juice out of it. You may hurt your hand. And you can see many people who are far richer than you, and far more miserable also.

Have you ever heard of a rich man being blissful? He is worried, continuously in anxiety. Nights, he cannot sleep – in fact, a man’s richness can be measured by how many sleeping pills he needs.

Yes, in the beginning, when suddenly you win a lottery, you start jumping and enjoying and you feel life is very juicy. But the lottery is outside you, it is not going to happen every day. Tomorrow you will be miserable because the lottery is not coming today. The day after tomorrow? And what will you do with the lottery money? You may gamble, you may go to a pub and get drunk and fall in a gutter. You may go to a prostitute. What are you going to do with the money that you have got?

Anything that is outside you can only give you an illusory feeling of beauty, of joy. But those moments are dangerous because they make you aware of all the darkness of your life. They give you the contrast.

Enlightenment is not an idea. It is an experience independent of any object. Nobody can steal it, nobody can borrow it. There is no way to lose it; it is yours forever. And then you will know what real juice means.