A dream is a dream, whether it is sweet or bitter, and sooner or later you have to drop it; you cannot carry it forever. Only truth can remain with you forever. That’s why I say feel blessed, not blissful, that for the first time your intelligence has started functioning, that some kind of awakening is happening, that the morning is very close by. Those questions, enquiries, doubts, are of immense value; your blissfulness was not worth a penny. I say so because these doubts, these enquiries, these questions, are the beginning of the pilgrimage to truth.

I am against drugs for this reason – because the drugs can give you a false blissfulness, and can stop you questioning, enquiring, doubting. Even a man like Aldous Huxley fell into the same ditch. When he took LSD he thought, “This is what Buddha was experiencing, Kabir was experiencing, and all the great masters of the world were experiencing.” He thought, “We have found, for the first time, the shortcut to paradise.” But within hours the effect of the LSD disappears, and you are back again, the same man, the same miserable creature. LSD has not transformed you.

Any hallucination – either created by drugs, or created by programming your mind, or created by your hidden desires of being great – is a hindrance to realizing the truth.

Let me repeat: now you are in the right state of mind. It is painful, bitter, but this is the nature of existence. Truth in the beginning is bitter, in the end, tremendously sweet – and sweet forever. The untruth is very sweet in the beginning, but ultimately leads you into hellfire. And then it is too late to come back to your original state and start again. Very few people have that courage.

Frederick Nietzsche, although a madman, had many beautiful flashes of light, love, truth. He says man passes through three stages of consciousness. The first stage he calls the camel, the second stage the lion, and the third stage – the ultimate – the child. He has chosen strange names for these stages.

You are all camels, the ugliest animal on the earth! – nothing is straight. Have you ever ridden on a camel? Then you will know. I have suffered much, because in India in the desert of Rajasthan, the camel is the only way to go from one place to another. Sitting on a camel for a few hours, one starts believing that hell is real.

The second stage Nietzsche calls the lion…a strange coincidence, because Buddha used to call his words “the lion’s roar.” The lion is one of the most beautiful animals on the earth; strong, and capable of being alone. The lion doesn’t live like a sheep, in crowds. He lives alone, without fear. He is ready to take any risk.

You have to become a lion to be alone. That does not mean that you have to leave your family, your friends, your society, your commune – no. You can be alone in the crowd, there is no problem. In fact, you are alone. The crowd may be big – you can forget your aloneness in the crowd, but forgetting makes no difference. Here, you are thousands of sannyasins…. Just become a little alert, and you will find you are alone. I am talking to each of you separately. Nobody can talk to a crowd.