So the responsibility is great – because otherwise you will go on missing your own soul. The responsibility is towards yourself. You will never feel fulfilled, you will always remain empty. If you don’t start discovering, creating, inventing, if you don’t start working for your being, you will remain just an existence without an essence.

That’s what is happening to millions of people. They have no souls. They exist, obviously, but their existence has no fulfillment in it, no contentment in it, no joy. This state is the state of existential anguish, tension, misery – what Buddha calls dukkha, utter misery. Blissfulness comes when you have come out of the darkness, you have become defined, you have become illuminated, you have an inner flame and now you know who you are. By knowing this, you have found your home – otherwise you remain a stranger, always searching for the home and never at home anywhere You remain a traveler you never know rest – because rest is possible only when you have come home.

So the whole life is a search for the home – a place where you can rest and relax, a space where you can be yourself, utterly fulfilled in your being. Existence has to become essence. existence has to produce essence.

And when I say “man has to create himself” I mean that’s how he participates in God. Animals live; they don’t create. Trees live; they don’t create. Even if something comes out of them, it is a natural production – the fruit will come, the flowers will come. It is only man who creates. There is no necessity…. There was no possibility of predicting that Picasso would do his paintings. A mango tree will produce mangoes but nothing is certain about man. Picasso will produce paintings, or become a buddha, or a dancer…nobody knows.

Man is a chaos, a creative chaos. He is very nebulous in his being. You cannot demark him, you cannot say exactly what he is. And man goes on changing every day. He is river-like. This is man’s dignity. He is the only animal who can create; he is the only animal who participates in God’s creativity.

But then there is also a problem. No glory can come without a problem with it. The glory is that you can miss. You may not be able to sing your song, you may not be able to dance your dance – you may be a failure. So man is constantly surrounded by fear – fear of failure; fear of remaining nobody; fear of remaining a nothingness, an unfulfilled, yearning nothingness; fear of remaining barren; fear of remaining a desert. Who knows? You can’t be certain about it. There is no guarantee in man’s existence.

The possibility of failure is ninety-nine per cent. The possibility of success is only one per cent – hence there is a trembling in man’s heart. Every step is in the unknown, with no guarantee, with no security. Every path is taking you into the unknown. You don’t know whether it will lead you to the goal or whether it will just turn into a cul-de-sac. It may reach only to a precipice from where there is no going anywhere. You may have to come back and all the effort may be a wastage. Nobody knows.