“Yes, I can know about the past if I focus on the past; I can know about the future if I focus on the future; I can know about the present if I focus on the present. But focusing becomes impossible as you become enlightened, because focusing is another name for concentration. That is a quality of the mind, and enlightenment is the quality of no-mind.” No-mind cannot focus. It cannot have any boundaries.

So there is a possibility that sometimes an enlightened man may commit subtle mistakes, but that does not go against his enlightenment. I wanted to make it clear to you because in today’s sutras he is saying things which are right for a bodhisattva, because he does not know the way of the arhatas, but he is mistaken. He should have rather said, “I don’t know the experiences of the arhatas because I am not an arhata.” He is bragging about the Mahayana, the “great vehicle.” And he is in some way condemning the Hinayana, the “small vehicle” of the arhatas.

I will not agree with that because I am not a party to any group. It makes my work in one way simple, in one way very difficult – simple because I can see from far away both sides of the coin, which people who are involved cannot see. But on the other hand, it makes my work more difficult because it starts taking a multidimensionality, and I have sometimes to speak against the people I have loved immensely. But love is not a higher quality than truth.

When it comes to deciding between your love and your truth, truth has to be the decisive factor.

The sutras:

The essence of the way is detachment.

It is true. All of our miseries are nothing but attachment. Our whole ignorance and darkness is a strange combination of a thousand and one attachments. And we are attached to things which will be taken away by the time of death, or even perhaps before. You may be very much attached to money but you can go bankrupt tomorrow. You may be very much attached to your power and position, your presidency, your prime-ministership, but they are like soap bubbles. Today they are here, tomorrow not even a trace will be left.

It happened before the Russian revolution, the prime minister of Russia was Kerensky. During the time of the chaos of revolution when the czar and his whole family were butchered – nineteen persons in all – the revolutionaries were so revengeful that they did not leave even a six-month-old baby. They did not want any trace of the family of the czars left in the world. But Kerensky escaped in time. He died in 1960, and for a half century nobody had any idea what had happened to Kerensky. He was a grocer, running a grocery store in New York, in disguise.