This is the split personality of Kahlil Gibran. In the very invention of Almustafa he is being political. He is not speaking directly, he is speaking through Almustafa because Almustafa is only a fiction. But it is a good security: people will take it as poetry, a fiction, beautiful.

He has been praised all over the world for this small book, The Prophet. Perhaps I am the first one who is trying to shift and create a clear-cut division between when he is honest and when he is not honest.

And without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires…

He never goes beyond the mind. Friendliness is beyond the mind, just as love is beyond the mind; in fact, friendliness rises higher even than love.

In the Upanishads there is a tremendous statement. It has been a tradition in the East that when somebody gets married he goes with his wife to a seer, to a sage, for his blessings. And such a strange blessing does not exist anywhere in any literature, in any tradition.

The sage, the man of enlightenment, blesses them with the words, “You should give birth to ten children, and after that your husband will be your eleventh child.” It looks absurd, the husband is going to be the eleventh child? – but it has such a profundity. You have loved enough, you have given birth to ten children; now it is time to rise above love itself. Even your husband is your eleventh child. Go beyond love, and merge and melt into friendship. Refine it to the point where it becomes friendliness; then neither are you a wife nor is the husband a husband, but you are two souls living together in friendliness.

…all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed.

Love or friendliness have no expectations. That is the beauty of friendliness – you don’t expect anything, because wherever there is expectation, just behind it, like a shadow, is frustration. And you cannot dictate to the future; you don’t even know what the future is going to be.

When I was a postgraduate in the university, a very beautiful girl was also studying the same subjects as me. For two years we remained studying the same subjects – philosophy, religion and psychology – and then finally we had to depart. She was a rich girl, the daughter of the collector of the city. I had gone out, her car was waiting – and perhaps she was also waiting; there was no need for her to sit inside the car and wait. It took two years for her to say to me, “I have been very much frustrated. I wanted you to say to me, ‘I love you.’”