Unless a mind is completely vacated, unoccupied by all kinds of prejudices, you cannot understand anything of real, authentic value. Mind can understand only that which is mundane. But in a state of having an empty mind – fully alert and aflame but with no thoughts, no desires, no imaginations – you can see the reality as it is, because the word is no longer distorting your vision.

A picture comes from the object to you. If you are clean and clear, mirror-like, reflecting, your reflection can come very close to truth, to beauty, to bliss, to God. But the mind is so full of words, full of so many interpretations, so many explanations, that whatever you see is not seen exactly as it is.

A picture comes to you from the object; a word does not come to you from anywhere. A word is a human creation. It is a soap bubble: while it is there, it may shine in the sun like a rainbow, but it is not there for long.

Primitive people still think in pictures. Hence, they have a certain authority, a certain being, a certain centeredness. The modern man, compared to them, is uprooted.

Children think in pictures. Thinking in pictures you bring with yourself; thinking in words is a social arrangement. Words and language are our manufactured commodities, and we have manufactured them for convenience, not for truth.

There are a few languages – for example, Chinese, Japanese and other far Eastern languages – which are pictorial. Because they are pictorial, they have more authenticity, more vitality, more resonance – but the language is very difficult to learn. Chinese needs at least thirty years to learn because it has no alphabet, it has only pictures – pictures for everything in the world. Now to remember those picture-grams…you need at least a million words, a million pictures to be a scholar. Just learning a few words will not do.

Other languages, which are no longer pictorial, which have found a new way, are alphabetical. Learning those languages is simple – twenty-six letters and the whole language is finished. All the words will be combinations of the same twenty-six letters. But in Chinese, there is no limitation. They have millions of picture-grams, and every day new things are happening, new discoveries are being made. China and Japan have to find new pictures for them.

It is closer to the heart, but certainly anything that is closer to the heart becomes automatically incapable of searching into the objective world. The heart cannot be just a bystander and go on watching the scientific experiment without interfering, without coming in.

For almost seven years, the Senate of America has been denying the fact that they have been supplying millions of dollars worth of weapons to the terrorists. Only just this week, they have been forced, simply by the facts, to admit that they had been supplying millions of dollars worth weapons to the terrorists.

The question might not have arisen except that President Ronald Reagan asked that two-hundred million dollars immediately be sent to a country, to the terrorists there, because the country has become communist. So now the society has to be destroyed, order has to be turned into chaos. And it is none of America’s business.