Millions of people have forgotten it completely. They are absolutely content and feeling that all that they need they have – nothing is missing. They are the poorest people in the world. They don’t have a longing for higher reaches, they don’t want to climb mountains, they don’t want to go to the stars – in their dark caves they are perfectly comfortable. One should have compassion for them. Their contentment is their spiritual death.

You need a spiritual discontentment which constantly moves you, like an arrow, towards faraway goals.

“At the junction of two paths, the inner one and the outer one, with tears in his eyes, the stubborn donkey is starving. The outer path does not attract him much anymore, and when it does the hope is quickly smashed. Seeing your finger pointing to the moon, still he is not going very much on the inner path.”

The inner growth is very still and very silent.

You cannot hear your own footsteps.

You only become aware when you reach a certain stage. And it is a surprise because all the time you were thinking nothing is happening…suddenly, the flowers have come. This is what I mean by patience.

To grow cedars of Lebanon one needs great patience. They are not seasonal flowers and you cannot see the growth. It is happening every moment, all these trees are growing every moment. But existence functions very silently.

You are growing, and even you cannot be aware of it unless something totally new happens and makes you aware that you have reached some space that was unknown to you. And that can happen any moment.

On your part great patience is needed, and a trust that the whole existence is in support of all those who are trying to grow spiritually. It is not you who are trying to grow spiritually; it is existence who, through you, is trying to reach to its utmost heights.

“I do not quite know how to speak to him. Disgusted with tunafish sandwiches, he became accustomed to starvation. Is this just fear, laziness, impatience? Does he just need a juicy joke?”

It is a combination of many things. Fear is always there, and will remain until you come to know that there is no death. Fear is the shadow of death. When death disappears the shadow disappears.

There is impatience, but you have to use your impatience not against your growth, but in favor of it. Be impatiently very patient. Your impatience should only show your longing. It should not be against your patience; it should be simply a tremendous desire of your being to crystallize, to reach somewhere where life becomes meaningful, blissful, where fear disappears, death disappears, where one becomes acquainted with one’s own immortality.

And it is not laziness. It appears so, because you don’t see every day new spaces; it almost seems as if you are standing, not moving. In the inner journey this has been felt by many many people, by almost everybody. And the reason is the nature of movement.