You are alive when faraway stars challenge you for a pilgrimage. Unknown realities, unheard-of truths, inexperienced beauties…when they become your real world you have a life with joy and with dance and with song.

Out of this joy, this rejuvenation, arises the most delicate phenomenon in life: gratitude, gratitude to the whole.

Gratitude is the only prayer, all other prayers are false.

And gratitude need not be expressed in words.

It is just a wordless fragrance arising out of you.

It is good you are back. In fact, anybody who has been a sannyasin, who has known individuality, has known freedom, has known playfulness…it is impossible that anything can prevent the person forever from going deeper into the experience of sannyas.

Your parents stopped you, they forced you not to be a sannyasin. That does not matter. In fact, their forcing you and taking away your sannyas has taken you away from them; they have created a gap unknowingly. Now there will not be any communion, everything has become formal. They have destroyed something which they cannot create; they have destroyed innocent trust, they have destroyed innocent love.

But it has not been in any way harmful to you. You are back – with better insight into human relationships, with better insight into the fact that even parents are trying to dominate, that it is a political relationship and there is no love. Their whole effort is…in the world they may not be able to be dominating, but at home they can dominate the children. As long as the lust for domination remains, love does not appear.

But to you, particularly…I would like you to remember that whatever they have done they have done almost in sleep, so don’t be angry at them. They have done to you what their parents have done to them – so rather than being angry you should feel sad for them, you should feel pity for them. You are fortunate because you have found something which your parents, their parents, and for centuries the whole line of your family, have not been able to find.

Rejoice. Be silent and be as joyful as possible. Perhaps you can become a message to your parents and your family members, your neighbors. But the message cannot be delivered in words. In words, people know everything, they are all knowledgeable. And nobody wants to accept that he is ignorant.

The only way to break the ice is not through words but through your life, through your very being. They will still resist, because their whole life – not only theirs but their forefathers’ – all their wisdom, all their philosophy, all their religion is at stake. You are proposing a new way of life. They cannot easily accept that all their parents since Adam and Eve have been ignorant and only you are no longer ignorant. So it will take a little time for them to come down from their egoistic attitude.