When you become individual…. The word is good: it means indivisible. Individual means that which cannot be divided, that which cannot suffer any split, that which cannot be two, dual or many, that which is absolutely one, no division exists; then you are an individual. It has nothing to do with the ego. Ego is a barrier towards it because ego is always divided, so much so that many times people come to me and I ask them: Are you happy? – they shrug their shoulders. I ask them: Are you unhappy? – again they shrug their shoulders. They are not definite about what state of mind they are in, because there are many states of mind together within them. They would like to say both yes and no to every question.

I have heard about a political leader who was suffering from a split personality, the beginning of schizophrenia. He was hospitalized. In ordinary things also, he had become very indecisive. He could not make ordinary decisions: whether to go to the bathroom or not, to eat this or not, to wear these clothes or not – small things, trivia. And anything that had to be decided would create trembling in him. He was treated six months in the hospital, and when the doctors decided that he was perfectly okay they told him, “Now you can go. You are now normal; the problem has disappeared. What do you say?”

He said, “Yes and no.”

The ego is many, it is never one. Because it has been collected from so many different people it cannot be one. You are one, the ego is many. And if you think that you are the ego, then you are on the path of madness. Once you understand this, you can see the footprints of the bull.

Once I traveled all over the country with a friend. He was constantly with his camera. In the Himalayas he was not interested in the Himalayas – he was interested in taking pictures. One fullmoon night we were looking at the Taj Mahal, and he was interested in taking pictures. After a few moments together, I asked him, “What are you doing? The Taj Mahal is here; I don’t see you looking at the Taj Mahal. You are constantly worried about your pictures, whether the pictures will come out or not, the light is proper or not.”

He said, “Why be worried about the Taj Mahal? Later on I am going to make a beautiful album of the whole journey. Then I can sit and see things.”

This is “kodakomania”: interested more in pictures than in the reality. Become more interested in reality. And whenever your mind tries to pull you away from reality – in pictures, fictions, dreams – become alert, come back. Come back to the present moment.

One doctor used to come here; now he has been transferred from Pune. He was continuously taking notes; while I was speaking, he would take notes. I told him, “While I am speaking, try to understand it.”

He said, “But taking notes is good, because later on, at home, with ease, I can go through them and understand.”

Now this man will never be able to understand what I am saying, because it is not a question of taking notes; it is a transfer of a certain vision. He never looked at me because he was looking at his copy. And I don’t think that he could write notes either, because by the time he wrote, something else had been said and he missed this. They would be just fragmentary. And then he would make a whole out of them – that whole would be his, not mine.