Now all those objects have disappeared. Only a witnessing, pure awareness, has remained. This witnessing is the end of all your misery and all your hell. It is also the beginning of the golden gate – the doors are open for the first time.

Two white rats were chatting through the bars of their laboratory cages. “Tell me,” said the first white rat, “how are you getting along with Dr. Smith?”

“Just fine,” replied the second rat. “It took a while, but I have finally got him trained. Now, whenever I ring the bell, he brings me my dinner.”

It is such a strange world. The psychologist, Dr. Smith, must be thinking he is training rats, and the rats are thinking they are training Dr. Smith! The games of the ego…The wife thinks she is training the husband. All wives are training their husbands their whole lives; the husbands are training their wives. It seems life is just to train and to be trained – for what?

A woman reached Pablo Picasso. She wanted a portrait; the portrait was made. She was absolutely satisfied. She said, “Just one thing, you have forgotten to put great diamonds around my neck, a great diamond ring, diamond bracelets.”

Picasso said, “But you don’t have them.” She said, “It doesn’t matter. I have cancer, and I am not going to survive more than six weeks. And I know my husband is going to marry immediately after I die. He is just waiting for my death, although he goes on saying, ‘My dear, without you I will not be able to live a single moment.’ I know that without me he will not be able to live a single moment. He will immediately find another woman!”

Picasso said, “I don’t understand the relationship of what you are saying and the diamonds.”

She said, “You don’t understand the woman’s mind. I want my portrait, after my death, to be seen by the woman who my husband is going to marry. Then she will torture him, ‘Where are these diamonds?’ I cannot leave him, even if I am dead. He has to be trained, he has to be kept under control.” Great idea!

People have forgotten completely to live. Who has time? Everybody is training everybody else, how to be – and nobody seems to be satisfactory, never.

If one wants to live, one should learn one thing, to accept things as they are, and to accept yourself as you are. Start living. Don’t start training for a life sometime in the future. All the misery in the world is created because you have completely forgotten to live; you have become engaged in an activity which has nothing to do with life.