It is always the other who is wrong, who is crazy. That’s how you protect your own so-called sanity; this is a protection. And a person who cannot look at himself, basically cannot look because he is not only afraid of looking at himself: basically he is afraid of looking. Because when you look at the other, the other can become the mirror; when you look into the other, the other can indicate something about you. In the other’s eyes you are reflected, so you cannot look at the other. You create a fiction about yourself and then you create a fiction about others; then you live in a dream world; that is how everybody is living.

And then you ask how to be blissful. Your nightmare is natural: whatsoever you have done, only a nightmare can come to flower from it. And you ask how to be at ease. No one can be at ease with fiction, only with fact. Howsoever hard it may be to accept, only fact can make you non-tense, only fact can lead you toward truth. If you deny the factuality then there is no truth for you, and then you go on moving around and around and never hit the center.

I have heard, once it happened:

A doctor came to see a patient, a very ill woman. He entered the room and after five minutes he was out. He asked the husband who was waiting there, “Give me a corkscrew!” The husband was a little worried why a corkscrew should be needed. But then the doctor came again after five minutes, perspiring, and he said, “Now give me a screwdriver!” The husband got very excited, but still kept silent, because, “The doctor knows what to do.” After five minutes the doctor was back again and he asked for a chisel and hammer. Then it was too much, the distraught husband couldn’t stand it any longer and he said, “What is wrong with my wife?”

The doctor said, “I don’t know yet, because I have not been able to open my bag!”

And I tell you, you are still struggling with the bag! And not only that you are not able to open it, but you don’t even want to open it. All those corkscrews and screwdrivers and chisels and hammers that you carry with you are just phony. You don’t even want to open the bag, because once you open the bag then what are you going to do? Then the patient – which is you – then the patient has to be diagnosed, then you have to look into yourself.

So everybody is occupied with the bag: that’s what your business is, your profession, your occupation. You may be a poet or a painter or a musician, but all your occupations are just ways to remain engaged outside. That’s why nobody is ready to be alone even for a single moment. It is so fearful, because when you are alone you may come across yourself. When you are alone what will you do? When you are alone you are with you; and the reality may erupt.

So everybody tries for continuous occupation, to be occupied twenty-four hours a day. When you are occupied you look a little happy, when you are not occupied you become unhappy. Psychologists say that if a man is left unoccupied for a long period he will go insane. But why? Why, if you are sane, should you go insane if you are left unoccupied for a long period? If you are sane, then in a long fallow period, a long period where nothing is done, you will become more sane, you will grow. But why should you become insane if you are left alone for a long period? – because you are insane! Your occupation simply hides the fact.