Just the other night somebody was here. He said, “I prepare so many questions when I come to see you, but when I come here I forget. What do you do to me?”

I am not doing anything at all! It is you. The moment you prepare something you are already saying that it is false. The real thing need not be prepared. Rehearsals are not needed in life, they are needed in a drama. A drama is a false thing. If you prepare your questions, it means those questions are not yours.

If you are thirsty and you come to me, will you forget that you are thirsty and you would like your thirst to be quenched? How can you forget? In fact, when you come by the side of a river your thirst will burn more intensely because the moment you see the water flowing and hear the sound of gurgling, immediately all that you have been suppressing will bubble up, it will respond. Your whole being will say, “I am thirsty!” If you are thirsty you will not forget.

But you prepare questions. You prepare yourself to go to the river and say, “I am very thirsty.” What is the point of preparing? If you are thirsty, you are. If you are not, by the time you reach to the river you will forget about it.

When I say you are immature I mean that you prepare your questions, your inquiries. They are mind things, they don’t come from your heart. They are not related to you, they have no roots in you.

It is related in George Bernard Shaw’s life that once, at the opening of one of his plays, he stepped forward at its conclusion with obvious complaisance, to accept the rousing plaudits of the crowd.

There was one dissenter, however, who seized the occasion of a lull in the applause to call out in stentorian tones, “Shaw, your play stinks!”

There was a momentary horrified silence, but Shaw, unperturbed, exclaimed from the stage, “My friend, I agree with you completely, but what are we two…” here he waved his hand over the audience “…against the great majority?”

And applause returned more loudly than ever.

You cannot prepare something like that. It is impossible. It is a spontaneous response, hence the beauty of it. You cannot prepare for such things. And life is such a continuous thing: either you act immediately or you miss. Later on you will find a thousand and one answers – you could have said this, you could have said that – but they are of no use.

Mark Twain was coming back home with his wife from a lecture hall where he had just delivered a beautiful talk. His wife had not been present, she had just come to pick him up.

On the way she asked, “How was the lecture?”

Mark Twain said, “Which one? The one that I prepared, the one that I delivered, or the one that I am thinking now that I should have delivered? Which one?”