Majnu looked at each woman in minute detail and said, “This is not Laila!” Again and again…he passed over a dozen women, and the remark was always the same: “This is not Laila!”

The king said, “You must have gone utterly crazy! Laila is nothing compared to these beautiful women! You can choose anyone. I know your Laila, I have known the most beautiful women of the world, and my women are some of the greatest that have ever been on the earth.”

Majnu said, “But you don’t understand me. And I can understand that you cannot understand. It is not a question of choosing somebody else; the choice is not in my hands. It has happened already; the heart has chosen! I am nobody, I cannot interfere in it. The mind is only the circumference; the heart is the center. The center has chosen, how can the circumference interfere?

“And moreover – forgive me for saying so, because you have been so kind – I still insist that there has never been a woman like Laila and there will never be again. But to see the beauty of Laila you need the eyes of a Majnu, and you don’t have those eyes so nothing can be done about it. You have to see her through my eyes; only then will you be able to see the grandeur, the splendor of her being.”

Remember these words: To see the beauty of Laila you need the eyes of a Majnu.

This is not a religion. The people who have gathered around me are lovers – not intellectually convinced of what I am saying, but existentially convinced of what I am. It is a question not decided by the mind but something to be felt.

That’s why my people never try to convince anybody. Knowing perfectly well that you don’t have the eyes of a Majnu, what is the point of going into hairsplitting logic? It is futile! They know perfectly well that it is not their intellect that has made them part of my buddhafield, it is their hearts. Something has started ringing in their hearts – a bell has started ringing in their hearts.

Their hearts have felt a new release of energy, a new dance. A new melody has been heard, not a new argument but a new melody. Their hearts were asleep, now they are awake. Their hearts were like a desert. Now the spring has come, now roses are flowering, bees are humming. Their inner beings are transformed. It is religiousness.