We move without touching anyone. And when I say this, I don’t mean only physically but psychologically also. We move without touching anyone physically; we are very afraid to touch anyone physically or to have anyone touch us. Psychologically also we live in a shell: enclosed, encapsulated.

There are reasons for it. If you penetrate somebody’s heart, you will have to do something about it. You will be filled with love, you will be filled with higher, superior values. Then you cannot remain as mean as you are, you cannot remain as unkind as you are, you cannot remain as self-centered as you are. If you look into the heart of the other, you will have to melt. The very looking into the heart of the other will become a merging of your egos.

So, no one looks at anyone. We don’t even look into the hearts of our friends. We take them for granted. We never even look into the hearts of our wives and husbands, our lovers and beloveds. We create an image and we live with the image. We never talk to each other directly, because if you talk directly you don’t feel safe, you become vulnerable. Remember this: if you penetrate anyone’s heart, simultaneously your own heart becomes vulnerable. Otherwise is not possible. If I look deeply into you, I become available to you. You can also look deeply into me.

But that feels dangerous. I don’t want anyone to look deeply within me, because on the surface I am different, a false person. Deep down, I am someone else. On the surface I go on smiling – very kind, very loving – and deep down there is much hatred, much ugliness. So I don’t want anyone to penetrate me.

But if I penetrate you, the very effort to penetrate you simultaneously makes me available to you. We are afraid. We don’t want anyone to trespass, to look within us. So it is better not to look into anyone’s heart and to be looked into by anyone. We become encapsulated, dead. We go on moving within an imprisonment.

How then can you know life? If even a human heart is strange to you, and you have not looked into it, how can you move deeply into the greater heart of the divine, the very center of existence? Learn to look. From looking into the hearts of others you can learn to look deeply. The heart is the thing you can look deeply into: it is the person’s depths. The depth of the person is his heart.

We talk through the mind. It is not the depth. The mind is on the surface, on the periphery. We talk, we discuss; we communicate only with words, we never remain silent for even a few minutes. Even those who are in love go on constantly talking, because if you are silent the heart can be penetrated. So we go on talking and talking.