No. Never hurry. Be patient, be trusting. When the time comes you will be ready, you will be ripe. And understand what that ripening means. To be ripe means that all the pleasures of the world now seem pointless to you. Only then will the thirst for the divine arise in you. You have not yet known the futility of worldly pleasures. They won’t be seen as futile to you just because I have told you that they are. How can they become futile to you just because I say so? Old people go on telling children: “Toys are useless. Why are you wasting your time with useless toys? There is no point in them” – but children go on seeing a significance in their toys.

A young child was talking to his doll. His mother said, “Stop this silly chatter.” He ran away. His mother didn’t understand why he ran away so quickly.

He came back shortly afterwards and said, “What were you saying?” He had come back without his doll.

So his mother asked, “Why did you run away so fast?”

He replied, “The doll would have been sad if she had heard what you were saying, so I have put her to sleep. Now, tell me what you wanted to say.”

It may seem to you that the child is talking nonsense, but in that moment the doll is alive for him, the doll will be hurt. For him, the very idea of not talking to the doll will offend her, will annoy her.

The child’s truth is not the same as an old man’s truth, and an old man’s truth is not the same as a child’s truth. And if a child is forced to throw away his doll because he thinks that what the old people say must be right because they are adults, he will not be able to sleep at night. His sleep will be continually disturbed. “What is happening to my doll? I hope no one is tormenting her in the dark! She may be scared of the dark! It rains at night – maybe she is getting wet! Maybe some animal or some wicked person is torturing her!” He won’t be able to sleep. He will dream of the doll the whole night. The time for him to let go of his doll has not yet come.

One day that time comes. One day the child suddenly sees that the doll is only a doll, that there is no sense in talking to it. The doll has never heard anything he has said. Smiling and laughing at his own foolishness, he will put the doll in a corner and move on. After that he will not even look at it again. It is the same with life.

I understand your difficulty. You are greedy for happiness. You are seeking happiness in wealth, in power – everywhere. You haven’t found it yet, but you have also not yet realized that happiness cannot be found there.

This is your dilemma. You have not found happiness. It cannot be found. No one has ever found it. No matter how young you are and no matter how much faith you have that the doll will answer you; it never does, it never speaks. There is no way it can. No one has ever found happiness in this way. You haven’t found it either, but your hope has not yet died. You think it is possible to find it, you think that the doll will speak: “Let me try a little harder. Let me try to persuade it a little more, let me wait a little longer. Perhaps I didn’t work hard enough; perhaps I didn’t work as much as I should have done. Perhaps my race is half-hearted. Perhaps I didn’t run properly, I didn’t stake my life totally. Let me stake it one more time.”