The meeting was arranged. Several weeks later the man complained to the matchmaker. “You lied to me,” he said. “The girl is not an orphan. She not only has a father who is alive and well, but he is living in prison!”

The matchmaker shrugged. “You call that living?” he asked.

If you are looking through a certain prejudice then you impose it, you project it, then everything enters you distorted.

In the beginning days of science scientists thought that our minds, our senses, were for gathering information from the outside world. They are doors; the world enters through those doors – the senses, the mind. They are bridges. But now the latest research has proved just the opposite: your senses don’t function as doors, your mind does not function as a bridge. Because it is so full of beliefs, it functions in just the opposite way: it prevents the reality from reaching you.

You will be surprised to know that ninety-eight percent of reality is prevented from reaching you by your mind and senses. Only two percent of reality reaches you – only that which fits your beliefs reaches you.

Unless a man is totally free of beliefs he cannot know the immensity of truth, the ecstasy of existence.

You say: “I have been raised to believe that commitment is absolutely necessary if a relationship is to work.” Now, so many things are taken for granted – you have not inquired into them. And they will look very true, they will look logical. Sometimes logic can be very absurd. Sometimes your so-called learned people are the most stupid people possible.

A learned man went into his library to read, but he couldn’t find his glasses. He looked and looked, but he couldn’t locate the missing glasses. So he used the logic of his ancient people, reasoning thus:

“Hypothesis: Maybe someone came in and stole my glasses while I was having lunch. No! Why not? Because if it was someone who needed glasses to read with he would own his own, and if he didn’t need glasses to read with, why would he steal mine?

“Second hypothesis: Maybe a thief stole my glasses, not to use but to sell. But to whom can you sell a pair of reading glasses? If the thief offers them to someone who needs glasses that man surely owns a pair already, and if the thief offers them to someone who doesn’t use glasses, why should such a man buy them? No!

“So where does this take us? Clearly the glasses must have been taken by someone who needs glasses and had glasses but cannot find them. Why can’t he find them? Perhaps he was so absorbed in his studies that, absent-mindedly, he pushed his glasses up from his nose to his forehead, then forgetting he had done so, took mine!”

The answer began to dawn on the scholar.