Unless you are moving on the vertical line, you are missing the whole opportunity of life. But here our whole effort is to block the horizontal line and open the blocked vertical line. Then every day you are coming closer to life, not farther away. Then your birth is not the beginning of death, your birth is the beginning of eternal life. Just two different lines and so much difference.

The West has never thought about it; the vertical line has never been mentioned because they haven’t been brought up in a spiritual atmosphere where the real riches are inside you. Even if they think of God, they think of him outside. Gautam Buddha could deny God – I deny God. There is absolutely no God for the simple reason that we want you to turn inwards. If God is – or anything similar – it has to be found inside you; it has to be found in your own eternity, in your own ecstasy.

To think of oneself as a body-mind structure is the most dangerous idea that has happened to people. That destroys their whole grace, whole beauty, and they are constantly trembling and afraid of death, and trying to keep old age as far away as possible. In the West, if you say to an old woman, “You look so young,” and she knows she is no longer young, she will stand in front of the mirror for hours to check whether any youthfulness has remained anywhere. But she will not deny it, she will be immensely happy. In the East, nobody says to an old woman, “You are young”; on the contrary, old age is so respected, loved, so that to say to somebody, “You look younger than your age,” is a kind of insult.

I am reminded of one incident that happened life…

I was staying in Chanda – a far corner of Maharashtra – with a very rich family, and they were very much interested in an astrologer. They loved me and I used to go at least three times per year. That was their quota, and I used to stay there for at least three or four days each time. Once when I went there, without asking they had arranged with the astrologer to come and to look at my hands and tell some things about me. When I came to know about it, everything was fixed; the astrologer was sitting in the sitting room. So I said, “Okay, let us enjoy that too!”

I showed him my hand; he pondered over it and he said, “You must be at least eighty years old.”

Of course, one of the daughters of the rich man freaked out, “This is stupid. What kind of astrology…”

At that time I was not more than thirty-five – even a blind man could have measured thirty-five and eighty! She was really angry, and she told me, “I am finished with this astrologer. What else can he know?”

I said, “You don’t understand. You are more Westernized – educated in the Western style. You have been to the West for your education – you can’t understand what he was saying.”

She said, “What was he saying? It was so clear there is no need to understand; he was simply showing his stupidity. A thirty-five-year-old young man, and he is saying that you are eighty years old.”

I said, “Be patient.”