It reminds me of Karl Marx – the founder of communism, the last religion in the world. He spent his whole life, without a single holiday, in the British Museum, just reading and reading and reading. He used to reach the British Museum before it opened; he would be waiting on the steps. And there were many occasions when he was pushed out forcibly because the museum had to be closed. There were a few occasions when he was taken away in an ambulance…because he had been reading all day since the morning – without eating, without drinking, and he had fainted on the table.

Now if this man knew more than anybody else of his generation, however old he was…he could not respect old age. Old age has lost respect because a new territory, a new space of learning and knowledge has opened up.

You are going to see a still bigger gap – one of which humanity is still not aware – and I am talking about it for the first time. One gap has been created by education. If meditation becomes a worldwide movement, another gap will be created which will be immense. Then the old man and the young man will be as far apart as the two poles of the earth. Even communication between them has already become difficult; it will become impossible.

The people who are here with me can understand what I am saying. If you start moving into the world of no-mind, then the people who are old, who have gathered much knowledge in the mind, will look to you retarded, undeveloped, very ordinary. There is no reason why you should respect them; they have to respect you – you have transcended mind.

And the world is becoming more and more interested in meditation. It will not be long before the day when meditation will become your education for the ultimate. Your ordinary education is about the outside. Meditation will be the education about your interiority, about your inner being.

Of course it will take a little time, because there will be many frauds; there will be many pretenders, false prophets, technicians. You have to understand the difference between a meditator and a man who knows the technique of meditation; he is not himself a meditator – he is a technician.

For example, I have not seen Dulari here; she is one of my old fellow-travelers. So I inquired today what has happened to Dulari, and I have heard that she has been in one man’s meditation camp. That man is utterly, utterly stupid. But he knows the technique, about that there is no doubt. He has been in Burma…and in Burma…he was only a businessman, but he learned the Burmese technique of Vipassana.

Vipassana has many forms: the Burmese, the Ceylonese, the Tibetan, the Chinese, the Korean, the Japanese. The Japanese is the best. But all those techniques have come from Gautam Buddha; perhaps he never thought that it would be possible to learn the technique and not to do the meditation. The technique is simply how to do it.