"Perfection is in the future: it is a desire. Wholeness is herenow: it is a revelation. Perfection has to be achieved, and of course every achievement takes time; it has to be gradual. You have to sacrifice the present for the future, the today for the tomorrow. And the tomorrow never comes; what comes is always today.

"Existence knows nothing of future and nothing of past; it knows only the present. Now is the only time and here the only space. The moment you go astray from now and here you are going to end into some kind of madness. You will fall into fragments; your life will become a hell. You will be torn apart: the past will pull a part of you towards itself and the future the other part. You will become schizophrenic, split, divided. Your life will be only a deep anguish, a trembling, an anxiety, a tension. You will not know anything of bliss, you will not know anything of ecstasy because the past exists not.

"And people go on living in the memories which are only footprints left on the sand; or they project a life into the future, which is also as non-existential as the past. One is no more, the other is not yet, and between the two one loses the real, the present, the now.

"Wholeness is of the now. If you can be simply here, then this very moment the revelation! Then it is not gradual, it is sudden, it is an explosion!

"The word upanishad is tremendously important. It simply means sitting down close to a master; it is a communion. The master is living in wholeness; he is living herenow, he is pulsating herenow. His life has a music, his life has a joy, a silence of immense depth. His life is full of light.

"Just to sit silently by the side of a master is enough, because the presence of a master is infectious, the presence of the master is overwhelming. His silence starts reaching to your very heart. His presence becomes a magnetic pull on you: it pulls you out of the mud of the past and the future. It brings you into the present."