"Any effort can only take you out, outwards. All journeys are outward journeys, there is no inward journey. How can you journey inwards? – you are already there, there is no point in going. When going stops, journeying disappears, when desiring is no more clouding your mind, you are in. This is called turning in. But it is not a turning at all, it is simply not going out.

"But in language it is always a problem to express these things.

"There is an ancient parable: It was a beautiful afternoon and a tortoise went for a walk on the land. He rested under sunlit trees and he roamed around in the bushes just for the delight of it. Then he came back to the pond. One of his friends, a fish, asked, 'Where have you been?' and he said 'I went for a walk on the land.' The fish said, 'What do you mean by 'a walk on the land'? You must mean swimming.' And the tortoise laughed and he said, 'No, it was not swimming, it was nothing like swimming. It was a walk on the solid land.' And the fish said, 'Are you kidding or something? I have been to every place, you can swim everywhere. I have never seen a place where you cannot dive and swim. You are talking nonsense. Have you gone mad?'

"You understand the difficulty of the fish? She has never been on land, walking on land makes no sense. If the tortoise wants to make sense of his statement he will have to say, 'I went swimming on the solid land.' Which will be absurd. But only the word 'swimming' can be understood by the fish.

"A mind full of desires can only understand desire, hence the desire for God. It is absurd; you cannot desire God. God comes to you when desire leaves. The cessation of desire is the coming of God to you. Again, I am using the word 'coming,' which is not true. Because God is already there – you only recognize when the desire has ceased. Nothing ever comes, nothing ever goes, all is as it is. That's what Buddha means when he says: Yatha bhutam – things are as they are."