"Perhaps it may not be possible for you to reach it. But if your longing is a flame in your heart and you are afire with it, it is a question of life and death, then those miles miraculously become very short – sometimes so short that a master can say, 'You can have it right here and now,' and they disappear completely.

"But the problem is to have a longing so deep, so total, so intense that it becomes your very life, your very heartbeat; that you are surrounded by it twenty-four hours a day, that you breathe it in, you breathe it out. Whatever you are doing does not matter, an undercurrent of a deep search continues. Even while you are asleep, the undercurrent of the search does not stop. You go to sleep with the longing, you wake up with the same longing; and between these two points you may have been asleep, but the longing has continued in your unconscious.

"I have been telling you that enlightenment is just around the corner; that is certainly a device. For most of you it is not just around the corner, but a few of you can make it just around the corner by how much you love it….

"There are so many categories: somebody is simply curious, he has no longing, he has become curious because others are searching for it. He starts thinking that there must be something in it if so many people are searching, but no bell rings in his own heart, nothing clicks within his being. Then it is millions of miles away. A few are just students – they are studying it as subject matter to increase their knowledge, to become more knowledgeable. They don't have a desire to achieve it, they don't have a desire to become pilgrims. They want to know everything about it – perhaps sometime it may be useful.

"One great sage in Sri Lanka was dying. All his disciples…and they were in the thousands because the man was over a hundred years old; he had lived long, he had been a man of charisma, and he had attracted many. Hearing that he was going to leave the body, they had all gathered from different parts of the country to have his last darshan, to be in his presence for the last time, to feel that silence, that celebration, that fragrance that was always around him."