"My love continues and will continue. And that is the only hope for him, because he is a tremendously intelligent person and he has tasted something of my love; he has known his heart opening up a few times. One time he was very close, very close, but missed only by inches. One can come to the abyss and can turn back. One step more and he would have been what he is now pretending to be.

"Hence he will miss me, immensely he will miss me, and sooner or later he will be back. And I will invite him back whenever the time is ripe, whenever I feel that this is the time for him to put his ego aside and come back home. But I will have to wait for the right moment. It is difficult to find the right moment, it is very easy to miss it.

"Gautam the Buddha used to say that life is like a vast palace with thousands of doors. All the doors are closed except one. And a blind man on a dark, dark night has lost his way in the palace. There is nobody who can show him the way out; all the guards are gone, the palace is utterly empty. He stumbles, gropes, he tries to find the way out, and he passes thousands of closed doors. Slowly slowly – and naturally – he becomes convinced that no door is open.

"And then suddenly he comes to the door which is open. But he has tried and touched and groped and always found ten thousand doors closed. He feels so tired, exhausted, that he thinks, 'This door is also going to be closed. Why bother?' And he passes the door without making an effort to see whether it is closed or open. Again he will have to pass thousands of doors. One never knows when the next opportunity will be when he will come back to this door which is open.

"And any small excuse – just an itching in the head – and he can miss it. He can start scratching his head and he can miss it. Just a thought in the mind, and he can become distracted and he can miss it."