"We live in dreams, illusions, hallucinations. They do not correspond to reality at all. The reality is the dirty old skull. He laughed at himself, and in that very laughter he became a different man. Now he will live with reality, whatever it is. Now no illusions will be needed, no hallucinations will be needed to cover it, to hide it. He has seen the point.

"The story is simple, but it is the story of the whole pilgrimage from darkness to light, from illusions to reality.

"Just watch your mind, how it creates illusions about everything and then gets disillusioned and disturbed. You love a man, you love a woman – you create a certain illusion about the man or the woman. It is not the truth. Deep down you know it too. You are imposing an image. Soon it will be shattered, because against reality no illusion can last long. Soon you will find a dirty old skull.

"Then ordinarily you will be disappointed, miserable, and you will miss the point. If you could have laughed you would not have missed it.

"Even when you understand that things are not the way you had imagined them to be, you dump the whole responsibility on the other person. A woman who was beautiful turns out to be a bitch. A man you had thought to be a hero turns out to be just a henpecked husband. You are not going to laugh at yourselves. You will throw the whole responsibility on the other person: that he deceived you, that he pretended to be something that he was not, that she was not so beautiful as she was pretending – with all the make-up she deceived him. But no make-up is needed. Your illusions, your hallucinations, your lust is enough – the greatest make-up in the world.

"So whatever you want, whatever you desire, you project, and when that projection proves wrong, there are two possibilities. One is to dump the whole responsibility on the other person, who is simply innocent of what you were seeing in her.

"In fact, when you say to a woman, 'You are beautiful' and this and that, she wonders, because she also looks in the mirror and she does not find anything that you are talking about."