"Secondly, to say 'I am joyful,' to say 'I am blissful,' to say 'I am discovering my own center,' is dangerous because it creates envy and jealousy all around.

"Everybody will believe your misery; nobody will believe your joy. Everybody will believe – even if you are lying – your anxiety, your suffering, because everybody knows what suffering is, what misery is; it is everybody's experience. Nobody is going to believe your joy – it goes against their egos to accept that you are reaching closer to your discovery, closer to your center. It goes against their very ego that they are still far away from the goal and you have reached so close. It cannot be believed – you must be lying, you must be deceived.

"If you go on insisting that you have achieved and if your life starts showing evidence of it, they will create all kinds of explanations to demolish your evidence. They may say you are a hypocrite, you are a pretender, that there is no joy in you – you are simply smiling to befool people. If you are still adamant, and you go on dancing and singing on your way without bothering what they are saying, their second step will be to say that you are mad.

"To accept that somebody is coming closer to home is so difficult; it hurts so deeply and so many people, that they are always in the majority and you are alone. It is easier for them to declare you mad, because the only way to save their skin will be for them to be as joyous as you are, which is not a simple matter – they will have to go for a long pilgrimage. But it is easy to condemn you, to find reasons…and if everything fails, you are insane – that is their last resort.

"But even calling you insane will not satisfy them, because deep down they feel the jealousy, the envy; they would like to declare themselves also closer to the center, closer to the truth, closer to blissfulness. But they are in darkness, in utter misery, in anguish. They don't see any end to their night, and you are talking about a beautiful dawn…that you have seen the first ray, the sun is rising, that you have heard the birds singing, that you have experienced the fragrance of the flowers that open in the early morning to welcome the sun, to begin the day."