"And sometimes the river becomes very deep – but then there is only silence.

"Today's statements would have been perfectly right on the lips of a Heraclitus, or Chuang Tzu, or Nagarjuna. There would have been no surprise if Buddha were speaking these words.

"The surprise is that Kahlil Gibran is not yet an awakened man yet, in some miraculous way, he speaks of those depths and those heights which are available only to the enlightened. That's why I say he is a category in himself – a strange mixture of the mystic and the poet.

"As a poet, the greatest mystic will look poor in comparison to Kahlil Gibran; but as a mystic, Kahlil Gibran only once in a while spreads his wings in the open sky and reaches to the boundless, to the unlimited, without any fear, without even looking back.

"In his soul, the poet and the mystic are both present – he is a very rich man. The poet is more often awake, the mystic once in a while, but the mixture of these two has created a new category to which only one other man, Rabindranath Tagore, can belong. I know only of these two persons who belong to this strange category.

"The statements that we are going to discuss are of tremendous profoundness, and about the most mysterious subject: time. We all think we know time; we have taken it for granted. There are people who are playing cards, going to the movies, and if you ask them, 'What are you doing?' they don't hesitate in saying that they are 'killing time.' They don't know what time is.

"Down the centuries thousands of philosophers have pondered and contemplated the subject, but nothing very tangible has come into the hands of humanity. But these statements are not from a philosopher, these statements are from a poet who knows the beauty of language.

"Once in a while, when his mystic is a little awake, a window opens into the unknown. He catches a glimpse and he is articulate enough to bring that glimpse into words, to translate it into such words that perhaps he himself may not be able to explain what he means."