"It is not imposed from outside, it is not arbitrary. You can see very clearly – according to the symptoms – silence, blissfulness, a kind of peace that passes understanding; and you need not worry at all, these things can happen only on the right path. They never happen if you go astray.

"If you are miserable, feeling meaningless, feeling no significance in life, if your life has no music, no poetry, but is just a stale, dead dragging, you have clear-cut symptoms in your hands that you are no more on the right path.

"The right path is just as if you are coming closer to a beautiful garden. You may not see it, it may not yet be visible, but you can start smelling the fragrance, you can start feeling the cool breeze, you can start hearing the birds in the trees singing far away. You can start seeing that things are becoming greener, livelier, you are approaching closer to the garden.

"But if things are becoming dry, losing all juice, the trees are becoming bare, without foliage, without flowers, and the path is becoming sandier and sandier and all coolness is disappearing – instead you are feeling hot and perspiring – you know you are moving towards the desert.

"This is exactly what happens in your inner world. There is a desert called the mind and there is a garden called the heart. If you are moving towards the heart, everything is right, because the heart is the bridge to your being. The heart is not the goal, but it is a sure indication that you have left the mind behind, that the desert has been left behind.

"The heart joins the mind and being just like a bridge. And as you start moving on the path of the heart things start becoming more beautiful, more loving. You are surrounded by a new energy, a new life, as if you are getting rejuvenated every moment.

"The day you reach your center will be the experience of sachchidanand. But before that experience of truth, consciousness, bliss, these small indications will help you on the path. They are the milestones.

"As far as I can see, you are going perfectly right, because you are feeling things which cannot be said – they must be coming from the heart."