"Fare you well, people of Orphalese. This day has ended. This life is closing, but hope has not ended – it knows no ending. For thousands of years the story has been repeated again and again. Your blindness, your deafness are infinite – and the compassion, and love, and trust of the mystics is greater even than your blindness and deafness. That's the only hope for humanity.

"The mystics know they are talking to the walls, but they go on talking; they know they are not being listened to, but they go on knocking on your doors. They know you are annoyed, irritated – why do these strangers disturb you? But it is impossible for these strangers, these people from the other world, to stop loving you. There is nothing that you can do to kill their love, to crucify their compassion.

"Even when Jesus was crucified, still he promised his followers, 'Don't be worried. Soon I will be with you again' – as if crucifixion was just a trivial matter. When Gautam Buddha was dying, thousands of his disciples were crying and weeping, and he said to them, 'Wash your tears because whenever you need, I will be with you. In your prayers, in your meditations, you will find me always amongst you.'

"Before departing, Mahavira said to his disciples, 'Whenever five of you will be together in meditation, there will also be a sixth – invisible though he will be. You may not be able to see me, but I will be able to see you, and that's what really matters. I have been with you for eighty-two years and you have not seen me; I have been in a material body and you went on missing me. So your seeing is unimportant; what is important is my seeing you.

"'But you will feel my presence more because I will be no longer confined in my body; I will surround you like a cloud, I will overwhelm your hearts, and you will know I have come because suddenly the whole climate will be different. The moment I am present amongst you, you will become absent. My presence will dispel your presence just as light dispels darkness.' And these were the people who had tried many times to kill him."