"Thinking is not the way to him but the barrier, not the bridge but the wall. It is thinking that is keeping you separate.

"Burn your thinking in intense thirst. When a man is lost in a desert and is thirsty, a moment comes when thirst is no more a thought in him, when he does not think about thirst, when he is simply thirst – his whole being involved in it, his every cell and fiber aflame with it. He is simply fire, he is thirst.

"In that intensity, religion becomes real – in that kind of passionate intensity.

"So remember that the greatest problem to be faced is speculation, philosophy, theorizing. Once can go on and on theorizing; there is no end to it, it is a process ad infinitum. One thought leads to another thought, and so on, so forth. You will never come to the end of the process – there is no end. It is a vicious circle. You will be moving in a circle like an ox in the mill. Movement will be there, but there is not going to be any arrival. And it is arrival that fulfills.

"Religion has nothing to do with thinking, but it has everything to do with a tremendous thirst for truth.

"One day, a master took his seat in the lecture hall and said, 'Over the lump of your reddish flesh there is a True Man without any rank. He is constantly going in and coming out through the gates of your face – that is, through your sense organs. If you have not yet encountered him, catch him, catch him here and now!'

"At that moment, a monk came out and asked, 'What kind of a fellow is this True Man without any rank?'

"The master suddenly came down from the platform, grabbed at the monk, and urged him, 'Speak, you speak!' The monk hesitated for an instant. The master on the spot thrust him away, saying, 'Ah, what a useless dirt-scraper this True-Man-without-any-rank of yours is!' And immediately he retired to his private quarters.

"The monk hesitated for an instant, that is to say, he reflected a moment in order to give an adequate response to the violent urging of the master."