"He said to Lin Yu-Tang, 'I love Lao Tzu.' Lin Yu-Tang looked at the poet, puzzled, and said, 'But the source of Lao Tzu is in the Upanishads!'

"And Lin Yu-Tang is right, sincerely right: the whole mysticism of the East, wherever it has happened – in India, in China, in Japan – has its source in the Upanishads. And this Upanishad, the Mandukya Upanishad, is one of the most fundamental, because in a very essential way it describes the innermost core and also the ultimate reach of human consciousness

"The ordinary mind is dual; it thinks in terms of twoness: light and dark, day and night, summer and winter, life and death, good and bad, moral and immoral, extrovert and introvert, the real and the unreal, the momentary and the permanent. The duality is always there; it has entered into the very fabric of our languages.

"But the moment you become really awakened…and remember the word really, because we think that every morning we are awake when we come out of sleep. That is only pseudo awakening, that is only so-called awakening. The real awakening is when one becomes a Jesus, a Buddha, a Mahavira, a Lao Tzu. When one has come to see the merger of the within and the without, when one has come to see the oneness of life and death, when there is no division left, that state is awakening. Before that everybody is a little bit schizophrenic because the divided mind divides you. Then you are divided into the lower and the higher, then you are divided into the conscious and the unconscious, the body and the soul, and so on and so forth.

"Carl Gustav Jung is not right at all in saying that Eastern mysticism is introvert. That is a condemnation, because in psychology the word introversion is ugly. It means somebody is morbid, it means somebody is closed to the outside reality, it means that one is not open.

"Jung had come to India while a great seer was alive, Sri Ramana Maharshi, and many people told him to go and see him – but he didn't go there. He traveled all over India, he went to see the Taj Mahal and Khajuraho Ajanta and Ellora, but he didn't go to see Ramana Maharshi."