“Unless you become self-seeing, unless you turn within, unless you can have a look at the reality that you are, whatever you encounter in the world is going to be just the appearance. The proportion will be the same: the more you penetrate within, the more you can penetrate without because reality is one.

“If you are not acquainted with yourself, all your acquaintance, all your knowledge is just false. Without self-knowledge there is no possibility of any knowledge. You can go on knowing and knowing; you can go on collecting more and more information, but that information will remain information – dead, borrowed. It will never become a knowing eye.

“How to attain those eyes which can penetrate the illusory and can encounter the real? This is going to be the base of this whole Upanishad. In the old days it was called Chakshusmati Vidya, the wisdom through which eyes are attained. But the first thing to be constantly remembered is that as we are, we are blind; as we are, we are dead; as we are, we are illusory, the stuff dreams are made of.

“Why cannot our eyes see the real? They are so filled with dreams, so filled with thoughts, that whatever you see, you are not seeing that which is. You project your ideas, your thoughts, your dreams upon it, and the whole world becomes just a projection screen – you go on projecting things. Whatever you see outside, you have put it there. You live in a man-created world, and everyone lives in his own world. That world consists of his own projections.

“Unless your eyes are completely vacant, unless there is no content within your eyes, no thoughts, no clouds; unless you become mirrorlike, pure, innocent, contentless, you cannot encounter the real. The real can be seen only through naked, empty eyes; it cannot be seen through filled eyes.

“This is all the art or the science of meditation consists of: how to make your eyes mirrorlike, nonprojecting, just looking at that which is, not creating it, not imagining it, not adding anything to it: just encountering it as it is.”