"And about you I can say it absolutely: that it is only a shadow that is torturing you. The ego has disappeared, but you have not yet been able…alert… The ego has disappeared in deep love with me.

"The ego disappears in two ways. When it disappears because of meditation one immediately becomes aware that it is gone, because meditation means awareness and nothing else, so there is no gap. On the path of awareness the disappearance of the ego and the recognition is instantaneous, simultaneous.

"But on the path of love ego disappears and the recognition comes only later on. The path of love is the path of the drunkard. He is utterly drunk, so how can he recognize what has happened or what is happening? And when you are in love, so much goes on happening that even to take note of it all becomes more and more difficult. And when deeper things happen, it really takes time for them to reach to your recognition.

"Meditation is the way of the head. Recognition also is part of the head-function, so meditation happens, immediately recognition happens. Love happens in the heart, and there is a great distance between love and logic, the heart and the head.

"In the heart you are no more; the head is still clinging to an old idea. The bird has left the cage long before…. You are drowning in me more and more every day.

"Dad was pretending to be asleep. 'Maybe the kids will go away,' he thought, 'if I play possum.' But they persisted in their efforts to try and rouse him from his delicious sleep. Finally his little daughter tried to open one of his eyelids, looked intently in, and reported to her brothers, 'He is still in there!'

"I have looked into you and I say you are not there. It will be difficult to believe what I am saying, because how can you believe it unless it becomes your own recognition? But my saying it will help, it will help the recognition to happen sooner than otherwise. The news has started traveling from the heart.

"Physiologically the heart and the head are very close – maybe the distance is not more than eighteen inches – but spiritually the head and the heart, these two points, are farthest apart."