"The second word, contemplation, means to allow your mind to move only on a certain object. In a way it includes concentration, but in another way it gives you a little more rope. For example, you are contemplating on love, its meanings, its implications…. Contemplation is the method of philosophy.

"Meditation, in English, simply means a far more deep concentration. The first concentration is superficial: you just stay on the surface, you touch the circumference. In meditation you go to the very center of the object. But remember, all are object-oriented.

"The fourth word, zen, is introverted. It is going in; it is non-objective. It is neither scientific nor philosophical; it covers a totally different area. It means not to know the object but to experience the subject.

"Closing yourself in and finding the center of your life and consciousness is the goal of Zen.

"Unfortunately, nothing like Zen ever developed in the West. And because the experience never developed there was no need for any word for it. Words are needed only when there are experiences to be expressed. In the East, concentration, contemplation and meditation are all mental activities.

"Zen is going beyond the mind, where no object exists. And remember, the moment the object is no more there, you cannot maintain the subject; they are two sides of the same coin. On the outside the object drops, on the inside the subject disappears, and then what remains is that spotless cleanness, that silence out of which everything arises and disappears. That is dhyan in Sanskrit, jhan in Pali, ch'an in Chinese and zen in Japanese.

"They have all traveled from dhyan, and whenever a word moves from one language to another language it automatically takes different shapes, different pronunciations. But you have to understand it clearly, that only the words are different; the space they point to is one, where there is no object and no subject, where there is no knowledge and no knower; just pure innocence, the fragrance of pure innocence. And the flowers that blossom in that innocence are of ultimate ecstasy, of absolute bliss.

"The whole East has been in search, for thousands of years, for the origin of your very life, the very center of your being."