"The playfulness that I talk about comes very slowly. You cannot just jump out of your seriousness which you have accumulated for lives. Now it has a force of its own.

"It is not a simple matter to relax; it is one of the most complex phenomena possible, because all that we are taught is tension, anxiety, anguish. Seriousness is the very core the society is built around. Playfulness is for small children, not for grown-up people. And I am teaching you to be children again, to be playful again. It is a quantum leap, a jump, but it takes time to understand.

"And as far as I am concerned, you have been immensely successful: objectively, certainly, but subjectively too. Unexpectedly you have been successful. Anybody else in your place would have been in a madhouse.

"You were excited, and it is natural to be excited. When somebody understands me, feels me, he immediately starts feeling an urgency – not a single moment to lose. And the word has to be spread. A kind of tremendous immediacy overwhelms. It is natural. It is true that there is not a single moment to lose. And if you love me, you would like all those people to come to me, because they may not get the opportunity again – for centuries, for lives together.

"When you love, and you have found a treasure, you would like to share it. And if the treasure is such that it can disappear any moment, how can you avoid the feeling of immense urgency? You will have to shout from the tops of the houses.

"And the response that you will get is absolutely certain and fixed. The more you would like people to come to me, the more they will escape – from you, from the very idea of coming to me. And the only way to escape is to ridicule you, to laugh at you, to call you mad. That is their way of defending themselves. If they listen to you understandingly, if they allow you to overwhelm their being, to overflow into their being, to flood their being, then they will also find themselves in the same grip."