"If they want to play the game of being unenlightened, it's perfectly okay. If you have become fed up with the world, if you are fed up with your anguish and anxiety and you have realized that now it is time to awake, then there is no difficulty. Nobody can prevent you, nobody is preventing you. It is only your own decision to play the game as an unenlightened being or to play the game as an enlightened being, it is only a question of inner decision.

"In a single moment, in one stroke, you can become enlightened. It is not a gradual process, because enlightenment is not something that you have to invent. It is something that you have to discover. It is already there. It is not something that you have to manufacture. If you have to manufacture it, of course, it will take time; but it is already there. Close your eyes and see it there. Be silent and have a taste of it. Your very nature is what I call enlightenment. Enlightenment is not something alien, outside you. It is not somewhere else in time and space. It is you, your very core.

"I was staying at Mulla Nasruddin's. One morning when we were sipping tea, the wife of Mulla Nasruddin told him, 'Mulla, you swore terribly at me in your sleep last night.'

"Mulla Nasruddin laughed and said, 'Who was asleep?'

"You are not asleep. Whatsoever you are doing, you have chosen to do it. It is your choice. And I insist that it is your choice, because if it is your choice, then it can be dropped immediately, the moment you are ready to change your choice. You have chosen your life to be this way – the way of agony, anguish.

"Certainly you will ask, 'Why should one want to choose a life of agony, anguish, anxiety, pain, suffering? Why? Why should one choose a life of sorrow?' There are reasons, great reasons behind it: because only in sorrow can you be. In ecstasy you disappear. Only in pain can you exist as an entity. In bliss you are lost, as a drop is lost in the ocean."