"Merging into the ocean, it merges into the universal music, into the eternal dance.

"Rivers come and go; the ocean remains. And the whole dance of the river, its song, its beauty, is because of the ocean. It is dancing and is joyful because the ocean is coming closer every moment. If the same river is lost in a desert, all dance will disappear, all song will disappear. That will be a death.

"The river is so tremendously blissful because it knows it is going to the ocean. At the ocean it appears on the one hand as if the river has disappeared, but in fact only the banks disappear – the river remains. And the banks are a bondage. The river was dancing, but its feet were chained. Those banks were its prison. The dance will remain, will become freer – so vast that perhaps you cannot see it, because the river is not going to disappear; it is going to become the ocean.

"You have raised a significant question, because it happens to all those who follow the path. Even the beginning is so beautiful that many think they have arrived and there is no need to go any further.

"One has to remember that each beginning has to be transformed not into a stopover forever, but into a new beginning. And the journey is infinite, so whenever you feel, 'This is the place to stop,' you will always be wrong, because existence stops nowhere. It simply goes on evolving. It has no limits, no boundaries.

"Looked at from the point of view of the river – and you are not the river, you are just watching the river – it seems to be lost in the ocean. But you can say just the contrary – that the ocean is lost in the river.

"Kabir, one of the great mystics of this country, when he was young and for the first time felt the melting and merging with the divine, he wrote a small poem – two lines of which are:

The dewdrop disappears
into the ocean.

"Kabir is no more. Although Kabir had started to search, what he wanted to find has been found; but the searcher has disappeared."