"You are alive, but if you have not penetrated to your innermost core of being or non-being your life is going to remain only on the surface. You will never know, you will never come to an understanding of the tremendous energy phenomenon that you were. You will die without being aware of what life was.

"If you live in such a way that the eyes see and yet do not see, that the ears hear and yet do not hear, that the heart throbs and yet remains like a rock, you are alive in the physiological sense of the word, medically you are alive – but not existentially. Then what happens? Then all your understanding is like misunderstanding. Then it would have been better that you had had no eyes: at least you would not have forgotten the fact that you are blind, at least you would have known that you cannot see, at least there would have been no possibility of misunderstanding.

"Better it would have been that you had had no ears. Better it would have been that you were not alive but really dead; at least there would have been some reality in it. A really dead person is at least really dead but an 'unreally' alive person is not really alive, he is in a limbo, neither alive nor dead. He drags, he doesn't exist, he has no inner dimension. He moves on the periphery without ever coming in touch with the center.

"When I say these things about man I am not talking about man as an abstraction. Whenever I say 'man,' I mean you. My man is concrete, not abstract; my man is not a concept, it is you. And this is the way you have been living for many lives: living a dead life. That's why you are so bored, bored to the very bottom: so tired, tired of existing. A thousand and one times you think of committing suicide and drop all this nonsense – but even that you cannot do. Even that is not possible, because a suspicion is always within you that there is much in life that you are missing. You know deep down somewhere in your heart of hearts that this is not a real life that you are living."