"Even when you think, feel, that this is the same situation, it is never the same situation. Each morning is a new morning, and each morning the sun that you encounter is the new sun. I am not talking about the material sun, I am talking about the beauty, the benediction, the blessing that it brings every day – it is so utterly new.

"If you go on carrying pictures of the past you will not be able to see the new. Your eyes will be covered with your experiences, expectations, and those eyes will not be able to see that which confronts you. That's how we go on missing life: the past becomes a barrier, encloses you, traps you, into something that is no more. You become encapsulated in the dead. And the more you become experienced, grown-up, the shell of the dead experience goes on becoming thicker and thicker around you. You become more and more closed. Slowly slowly all windows, all doors, are closed. Then you exist, but you exist alienated, you exist uprooted. Then you don't have a communion with life. You don't have a communion with the trees and the stars and the mountains. You can't have a communion, because a great China Wall of your past surrounds you.

"When I say become receptive, I mean become a child again.

"Remember Jesus, who goes on saying to his disciples: Unless you are like small children you will not be able to enter into my kingdom of God. What he is saying is exactly the meaning of receptivity. The child is receptive because he knows nothing; not knowing anything, he is receptive. The old man is not receptive because he knows too much; knowing too much, he is closed. He has to be reborn, he has to die to the past and become a child again – not in the body, of course, but the consciousness should always be like a child; not childish, remember, but like a child, grown-up, mature, but innocent.

"And that's how one learns, learns the truth that is presented to you every moment of your life, learns to know the guest which comes and knocks on your doors every moment, day in, day out, year in, year out."