"Presence is simply presence. The flower is no more, it has become the fragrance. You can hold the flower in your hand, but you cannot hold fragrance in your hand. To experience fragrance, hands are not needed at all. That's how you should come close to me: you should be more sensitive towards the presence, synchronize with my presence.

"And the only way to synchronize with my presence is for you also to dissolve your person and become a presence. Only two presences can meet and mingle and merge. If you are a person then there is no possibility of melting and merging with me. You remain a rock and I am a river – how are you going to melt and merge with me?

"You also become a presence – that's my whole teaching, my whole message. Let the person die, let the flower disappear, because the person is nothing but a mask. The presence is your essence. The presence is what is meant by godliness. There is no God, only godliness; but because we are persons we imagine God also as a person.

"Our attitude towards ourselves is bound to reflect in our other attitudes too; our attitude towards existence is bound to be part of our attitude towards ourselves.

"You are still searching in my eyes for a person – certainly there is none. Hence you can become afraid, scared, because you will see emptiness, nothingness.

"There are three stages of being with me. One stage is that of a student who thinks about me as a person. He never looks into my eyes, he never tries to penetrate my being, he remains concerned with the superficial, the formal, my body, my words. He remains an outsider, curious, desirous to know more about me, longing for more and more knowledge, information. But there is an infinite distance between me and him. He will gather a little information about the mysteries of life and will leave. He will become more knowledgeable, more egoistic; in fact he will leave more sick than when he had come, more burdened than when he had come – burdened by knowledge.

"He will not have any taste of my wisdom."