"But one can fall back, because the flowering is so new and so fragile and your past is so old and so strong – it can pull you back; it is still there.

"Awakening is getting very close to your center. And as you get closer to the center, falling back becomes more and more difficult because your new experience is gathering power, strength, experience, and the old is losing. But the old is still there; it has not disappeared. Ordinarily people don't fall from awakening, but the possibility remains: one can fall.

"Self-realization is reaching to your center. Many religions have believed that self-realization is the end – for example, Jainism – you have come to your ultimate truth. It is not true. Self-realization is only a dewdrop which has become aware, alert, contented, fulfilled. It is almost impossible to fall back from self-realization – but I am saying almost impossible, not absolutely impossible, because the self can deceive you; it can bring your ego back.

"The self and the ego are very similar. The self is the natural thing and the ego is the synthetic, so it happens sometimes that a self-realized man becomes a pious egoist. His egoism is not going to harm anyone, but it certainly prevents him from dropping into the ocean and disappearing completely.

"Enlightenment is the dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf into the vast, infinite ocean. Once the dewdrop has fallen into the ocean, now there is no way even to find it. The question of turning back does not arise.

"Enlightenment, hence, is the ultimate truth. What begins as flowering moves on the path of awakening, reaches to self-realization. Then one quantum leap more – disappearing into the eternal, into the infinite.

"You are no more, only existence is.

"I have told you about Kabir, India's greatest mystic. When he was young, he became self-realized and he wrote a small couplet:

Herat, herat he sakhi
Rahya, Kabir, herai

"'Searching and searching and searching, oh my friend, the searcher is lost. Seeking and seeking and seeking, the seeker is lost.'

Bund samani samund mein
Sokat herijai

"'The dewdrop has slipped into the ocean; now there is no way to get it back.'

"But it was too early to say that."