"We have been waiting for you since ages. You are welcome. You have returned home.'

"Buddha said, 'I will stay here, I will have to stay here. Until the last human being passes by me and enters the door, I cannot enter.'

"This is a beautiful parable. Don't take it literally. But it is true. Once you become aware, once you become a being – once you are – infinite compassion arises in you. Buddha has made compassion the criterion of enlightenment. Once you have attained you don't suffer for yourself, but you suffer for others: seeing the misery all around, seeing the whole absurdity of it; seeing the possibility that you can come out of it immediately, right now, and still you go on clinging.

"By one hand you push it away, by another hand you pull it close. You go on creating your own prisons and still you would like to be freed. Your whole effort is contradictory. You want to come to the east and you go towards the west.

"Seeing youyes, I always cry.

"The second question:

Osho,
For ten years I have identified myself as a poet. But since I took sannyas ten days ago it has become unimportant to me whether or not I ever write another verse, even though I have often heard you praise the poet. What has happened?

"The first thing: you cannot be identified as being a poet, because poetry is something that happens only when you are not there. If you are there, it will just be rubbish. It happens only when you are absent. That's why it is so beautiful. It comes into your emptiness: it fills you – your vacuum. You become pregnant with the unknown, with the strange.

"The poet is just a mother. The mother is not going to produce the child. The child has been conceived: at the most the mother is tending it, caring for it deep within her heart, trying to give it a body – not the soul. Poetry comes to you just like a child is conceived – in deep love. In deep receptivity you become a womb and the poetry is conceived. It is a pregnancy."