"So first try to understand all the meanings of innocence.

"The first is: no past, only future.

"The past corrupts because it gives you memories, experiences, expectations. All those combined together make you clever but not clear. They make you cunning but not intelligent. They may help you to succeed in the world but in your innermost being you will be a failure. And all the success of the world means nothing compared to the failure that finally you are going to face, because ultimately only your inner self remains with you. All is lost: your glory, your power, your name, your fame – all start disappearing like shadows.

"At the end only that remains which you had brought in the very beginning. You can take from this world only that which you have brought in.

"In India it is common wisdom that the world is like a waiting room in a railway station; it is not your house. You are not going to remain in the waiting room forever. Nothing in the waiting room belongs to you – the furniture, the paintings on the wall. You use them – you see the painting, you sit on the chair, you rest on the bed – but nothing belongs to you. You are just here for a few minutes, or for a few hours at the most, then you will be gone.

"Yes, what you have brought in with you, into the waiting room, you will take away with you; that's yours. What have you brought into the world? And the world certainly is a waiting room. The waiting may not be in seconds, minutes, hours, days, it may be in years; but what does it matter whether you wait seven hours, or seventy years?

"You may forget, in seventy years, that you are just in a waiting room. You may start thinking perhaps you are the owner, perhaps this is the house you have built. You may start putting your nameplate on the waiting room.

"There are people – I have seen it, because I was traveling so much: people have written their names in the bathrooms of the waiting room. People have engraved their names on the furniture of the waiting room."