"In any other activity you can be total and aware. In music, dance, or different…when you are total in it the experience is so beautiful, so exhilarating, you forget completely to be aware. The experience is so valuable that you would like it to remain forever, enveloping you. But the need for enlightenment is that even in this tremendously beautiful experience you can stand aloof.

"It is easy when you are suffering to stand aloof, to be aware. It is easy when you are miserable to be aware, because who wants to be miserable? Who wants to be in suffering? The experience of suffering, anguish, misery, itself, helps you to get out of it. But the experience of music, the experience of dance, the experience of a great painter, sculptor – any creative activity that absorbs you and needs you to be total in it, does not leave even a small part out of it, is the most difficult.

"These people were remarkable. They had a tremendous beauty – of individuality, freedom, creativity – but something was missing. And they also felt that something was missing, but they could not figure out what it was that was missing. Because the experience is so fulfilling, it is impossible to conceive what is missing.

"One of the musicians asked me, 'Can you help me to figure out what can be the missing thing? – because I don't see that anything is missing: I'm totally in it.'

"And he was surprised when I said to him, 'That's what the problem is: you have to do a very contradictory act simultaneously – be total in your music and yet a watcher too.'

"He said, 'It is difficult.'

"'I know it is difficult,' I said, 'but there is no other way. It is not impossible. Just because your experience is so juicy, you don't want to get away from it. Your whole being is drowned in it and you don't want to get out of it. But you don't know that if you can get out of it, you are not going to be a loser. Far more blissfulness, far greater benediction is waiting for you.

"'You just give it a try."