"One goes on from despair to illusion, from illusion to despair. No energy is left to celebrate. You are in a constant tension between despair and hope. Your life becomes nothing but a tension between that which is and that which should be. You cannot feel being, you remain engrossed in becoming; becoming is misery, being is celebration.

"Celebration is not because some desire is fulfilled – because no desire is ever fulfilled. Desire as such cannot be fulfilled. Desire is only a way to avoid the present moment. Desire creates the future and takes you far away. Desire is a drug; it keeps you stoned, it does not allow you to see the reality – that which is herenow.

"Celebration means dropping this whole trip of becoming – just being here. When becoming disappears, all the smoke of becoming disappears, there is the flame of being, and that very flame is celebration.

"Celebration is without any cause. Celebration is simply because we are. We are made out of the stuff called celebration. That's our natural state – to celebrate – as natural as it is for the trees to bloom, for birds to sing, for rivers to flow to the ocean. Celebration is a natural state. It has nothing to do with your desires and their fulfillment, with your hopes and their fulfillment; it is already the case. But to see the celebration that is already happening at the deepest core of your being you will have to drop becoming, you will have to understand the futility of becoming.

"So something tremendously beautiful is happening, Gopal. Allow it. Yes, it is exactly so: when you are utterly disillusioned and you don't create any more illusions – that is what I mean by utterly disillusioned…. Disillusionment comes many times in everybody's life, but out of disillusion you again create new illusions. You cannot live without illusions; it has become a habit, a habit of many lives. You cannot live in the reality as it is, you want it to be something else – you are always wanting it to be something else – and reality has no obligation to anybody to change itself. And it is good that it doesn't bother about your desires, otherwise there will be chaos because there are so many people desiring, projecting."