"It cannot last long. Soon your body will remind you, your hurting back will remind you that you are on the earth, and the window has closed. Now it not only hurts your back, it hurts all over your being. And out of great helplessness – that what can you do so that the window can remain open forever? – there is pain. But this pain is also sweet.

"It is not the pain of a wound, it is the pain of a vision that was just here and is lost. It is different from ordinary pains; it is not physical. It is a pain that comes out of the longing, a deep-felt longing, to be beyond the body, to be uplifted into superconsciousness. You have just tasted a little bit of it, and that taste is enough to create the longing.

"And all these things get mixed up and tears come to you. Those tears will also be of mixed-up feelings: of the blissful state that you had suddenly stumbled upon, of the lost treasure that was just so close by, of the longing to get it back and the sweet memory still lingering, the helplessness that you cannot do anything that can bring it up again – because in the first place you had not done anything to bring it up. It has happened.

"It will happen again, but a happening always has, as a shadow to it, a kind of helplessness. You cannot do it; it happens when it happens. It is not within your power, within your hands. All these feelings are mixed up in your tears.

"And tears have a basic function that is giving you relief. They wash all the confusion out of you. They take it away from you. They clean your eyes and your vision. So those tears are not of pain, not of pleasure, but of a tremendous experience that has been lost. And the tears help you to be relieved of the pain. They refresh you again. They bring you back to the place where you were before you felt the feeling of superconsciousness, just a little hit, a ray of light entering into your being."