"And they have even forgotten that they cannot see without the glasses, so if they are looking and seeing, it is an absolute certainty that the glasses are in place.

"But if you have been using glasses for years, slowly, slowly they become part of you, they become your eyes. You don't think of them as separate from you. But each pair of glasses can give its own color to the things it sees. You are the seer behind – the glasses cannot see themselves. Things outside don't have the color that the glass is imposing upon them, but you have become so identified with the glasses.

"I used to live with a man – he was a very nice man – who had glasses from his very childhood, and now they had become thicker and thicker. He was so accustomed to them that he would go to sleep with his glasses on. When one day I saw him sleeping with the glasses on, I woke him and said, 'This is too much! Do you need these glasses for dreams? You can see dreams without glasses.'

"He became aware that he had completely forgotten that those glasses were separate from him. For fifty years continuously they have been there, and he cannot see without them, so even to go to his bed he has to use them, and slowly, slowly, he started sleeping with his glasses on.

"His whole world depends on his glasses: if they are green, everything will look green; if they are blue, everything will look blue; and he will believe that what he is seeing cannot be wrong.

"Man's mind also is only an instrument. The glasses are outside the skull – the mind is inside the skull, so you cannot turn it off every day. And you are so close to it within, that the very closeness has become the identification, so that whatever the mind sees is thought to be the reality. But mind cannot see the reality; mind can see only its own prejudices. It can see its own projections displayed on the screen of the world.

"I have told you, once it happened that I was traveling from Bombay to Calcutta, and on the railway station hundreds of people had come to see me off."