Awareness is the goose which is not in the bottle of the mind. But you are believing that it is in it and asking everyone how to get it out. And there are idiots who will help you with techniques to get out of it. I call them idiots because they have not understood the thing at all.

The goose is out, has never been in, so the question of bringing it out does not arise.

Mind is just a procession of thoughts passing in front of you on the screen of the brain. You are an observer. But you start getting identified with beautiful things – those are bribes. And once you get caught in the beautiful things you are also caught in the ugly things, because mind cannot exist without duality.

Awareness cannot exist with duality, and mind cannot exist without duality. Awareness is non-dual, and mind is dual. So just watch. I don’t teach you any solutions. I teach you the solution: Just get back a little and watch. Create a distance between you and your mind.

Whether it is good, beautiful, delicious, something that you would like to enjoy closely, or it is ugly – remain as far away as possible. Look at it just the way you look at a film. But people get identified even with films….

I have seen, when I was young…I have not seen any movie for a long time. But I have seen people weeping, tears coming down – and nothing is happening! It is good that in a movie house it is dark; it saves them from feeling embarrassed, and nothing is happening!

I used to ask my father, “Did you see? The fellow by your side was crying!”

He said, “The whole hall was crying. The scene was such….”

“But,” I said, “there is only a screen and nothing else. Nobody is killed, there is no tragedy happening – just a projection of a film, just pictures moving on the screen. And people laugh, and people weep, and for three hours they are almost lost. They become part of the movie, they become identified with some character….”

My father said to me, “If you are raising questions about people’s reactions then you cannot enjoy the film.”

I said, “I can enjoy the film, but I don’t want to cry; I don’t see any enjoyment in it. I can see it as a film, but I don’t want to become a part of it. These people are all becoming a part of it.”

My grandfather had an old barber who was an opium addict. For something which was possible to do in five minutes he would take two hours, and he would talk continuously. But they were old friends from their childhood. I can still see my grandfather sitting in the chair of the old barber…. And he was a lovely talker. These opium addicts have a certain quality, a beauty of talking, telling stories about themselves, what is happening day-to-day…it is true!

My grandfather would simply be saying, “Yes, right, that’s great….”

I said to him one day, “About everything you go on saying, ‘Yes, right, it is great.’ Sometimes he is talking nonsense, simply irrelevant.”