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That’s why it is long and arduous – because you are not herenow. You are far away from herenow. You will have to come, you will have to journey.

When I say truth is not far away, I mean truth is herenow – I don’t mean you are not far away from truth. You are far away from truth. Truth is not far away from you, God cannot be far away from you. God exists in you as you. God exists as eternity, not as past or future. God simply is.

How God can be far away? There is no place for him to be far away. He is all over the place. He is everywhere – in your breathing, in your heartbeat. But you are not here. God has not gone away, you have gone away from him.

You have to understand this. For example, in the night you sleep and you dream – you dream you have gone to the moon. You are here, but the dream has taken you far away. In the morning when you awake, you will not find yourself on the moon – you will be here in Pune. But in the dream you were far away from your reality.

You have to come back from your dreams… and the journey is arduous because you have invested so much in those dreams, and you are hoping to gain so much from those dreams, and you have lived in those dreams for so long that they have become reality, your reality.

The East calls this dreaming state of mind 'maya' – illusion. And then you can go on searching for God in your illusions and you will not find him. You have to awake. And to be awake is arduous because a thousand and one dreams will be shattered. And in those dreams all your joys, all your so-called successes, ambitions, are involved. Your whole ego is involved. The ego will be shattered.

You are here, but the ego has gone to the moon – and the ego can only live through dreams, it can only live through illusions. It is nourished by illusions. The more illusions you have, the more grandiose an ego you have. The greater your illusions, the bigger your ego. It is very difficult to renounce those dreams.

In the East this is called 'sannyas': to renounce those dreams. When it is said, “Renounce the world,” it is not meant the actual world – the wife, the husband, the children, the house, the marketplace. No, not at all. What is really meant is this dream-world in which you go on constantly moving away from yourself and away from reality. Renounce the dreams! And that is arduous.

Now, let me read your question again: “Today you said that the way to enlightenment is long and arduous” – it is – “and also that it is here and now” – it is. “As it is herenow, how can it be long and arduous?” That’s why.

You are not to go anywhere, you have to come here! You have already gone somewhere. You have moved away from your innermost core. You never come home. And God exists there, but you keep God at the back. Your eyes are roaming far away in distant stars; they never come back. From one star to another you go on hopping. Your mind is a vagabond.

So it is arduous and yet it is easy. The contradiction is only apparent. It is arduous because of you: it is easy because of God. If you think of God you can take it very easily, you can relax. If you depend on yourself, it is very arduous.

That’s why I say if you depend on yourself, if you depend on your effort, you may never come back – because it is through effort that you have gone away. You have to surrender. In that very surrendering, grace descends.

And what can you surrender? What have you got? Why are you so afraid of surrendering? You have only dreams and nothing else, just soap bubbles.

Surrender your dreams and the truth is herenow. That’s why I say 'now or never' – because existence always exists in the now, and the mind exists in the then. Existence is here and the mind is always there, and they never meet. Here and there never meet; now and then never meet.

Just look deep down in your mind: it is very rare to come across a contemporary.

Somebody is living five thousand years back; he is still part of the days of Rig Veda. He is still reading Rig Veda; he is still following the Vedic ritual. Five thousand years have passed, but he has not come here, now. He lives there: in the dead, in the gone, in the memory.

Why do you call yourself a Hindu or a Christian, or a Mohammedan or a Jaina? To call yourself these things simply means you cling to the past. These are names that come from the past. Herenow you are only a consciousness, neither Hindu, nor Mohammedan, nor Christian.

If you get entangled with the past, you are a Hindu, or a brahmin or a sudra. Or there are a few other people who think they are very progressive: Communists, Socialists. They are involved in the future; hence they think they are very progressive. But to be in the past is to be as far away from the present as to be in the future. It makes no difference.

There are two kinds of mind in the world. One: involved with the past, the orthodox mind; and the other: involved in the future, the so-called revolutionary mind – but both are minds. The orthodox thinks the golden age has passed, the Ramrajya has passed. And the revolutionary, the so-called revolutionary, thinks the golden age has to come, the Utopia has yet to happen. His eyes are there on the distant future.

But there is no difference between these two; they are the same kind of people. Both are avoiding the present, both are escaping from the present, both are denying reality. So a Communist or a Mohammedan, a Socialist or a Hindu, to me are all in the same boat – the boat of time.

Whom do I call religious? The man who is no longer in the boat of time, who starts living in eternity, who lives in the now, who has no past and no future. Who does not go to the Rig Veda and who does not go to Das Kapital – who simply goes in himself. Who looks at the sun that is there on the horizon, and who listens to the birds that are singing right now, who looks at the trees that are blooming. Just see that quality of being; here, that collectedness, that integrity, that centering I call religiousness.

Religion does not mean affiliation. Religion means being in reality without any dreams. Dreams come either from the past or from the future. A religious man is an empty man, a hollow bamboo. He allows the reality to live through him, he flows with it. He has no goals, he is not going anywhere. He is just being here, as God is just being here… hence the meeting.

That’s why I say 'now or never'. 'Now' is eternity. By 'never' I am denying time: I am saying you will not find God in time.

The present is not part of time; that has to be remembered. Ordinarily you have been taught that time has three tenses: past, present, future. That is absolutely wrong. It has no understanding about time. Time has only two tenses – past and future. The present is not part of time: the present is part of eternity. The present is that which abides, which is always.

To relax into it is meditation, or call it prayer. And to know it is celebration. Infinite joy starts showering on you, great benediction descends; with the past and the future all worries disappear, all dreams disappear.

That’s what Ikkyu means when he says the original mind is clean, clean of all ideas. It is a mirror without dust. It simply mirrors that which is.