Listen well, my dear, listen well! The sin­ner, which I am and which you are, is a sin­ner, but in times to come he will be Brahma again, he will reach the Nir­vana, will be Buddha—and now see: these ‘times to come’ are a de­cep­tion, are only a par­able! The sin­ner is not on his way to be­come a Buddha, he is not in the pro­cess of de­vel­op­ing, though our ca­pa­city for think­ing does not know how else to pic­ture these things. No, within the sin­ner is now and today already the fu­ture Buddha, his fu­ture is already all there, you have to wor­ship in him, in you, in every­one the Buddha which is com­ing into be­ing, the pos­sible, the hid­den Buddha. The world, my friend Govinda, is not im­per­fect, or on a slow path to­wards per­fec­tion: no, it is per­fect in every mo­ment, all sin already car­ries the di­vine for­give­ness in it­self, all small chil­dren already have the old per­son in them­selves, all in­fants already have death, all dy­ing people the eternal life. It is not pos­sible for any per­son to see how far an­other one has already pro­gressed on his path; in the rob­ber and dice-gam­bler, the Buddha is wait­ing; in the Brah­min, the rob­ber is wait­ing. In deep med­it­a­tion, there is the pos­sib­il­ity to put time out of ex­ist­ence, to see all life which was, is, and will be as if it was sim­ul­tan­eous, and there everything is good, everything is per­fect, everything is Brah­man. There­fore, I see whatever ex­ists as good, death is to me like life, sin like holi­ness, wis­dom like fool­ish­ness, everything has to be as it is, everything only re­quires my con­sent, only my will­ing­ness, my lov­ing agree­ment, to be good for me, to do noth­ing but work for my be­ne­fit, to be un­able to ever harm me. I have ex­per­i­enced on my body and on my soul that I needed sin very much, I needed lust, the de­sire for pos­ses­sions, van­ity, and needed the most shame­ful des­pair, in or­der to learn how to give up all res­ist­ance, in or­der to learn how to love the world, in or­der to stop com­par­ing it to some world I wished, I ima­gined, some kind of per­fec­tion I had made up, but to leave it as it is and to love it and to en­joy be­ing a part of it.—These, O Govinda, are some of the thoughts which have come into my mind.”