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Zen masters you can feel: "Yes, it is true!" Not only is it intellectually true -- you can feel it is existentially true. "Yes! This is what is happening to me also." When listening to me, there are bound to be moments when you will see that you have been for a few moments like a Buddha -- the same grace, the same awareness, the same silence; the same world of beatitudes, of blessings, of benediction.
There will be moments, glimpses of your own center. They cannot be permanent; again and again you will be thrown back to the periphery... and then it will look weird. Then you will see that "I am like the Emperor: not understanding at all; stupid, sad, frustrated; missing the meaning of life" -- because you exist on two planes: the plane of the periphery and the plane of the center.
But, by and by, the weirdness will disappear. By and by, you will become capable of moving from the periphery to the center and from the center to the periphery very smoothly -- just as you walk into your house and out of your house. You don't create any dichotomy. You don't say, "I am outside the house so how can I go inside the house?" You don't say, "I am inside the house so how can I come outside the house?" It is sunny outside, it is warm, pleasant -- you sit outside in the garden. Then it is becoming hotter and hotter, and you start perspiring. Now it is no longer pleasant -- it is becoming uncomfortable: you simply get up and move inside the house. There it is cool; there it is not uncomfortable. Now, there it is pleasant. You go on moving in and out.
In the same way a man of awareness and understanding moves from the periphery to the center, from the center to the periphery. He never gets fixated anywhere. From the marketplace to the monastery, from sansar to sannyas, from being extrovert to being introvert -- he continuously goes on moving, because these two are his wings, they are not against each other. They may be balanced in opposite directions -- they have to be; if both the wings are on one side, the bird cannot fly into the sky -- they have to be balancing, they have to be in opposite directions, but still they belong to the same bird, and they serve
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