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Even the illusion that you are good gives you life to move, gives you legs to stand on, gives you confidence. You become almost centered even with the illusion, and this center that happens in illusion is the ego. When you are really centered, that is the self. But that happens only when the truth is realized: when your inner energies have been transformed, the lower has been transformed into the higher, the earthly into the heavenly; when the devil has become divine, when you have become radiant with the glory that is yours; when the seed has come to sprout, when the mustard seed has become a great tree.
But that is a long process; one needs the courage to wait, one needs not to be tempted by the shortcut. And in life there are no shortcuts; only illusions are shortcuts. Life is arduous because only through arduous struggle does growth come to you -- it never comes easily. You cannot get it cheaply; anything that is cheap cannot help you to grow. Suffering helps -- the very effort, the very struggle, the long path that gives you sharpness, growth, experience, maturity. How can you achieve maturity through a shortcut? There is a possibility -- now they are working with animals, and sooner or later they will work with human beings. There is a possibility: you can be injected with hormones. A child of ten can be injected with hormones and he will become a young man of twenty. But do you think he will attain the maturity that he should have attained if he had passed through ten years of life? The struggle, the arising sex, the need to control, the need to love: to be free and yet controlled, to be free and yet centered; to move with the other, to suffer in love, to learn -- all that will not be there. This man who looks twenty is really ten years of age. Through hormones you have only blown up his body.
But they are doing this with animals, with fruit, with trees. A tree can be injected, and the tree that would naturally come to flower in three years will come in one year. But those flowers will lack something. It is difficult to see because you are not flowers, but they will lack something. They have been forced, they have not passed through a seasoning.
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