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side, but simultaneously exists somewhere else. He has joined the SANSAR, the world -- and sannyas, the renunciation.
When I give sannyas to you, I am doing a Hassidic work. I don't tell you to move to the Himalayas because that would be a choice, and a choice is always serious -- because you would have to leave something, you would have to cut a part of your being, you would have to cripple yourself.
When you choose you move in a certain direction -- then the whole is not accepted. If you live in the world, then you reject renunciation, sannyas, then you reject meditation. You say: 'They are not for us. We are worldly people.' Then one day you get fed up with the world, you leave the world. Now you are afraid to come into the world. Now you say: 'We are unworldly people. We live outside the world!' But in both the cases, you remain half-hearted, you are never total.
A Hassidic sage is total. He lives in the world, he lives as ordinarily as everybody else. He has no madness, no megalomania about his extraordinariness. A Hassidic rabbi is absolutely ordinary -- and that is his extraordinariness. He has no need to show it. He is!
There are other saints who have a need to show that they are special. That very need shows that deep down they are very ordinary, because this is part of the ordinary mind: to be always in need, always expecting, always wanting people to feel and think that you are not ordinary. This is a very ordinary need. Only somebody who is really extraordinary can be ordinary -- because he has no need to convince others: 'I am special.'
Once I was travelling in a train. In my compartment three persons were also there. They talked about a thousand and one things. The journey was long and they needed to be occupied. Then their talk drifted towards the subject of happiness.
One of them was a very rich man and he said: 'I am happy because I have attained all the riches that I need. I have succeeded, I have arrived.' I looked at the man's face -- no sign of any arrival, a sort of nervousness. In fact, the way he was saying it -- with such confidence -- was nothing but to hide a deep nervousness. I could see he was
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