The three months of solitude were of the greatest significance for me. I came away from them very much strengthened — ready to share my insights with people who were interested in hearing them. Still today, I have the sounds of the jungle in my ears: the cries of the monkeys and birds and the wind rushing through the banana leaves. But there were also times of utter silence, at dawn and twilight. I took walks in the jungle in order to look at nature as a part of myself.
If we cannot see the multitudinous splendor of light in every form when it is right before our eyes, then we have to be awakened, jolted out of complacency, cast down from the ivory tower, and buried under the black earth of all our materialistic fantasies. It’s quite a shock and painful. Fearing loss, fear will bind us to forms that have already collapsed and are dissolving. But light is there even in the darkness. At the point where one dies, at the point where one stops trying to assert the ego, at the point one gives up in despair, at the point where one says, “I yield. I give in,” then one finds the Divine within.