You yourself are the teacher, and the pupil, you're the master, you're the guru, you are the leader, you are everything! And, to understand is to transform what is.
In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.
The purpose of having the title 'World-Teacher' is to acknowledge, to show, the condition of mind and heart when you have achieved. It is like saying: 'I have painted a picture'. It is like saying: 'I have written a poem'. It is an assertion of the fact of attainment, rather than the narrow understanding that is given to labels and phrases. What the phrase indicates is of importance.
Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree', or `that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.
A mind that is disciplined, controlled, is free within its own pattern; but that is not freedom. The end of discipline is conformity; its path leads to the known, and the known is never the free.
What is of great importance is that everyone should concern himself with what I am saying, rather than with the personality of the Teacher, the body of the Teacher, where He dwells, and so on. That will lead to confusion.
Clever people, people who are cunning, do not know what love is because their minds are so sharp, because they are so clever, because they are so superficial - which means to be on the surface, and love is not a thing that exists on the surface.
Religion becomes a matter of belief, and belief acts as a limitation on the mind; and the mind then is never free. But it is only in freedom that you can find out what is true, what is God, not through any belief; because your belief projects what you think God ought to be, what you think ought to be true. If you believe God is love, God is good, God is this or that, your very belief prevents you from understanding what is God, what is true.
It does not in the least concern me whether I shall have at the end of my life thirty people who understand or three hundred. I am like an artist who paints a picture because he must, otherwise he is unhappy - not unhappy, but he must obey that creative impulse.
This is no magnificent deed, because I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth. I am not concerned whether you pay attention to what I say or not. I want to do a certain thing in the world and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.
As long as the mind is seeking to fill itself, it will always be empty. When the mind is no longer concerned with filling its own emptiness, then only does that emptiness cease to be.