The path of Buddha is one of intelligence, not emotion, says Osho. “The intellect has to be used, not discarded; it has to be transcended, not discarded… A moment comes when intelligence has given you all that it can give, then it is no longer needed.” Two analogies that he uses in this context are interesting. The first is about disease and medicine. “When you are free of the disease and the medicine, too, only then are you free. Sometimes it happens that the disease is gone, but you have become addicted to the medicine. This is not freedom.”

The other analogy is of a thorn in the foot. “You take another thorn so that the thorn in your foot can be taken out with the help of the other. When you have taken the thorn out, you throw away both; you don’t save the one that has been helpful. It is now meaningless.”

Meaningful messages!

In John Sandford’s Dead Watch (www.si monsays.co.uk) you’d meet Jake Winter, a specialist in ‘forensic bureaucracy’, who goes about finding what really happened. “In training for Afghanistan, Jake had taken a course in burglary — what the army called surreptitious entry — from an ex-burglar hired by the CIA,” reads a snatch in the fast-paced fiction. Though the technique was not particula rly practical in Afghanistan, Jake found the training interesting. He remembered one of the lessons from the ‘burglary’ course: “The instructor said, ‘A lot of people hide a key outside the house. If they’re going to do that, it’s gonna be in about one of nine places: repeat after me…” And… “He found it in the wrecked washing machine, in the lint filter.”