"When an enlightened person speaks, meaning is not to be discovered by you; it is there, you have simply to listen to it. It is not to be discovered, it is not hidden, it is nothing to be interpreted. He is not talking in theories, he is giving you simple facts. If your eyes are open, you will see them; if your ears can hear, you will hear them. Nothing more is needed.

That is why Jesus keeps on saying: If you can hear, hear me. If you can see, see. Nothing more is expected -- just open eyes, open ears.

Buddha, Chuang Tzu or Jesus are not philosophers like Hegel, Kant. If you read Hegel the meaning has to be discovered. It is very arduous, as if Hegel is making every effort to make it as difficult for you as possible, weaving words around words, making everything riddle-like. So when you first encounter Hegel he will look superb, a very high peak, but the more you penetrate and the more you understand, the less he becomes. The day you understand him, he is just useless.

The whole trick is that you cannot understand him, that is why you feel he is great. Because you cannot understand, your mind is baffled, because you cannot understand, your mind cannot comprehend, the thing seems to be very mysterious, incomprehensible. It is not, it is only verbal. He is trying to hide, he is not saying anything. Rather, he is using words without any substance.

So persons like Hegel are immediately appreciated, but as time passes appreciation of them disappears. Persons like Buddha are not immedi-ately appreciated, but as time passes you appreciate them more. They are always before their time. Centuries pass, and then -- then their greatness starts emerging, then their greatness starts appearing. Then you can feel them, because their truth is so simple; there is no garbage, no rubbish around it. It is so factual that you can miss it if you think about it."

"The open society" and " the Poverty of Historicism" are, not without reason, books that people from totally divergent strains of political thought agree are idiotic (think of Strauss). No accurate analysis of what historicism is and how it fits within historiography, no understanding of the base texts of Hegel and Marx ... . It's neither a good (liberal) analysis of Marxism as a school of thought nor an examination of  it's actual manifestation as a ruling ideology within the SU in the form of "Leninism". It's best to stay silent about the weird horseshoe theory. A serious critique of the former would be those of Raymond Aron or Leszek Kolakowski, and for the ruling ideology of the su see Roy Medvedev or Kotkin.