"This statement of Gautam Buddha is one of the milestones in the history of human growth: Appa deepo bhava – be a light unto yourself. Nobody before him was courageous enough to say this. They were all trying to say, 'We are the light, follow us. Be surrendered to us and whatever we say never doubt it.' These people were not really for human freedom, human integrity, they destroyed all self-respect in man, they reduced him to a slave, a spiritual slave.

"Gautam Buddha has brought a great revolution to the world. He says, 'Be a light unto yourself' – because there is no other light. You are not to surrender to somebody because every surrender is slavery, and spiritual surrender is the greatest of all because it is so subtle. The chains are so invisible that you may never become aware of it, and the imprisonment is not something outside you, it is something imposed on the very being of your interiority. You are carrying your prison wherever you go, whatever you do.

"People were very angry against Gautam Buddha. It is a strange story that people become accustomed to their slavery too! So much so, that anybody who wants to make them free, it seems to them that he is their enemy.

"During the French revolution there was a great jail in France, the biggest jail in the whole country. It was meant only for those who were sentenced for their whole life. So they entered into the jail alive, but they came out only when they were dead.

"Their whole lives they had to live in dark cells with heavy chains on their feet, heavy chains on their hands. Even the keys of those jails were immediately thrown into a big well inside the jail, because the doors were not going to be opened: 'These people will be out of the jail only when they are dead.'

"The revolutionaries thought about the jail. There were five thousand people in that jail, and they thought that if they could make all of them free they would be immensely grateful, immensely joyful. But they were in for a great surprise. People had lived there for ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, thirty years…there was a man who had been there for sixty years! They had become so accustomed to the darkness of the cells that their eyes were no longer capable of coming into the light of the sun, and in a way they had accepted their fate."