"But people of sensitivity, awareness, meditativeness, people of the heart, are everywhere feeling that the danger is very close, that mankind can commit suicide any moment, that the future was never so uncertain as it is today, that the tomorrow may really never come.

"These are moments of great turmoil, but they can become of great creativity too. When one is encountering death, one can bring one's total potential into manifestation. When there is no time left you cannot postpone. Hence the hurry.

"When death is very imminent, life flares up to the optimum. And that is what is happening to all creative people around the world, and more so around this commune, because my whole approach is such that only the very creative ones will be attracted to it.

"I teach sensitivity. Down the ages, religions have been teaching just the opposite – how to become insensitive – because the more insensitive you are the more you can remain aloof, distant, detached. Because it was thought that to attain to godliness one has to renounce the world, it was a natural consequence, a logical consequence, that one should learn how to be more and more insensitive to beauty, to music, to love, to people, to life itself. In the past, religion has been teaching people how to be unintelligent, because sensitivity and intelligence go together, insensitivity and stupidity go together.

"Your so-called saints are not intelligent people at all, but you have worshipped them. And you have worshipped them for the wrong reason – because they were insensitive, because they had dulled their consciousness, because they had grown thick skin around themselves. The spring will come but they will remain unaffected, the clouds will gather and they will remain unaffected. The peacock will dance but they will remain unaffected, the night sky will be full of stars but they will be completely unaware of it. That was the whole discipline in the past: how to become like a rock, so that the world cannot overpower you. It was a kind of paranoia, it was based in fear.

"I teach you just the opposite: be sensitive, be alert, be loving, be sensuous – because existence is not against the roseflower, existence is in it."