"With so many eyes watching you, you are reduced to an object. You are no longer a subjectivity, you have become a thing. And you are afraid because they may not appreciate you. They may not feed your ego, they may not like you, they may reject you. Now you are in their hands. You are reduced to a dependent slave. Now you have to work in such a way that you will be appreciated. You have to buttress their egos, so that in response you can hope they will buttress your ego.

"When you are with your friends you are not so afraid. You know them, they are predictable, you depend on each other. But when you face the anonymous crowd, more fear arises. Your whole being starts trembling, your whole ego is at stake – you can fail. Who knows? Your success is not guaranteed.

"This is the first kind of witness. Others are witnessing you, and you are just a beggar. This is the situation in which millions of people live. They live for others, hence they only appear to live, they don't live in reality. They are always adjusting to others, because they are happy only if others are happy with them. They are compromising constantly, they are selling their souls for a simple reason: so their ego can be strengthened, so that they can become famous, well known.

"Have you observed something of immense value that whenever a poet, a novelist or a scientist gets the Nobel Prize, immediately after that his creativity declines? No Nobel laureate has been able to produce anything valuable compared to the things that he created before he received it. What happens? Now you have attained the goal of the ego, there is no further to go, so there is no more need to adjust to people. Once a book becomes famous the author dies.

"That's what happened with Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. That's what happened with Rabindranath's Gitanjali. And that is almost the rule, not the exception. Once you are famous you stop compromising. For what? You are already famous. And when you stop compromising, people start neglecting you, ignoring you. Your whole creativity was rooted in the desire of the ego; now the ego feels at rest, all creativity disappears."