"You cannot make somebody a slave without becoming a slave yourself. Whatsoever you do to others is done to you.

"This is the basic principle to be understood, that love without freedom never brings fulfillment.

"And there have been people who have tried the other extreme, freedom without love. These are the monks, the escapists, the people who renounced the world. Afraid of love, afraid of love because it brings bondage, they renounce all the situations where love can flow, grow, can happen, is possible. They escape into loneliness. Their loneliness never becomes aloneness, it remains loneliness. And loneliness is a negative state; it is utterly empty, it is sad.

"One can be a solitary, but that does not bring solitude. Solitariness is just physical aloneness, solitude is spiritual aloneness. If you are just lonelyand you will be if you have renounced the world. If you have escaped from the world out of fear you will be lonely, the world will haunt you, and all kinds of desires will surround you. You will suffer millions of nightmares, because whatsoever you have renounced cannot be dropped so easily.

"Renunciation is repression and nothing else. And the more you repress a thing, the more you need to repress it. And the more you go on repressing it, the more powerful it becomes. It will erupt in your dreams, it will erupt in your hallucinations. People living in the monasteries start hallucinating, people going to the Himalayan caves sooner or later are no longer in contact with reality. They start creating a reality of their own – a private reality, a fictitious reality.

"The Christian will talk to Christ. In his lonely cave he creates Christ, just so that he can have somebody there, just so that he is not lonely. And many methods have been developed by these monks: how to hallucinate. If you fast, hallucination becomes easier. The body becomes weaker, you start losing control over reality. The more weak the body is, the more is the possibility of hallucination. People in fever, illness, start hallucinating. The exact same rule: torture the body, weaken the body, starve the body and hallucinations will be easier.

"You can have Jesus Christ or Krishna or Gautama Buddha – great company you can have, but it is all imagination."