"The very effort to reduce the divine to an image is to falsify reality.

"In the first place, why do we want the ultimate to be reduced to an idol? The very enormity of existence baffles us. The very infinity, and we feel we are falling into an abyss. Out of fear man creates a God, a small god, small like man. Out of fear man creates God in his own image and then he feels at ease. To feel at ease with the enormity of existence, you will have to disappear. Either disappear into the infinity of existence or create a manageable God. Create a temple in your home, let the divine be reduced to an image – then you can forget the enormity, the hugeness, the immensity.

"Because of the eternal silence of existence, man wants to create a song to sing. The song may be of the Vedas or of the Koran; it doesn't matter. Sound is consoling, silence frightening. The image feels human, part of our world. Imageless godliness is superhuman, it is beyond us. Unless we go beyond ourselves, we cannot meet the true godliness. To avoid that meeting, to avoid that transcendence, we create a small god of our own. We start having dialogues with our created god, man-made, manufactured by the human mind. We worship, we pray, we do rituals and we are happy. It is a kind of dream, it is not entry into reality. Your temples are barriers to the divine, not doors. They pretend to be doors, but they are not. And your ideals, your images, your philosophies, your continuous effort to fill the emptiness of existence with words, philosophies, systems, are nothing but creating a false security around you.

"Existence is insecurity. To be with the ultimate is to be constantly in danger. To move into godliness is to move into the unknown and the unknowable. That frightens, that scares. One starts losing oneself. One wants to hold back. One wants not to look into the enormity. Then those small gods created by yourself or by your priests out of your cunning, cleverness, skill, are of great help. They are false because you have created them."