"That is the meaning of the Socratic insistence: Know thyself. If you can know yourself you have know all that can be known – or that which is worth knowing. If you miss yourself you can know much, but all that knowledge is just rubbish. It may hide your ignorance, it cannot dispel it. It may make you knowledgeable but it will not make you understanding, it will not open the inner eye of knowing. You will remain a head person, top heavy, in deep anguish and anxiety.

"If you want to be with me, to be with me is not the way. If you want to be with me, to be with yourself is the way. And that is the insistence of all the buddhas: Know thyself and you will know me, because in knowing yourself you have known all.

"But if you try to be with me you will create a duality, and a conflict. Then being with me will become a new sort of attachment. That won't help you, that will really harm you and hinder you. Then I will not be helping you towards transcendence. Rather on the contrary I will become a rock hanging around your neck. You will not achieve through me then, you will be drowned.

"But I will not be at fault; that will be your own fault. That has happened to millions of people all over the earth in all the centuries. A Jesus comes and people start being attached to him. The whole point is lost. A buddha comes and people start their journey to know the buddha and they become so much obsessed with it that they forget that their own buddha is just inside themselves. He is not outside.

"And the way to know the outside Buddha is to know the inside buddha. When you are completely within yourself you have known all Christs, all Buddhas, all the masters that have ever existed, and also all those which will ever exist, because you become one with the whole. Knowing oneself one knows the whole.

"The temptation is strong to be attached to a master, to cling to a master, to become a shadow; but that won't help, that will be suicidal."