"I have never asked anybody to be somebody other than who he is. But for thousands of years all the religions have lived in a nightmare, in a very strange and weird situation. The disciples were demanding how the master should be, the master was demanding how the disciples should be.

"One can understand the demand from the side of the master: you have come to him to be transformed, to be changed; it is understandable if he wants certain disciplines to be followed. But it is absolutely not understandable that the disciples, the followers, should also demand how the master should be. And the wonder of wonders is that the masters have been fulfilling the desires of those who are their followers. The leaders have been followers of their own followers. To remain in the dominant position of being a master, they have compromised; it is a mutual compromise: 'I will fulfill your demands, you fulfill my demands.' And this has been going on for thousands of years.

"A real master, an authentic master, a man who knows, is not going to accept any demand from those who do not know. He cannot fulfill your desires, your idea of how a master should be. But your so-called masters have been doing exactly that. If you wanted them to be naked, they remained naked; if you wanted them to fast, they fasted; if you wanted them to do certain yoga exercises, they did them. Whatever you wanted they did, in order to remain in power, dominating you, dictating your life.

"And of course the disciple was the loser, because these people managed to fulfill the demands of the followers…but the followers were not capable of fulfilling the demands of the masters, so they were condemned as sinners. All the religions created nothing but guilt in the human mind, a deep feeling of inferiority, a sense of failure, a kind of hatred for oneself, one's weaknesses, frailties. They destroyed people's self-respect. And no crime can be greater than that, because once a person loses self-respect he loses his very soul; he loses his manhood, he falls into a subhuman existence.

"It has been a very strange nightmare, tremendously painful to the whole of humanity."