"The animals are tremendously happy – of course not aware, not consciously happy, but tremendously happy, unworried, non-neurotic. God is tremendously happy and conscious. Man is just in between the two, in limbo, always wavering – to be or not to be?

"Man is a rainbow, I say, because a rainbow will give you the total perspective in which man can be understood – from the lowest to the highest. The rainbow has seven colors, man has seven centers of his being. The allegory of the seven is very ancient. In India, the allegory has taken the form of seven chakras: the lowest is muladhar and the highest is sahasrar and between these two are five steps, five more chakras. And man has to pass through all these seven chakras – seven steps towards the divine.

"Ordinarily, we are stuck at the lowest. The first three – muladhar, svadhishthan and manipura – are animal chakras. If you live in the first three you are no more different than the animals – and then you are committing a crime. Not that you are actually committing a crime – you are committing a crime because you will not be able to be what you were meant to be; you will miss the possibility. If a seed does not grow to be a flower, it has committed a crime – against nobody; against himself. And the sin that one commits against oneself is the greatest. In fact, we commit sins towards others only when we have committed the first, fundamental sin against ourselves.

"The first three chakras are concerned with food, money, power, domination, sex. food is the lowest, sex is the highest, in the lowest three chakras. This has to be understood. Food is the lowest – a food-obsessed person is in the lowest category of animals. He simply wants to survive. He has no purpose, he just wants to survive to survive. If you ask him for what, he has no answer to give to you.

"One day, Mulla Nasruddin told me, 'I wish I had more land.'

"I asked him, 'But why? As it is, you have enough.'

"He said, 'I could raise a lot more cows.'

"I asked him, 'And what would you do with them?'

"He said, 'Sell them and make money.'

"'And then? Then what you are going to do with that money?'

"'Buy more land.'

"And I asked him, 'For what?'

"'To raise a lot more cows.'

"This way it goes, just a vicious circle in which you never come out: you eat to live, you live to eat."