"The religious man is one who knows himself, one who is conscious of his own being. And the moment you are conscious of your own being, goodness follows you like a shadow. Then there is no need of any effort to be good; goodness becomes your nature. Just as the trees are green, the religious man is good.

"But the good man is not necessarily religious. His goodness is out of great effort, he is fighting with bad qualities – lying or stealing, untruthfulness, dishonesty, violence. They are in the good man but only repressed – they can erupt any moment.

"The good man can change into a bad man very easily, without any effort – because all those bad qualities are there, only dormant, repressed with effort. If you remove the effort they will immediately erupt in your life. And your good qualities are only cultivated, not natural: you have tried hard to be honest, to be sincere, not to lie – but it has been an effort, it has been tiring.

"The good man is always serious, because he is afraid of all the bad qualities he has repressed; and he is serious because deep down he desires to be honored for his goodness, to be rewarded. His longing is to be respectable. Your so-called saints are mostly just good men.

"I have given you the name: transcend the good man – and there is only one way to transcend the good man, and that is by bringing more awareness to your being.

"Awareness is not something to be cultivated; it is already there, it has just to be awakened. When you are totally awakened, whatever you do is good, and whatever you do not do, is bad. The good man has to make immense efforts to do good and to avoid the bad. The bad is a constant temptation for him. It is a choice: every moment he has to choose the good, and not to choose the bad.

"For example, a man like Mahatma Gandhi: he is a good man; he tried hard his whole life to be on the side of good. But even at the age of seventy he was having sexual dreams – and he was very much in anguish: 'As far as my waking hours are concerned, I can keep myself completely free from sex."