"If you are a Hindu you will never know it; your very being a Hindu will keep you blind. What do we mean when we say, 'I am a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, or a Jew'? We mean, 'I have already got ideas about truth – ideas from the Bible or the Koran or the Gita, but I have got ideas already. I don't know the truth, but I know much about it.' And that knowing much about it is the only problem that has to be solved.

"Once you drop your ideas about truth you will be confronting it, both within and without. You will be facing it – because there is nothing else!

"But the parents, the society, the state, the church, the educational system all depend on lies. As the child is born they start trapping it into lies. And the child is helpless. He cannot escape his parents, he is utterly dependent; you can exploit his dependence. And it has been exploited down the ages.

"Nobody has been exploited so much as children – neither the proletariat nor women, nobody has been exploited so much and so deeply and so destructively as the innocent children. Because they are helpless and dependent they have to learn whatsoever you teach them. They have to imbibe all the falsehoods that you go on forcing upon them. It is a question of survival for them – they cannot survive without you. It is a question of life and death. They have to be Hindus, they have to be Mohammedans, they have to be Jainas, they have to be Buddhists, they have to be Communists. Whatsoever you are interested in putting into their minds, you go on putting in.

"Instead of making them more alert, more aware, more alive, more reflective, instead of making them more mirrorlike, pure, you make them full of ideas: layers and layers of dust. And then it becomes impossible for them to see that which is. They start seeing that which is not and they stop seeing that which is.

"Hence, to be really religious means a rebirth: becoming again like a child, dropping all that the society has given to you."