"Its domination has become almost permanent. Love is the only experience that can dethrone it.

"If you cannot lose your ego in love, then you can never lose it. And you are not the ego, remember: it is a false idea of yourself, accepted and acquired in ignorance. In love you need humbleness, in love a trust arises on its own. You can expose yourself to the person you love in total vulnerability. But you don't know that with love this shadow is always there: that it is a kind of death, and particularly your personality feels immensely troubled that you are in such deep love.

"So as far as I can see there is no division in you. You just don't understand the relationship between love and fear. It is absolutely natural for every person who loves to feel fear because he does not know that love is nothing but a graveyard for your ego. And because you are identified with the ego you think, 'It is going to be my death.'

"All this may not be on the conscious level; it may be going on underneath, in the darkness, in the unconscious part of your psychology. So on the conscious level perhaps you think that you are split into two opposing camps. They are not opposing camps: they are two branches of the same tree, but the tree is hidden in the unconscious and you see only the branches in the conscious. Naturally, they look like two separate things.

"So the first thing is: exactly understand that love is the death of the ego, the personality, the false. There is no way to have both love and ego. Either you can have the ego or you can have love – but make it a conscious thing.

"Just a few days ago, one of the most intellectual and experienced journalists of India, M.V. Kamath, wrote a review of two of my books: The Rebellious Spirit and The New Man. In his review he said a few things that perhaps he himself was not aware of – the unconscious is very deep, and nine times bigger than your conscious. He said that I am the greatest intellectual giant of the second part of the twentieth century."