"You can create a world empire, you can be Alexander the Great; or you can renounce the world and can be a recluse in the mountains, in the Himalayas – it is your mind game.

"It is true that your world is your mind projected on a screen. But you are going to help people to be satisfied with their desires.

"You have asked a very significant question: Is it going to help them towards meditation, or is it going to take them away from meditation?

"It is going to take them away from meditation. You are not going to be a friend; you are poisoning people if you help them to be contented with their desires.

"A divine discontentment is a basic step towards meditation, not contentment. If a man is contented with his money, with his power, with his respectability, why should he meditate? You have given him the opium, you have drugged him.

"This has been done by all the religions down the ages – giving opium to the people, making them contented, teaching them that being contented in the world is spirituality. They consoled people, but consolation is not religion. Religion is revolution. And revolution never comes out of contentment; it comes out of tremendous discontentment.

"Just for an example, you can look at the history of India. For ten thousand years it has suffered all kinds of humiliations, slaveries, poverty, sickness; yet there has not been any revolution. Strange! For thousands of years millions of people in India are being treated almost like animals or even worse, but they have not revolted. They have been perfectly content because the religions – Hindus, Buddhists, Jainas – were all teaching one thing: if you are contented in the world, you will be rewarded in the other world a millionfold. To be discontented is unspiritual. If you are poor, accept it as a gift of existence

"Have you not heard Jesus saying to people, 'Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the kingdom of God'? In his small statement the essential religious approach towards poverty is expressed: be contented. If you are a beggar, it is only a question of a few days…

"And to console the poor, Jesus says, 'A camel can pass through the eye of a needle, but a rich man cannot pass through the gates of paradise.' It feels good."