"Each human individual should think as if he is the first on the earth; he is the Adam or the Eve. Then you can open, you can open to infinite possibilities; then you will be vulnerable, available. And the more vulnerable you are, the more available you are, the greater the possibility of life happening to you. Your attitudes function like barriers; then life never reaches to you as it is – it has to fit your philosophy, religion, ideology, and in that very fitting, something dies in it. What you get out of it is a corpse: it may look like life but it is not.

"That's what people have been doing down the ages. The Hindus are living according to the Hindu attitude, the Mohammedans according to the Mohammedan attitude, and the communists according to the communist attitude. But remember a basic, fundamental truth: the attitude does not allow you to come in contact with life as it is; it distorts, it interprets.

"There is an old Greek story:

"A fanatic king had a beautiful golden bed, very precious, studded with thousands of diamonds, and whenever there was a guest in the palace he would offer the bed to the guest. But he had a certain attitude: the guest had to fit with the bed. If the guest was a little longer then the king would cut him down to size. Of course, the bed was so valuable it could not be changed, but the guest had to be changed according to the bed – as if the bed did not exist for the guest but the guest existed for the bed!

"And it is very rare, almost impossible, to find a man to fit a ready-made bed. The average person does not exist, remember; the average person is a fiction, and the bed was made for the average person. The king was a mathematician – great calculation had gone into it. He had measured the height of all the citizens of his capital, and then the height was divided by the number of all the citizens; he had come to a fixed average. Now, there were small children in the capital, young people, old people, pygmies, giants, but the average was a totally different phenomenon."