"It will not have any music in it. It will not have any depth in it. Flowers will be there, but they will not be beautiful anymore. Who will feel their beauty? Who will know their beauty? Birds will go on singing, but who will call the singing poetic, mysterious? Trees will be green, but will not be green at the same time, because that greenery has to be recognized by a deep resonance of the human heart.

"With man, appreciation will disappear. With man, prayer will disappear. With man, God will disappear. The earth will be there, but ungodly. The silence, but the silence of the cemetery. The silence will not be throbbing with the heart. It may be spread all over the earth, it may have expansion, but it will miss depth – and a silence without depth is no longer silence. The world will be profane; it won't be sacred anymore.

"Man creates the holy, because deep hidden behind man is the holy. Man cannot live without temples, without churches, without mosques, because man himself is a temple. He goes on creating temples – even atheists create temples. Look at the temple of the Kremlin. Communists passing before the Kremlin or before the mausoleum of Lenin are as worshipful as any theist worshipping any other god. Man cannot live without a god because deep down he is a god.

"The problem, the trouble, arises because man is both: a bridge stretched between two eternities – between matter and mind, between this world and that, between the profane and the sacred, between life and death. That's the beauty also: with the mystery, with the paradox, man is not only a puzzle, he also becomes a mystery.

"What to do? If you settle with Pavlov and his disciple B.F. Skinner, you have settled without knowing man, without understanding man, without even making an effort to know him. If you settle too soon with Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna, Christ, Patanjali, if your acceptance is immature, then 'that man is a god' will remain a belief; it can never become a faith. If you are in a hurry to be settled with anything, then you will miss."