"It shrinks.

"Life expands, death is a shrinkage. When you are young you are flowing in all directions. When you are old you are frozen. You no longer flow, you only grumble. You become hard; the flexibility is lost.

"When religion is young, alive, it is ordinary. It has nothing to fulfill the ego – it is very ordinary. In fact, it is extraordinary in its very ordinariness. It is superb in being just ordinary. When religion is young, life is enough, no other God is needed. Then, life is God, life is divine.

"When religion becomes old and illas everything becomes old and ill, whatsoever is born has to die. Even a religion is born one day, lives for a while and then dies. But followers go on clinging to the dead body. Then the dead body kills those followers too: it becomes a source of illness, neurosis. It becomes an abnormality, a cancerous growth. When religion becomes ill or dead, it kills you, it is poisonous. This has to be understood from many directions.

"First, people are more willing to be in a dead religion than to be in an alive one – because you have been taught to be afraid of life, of love, of happiness. Every child is brought up in the world with a conditioning, with a feeling that there is something wrong in being happy – a very vague feeling, but it is there and it influences your whole life: that there is something wrong in being happy. So whenever you feel happy, you feel guilty – as if you have been committing some wrong, as if you have been sinning.

"Only sinners seem to be happy. Saints seem to be very sad. So whenever you are sad, everything is okay. You never feel guilty if you are sad – have you observed it? But if you are very happy, suddenly you try to hide it. Nobody should know.

"Why has this happened to the human mind? – because every child is taught to be serious, somber; to have a long face. Every child is taught not to jump, not to run, not to shriek, not to be too delighted, not to laugh loudly."