"If this is not understood rightly, then your whole effort can go in a wrong direction. You may start fighting with yourself, and once you start fighting with yourself you are fighting a losing battle. You can never be victorious. Who will be victorious and who will be defeated? – because you are both. The one who is fighting and the one with whom you are fighting are the same. If both my hands start fighting, who is going to win?

"Once you start fighting with yourself you are lost. And so many persons, in their endeavors, in their seeking for spiritual truth, fall into that error. They become victims of this error – they start fighting with themselves. If you fight with yourself you will go more and more insane. You will be more and more divided, split. You will become schizophrenic. This is what is happening in the West.

"Christianity has taught – not Christ, Christianity has taught – to fight with oneself, to condemn oneself, to deny oneself. Christianity has created a great division between the lower and the higher. There is nothing lower and nothing higher in you, but Christianity talks about the lower self and the higher self, or the body and the soul. But somehow Christianity divides you and then creates a fight. This fight is going to be endless, it will not lead you anywhere. The ultimate result can only be self-destruction, a schizophrenic chaos. That's what is happening in the West.

"Yoga never divides you, but still there is a fight. The fight is not against your nature. On the contrary, the fight is for your nature. You have accumulated many habits; those habits are your achievement of many lives' wrong patterns. And because of those wrong patterns your nature cannot move spontaneously, cannot flow spontaneously, cannot reach to its destiny. These habits have to be destroyed. And these are only habits – they may look like nature to you because you are so much addicted with them. You may have become identified with them, but they are not you.

"This distinction has to be clearly maintained in the mind, otherwise you can misinterpret Patanjali. Whatsoever has come in you from without and is wrong has to be destroyed so that which is within you can flow, can flower."