"A nationalist is never a religious person, cannot be. And a nationalist is a neurotic. The whole of human history is enough proof of it.

"I am not an Indian – the first thing. And the second thing: I am not a saint either.

"You ask me: 'Like all other Indian saints, why do you not like to be the saint of the masses?' First, I am not an Indian, and second, I am not a saint. The very claim that one is a saint is a condemnation of everybody else. In that very claim, others are condemned. If I am a saint then you are a sinner – you have to be sinners, otherwise how can I exist? To create one saint, you will need millions of sinners. It is very costly and uneconomical.

"I would like a world where the sinners and the saints have disappeared – they are two aspects of the same coin. Lao Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching: 'When the world was really natural and religious, there was not a saint and not a sinner.' When the saints entered in the world, sin entered. When you say somebody is a saint, you have started divisions: the good and the bad, that which has to be done and that which has to be avoided. You don't accept life in its totality; you become a chooser.

"And I teach choiceless awareness. I don't teach any choosing on your part, because whatsoever you choose is going to be a wrong choice – because you will be there as a chooser. Accept the total and don't go on labeling things – this is good and that is bad.

"The division between the sinner and the saint is again an egoistic division. It is very oppressive. It condemns. It is very hateful. A saint looks at you with holier-than-thou eyes: 'I am the chosen one, and I am going to heaven and you all are going to hell.' No, that is not my outlook at all.

"I declare you are also holy, divine. There exists not a single being who is not holy. To me the word holy means whole. We belong to one whole; we are all holy, we are parts of one universal consciousness, we are ripples of one ocean."