"It is as if one was born in a madhouse and from the very beginning was acquainted only with mad people; he will think them normal. In fact, if he ever comes across somebody who is sane, he will be very puzzled, he will not be able to believe his own eyes. He will think this man has gone crazy.

"Man is a chaos. Let this idea sink deep into your heart, because only then the desire to create a cosmos out of this chaos arises. The moment you realize that you are standing on your head, a great moment has arrived. Now you cannot go on standing on your head any more: you have to do something, it is inevitable. You have to act – and that very act becomes religion.

"Religion is against society, because society lives on this so-called normal madness of people. Society wants people to be abnormal; only then can they be exploited, only then can they be reduced into machines, only then can they be reduced to slaves – and happily, and without any revolt.

"For thousands of years, man has lived in imprisoned states. Those prisons have been given beautiful names: you call them churches, religions, ideologies. Somebody lives in a Catholic prison and somebody lives in a communist prison, and both go on bragging about their prison, that their prison is far better. But any person who lives through some ideology is a prisoner, because every ideology narrows down your consciousness, becomes chains on your being. Anybody who belongs to any crowd out of fear, out of conditioning, out of a kind of hypnosis, is not truly a man, is not yet born. The opportunity has been given to him, but he is wasting it.

"You have been taught values which are not really values; you have been taught things which are basically poisonous. For example, you have been told not to love yourself, and you have been told so many times that it looks like a simple fact, truth. But a man who is incapable of loving himself will be incapable of loving anybody else. The man who cannot love himself cannot love at all.

"You have been told to be altruistic and never selfish."