"The rocks don't think – they don't have a self. The sky has no self, the earth has no self. Without the self there is no possibility of getting into misery. The self is the door to misery. Buddha called it atta, the ego, the self.

"We are miserable because we are too much in the self. What does it mean when I say we are too much in the self? And what exactly happens when we are too much in the self? Either you can be in existence or you can be in the self – both are not possible together. To be in the self means to be apart, to be separate. To be in the self means to become an island. To be in the self means to draw a boundary line around you. To be in the self means to make a distinction between 'this I am' and 'that I am not.' The definition, the boundary, between 'I' and 'not I' is what the self is – the self isolates.

"And it makes you frozen – you are no-longer flowing. If you are flowing the self cannot exist, hence people have become almost like ice-cubes. They don't have any warmth, they don't have any love – love is warmth and they are afraid of love. If warmth comes to them they will start melting and the boundaries will disappear. In love the boundaries disappear; in joy also the boundaries disappear, because joy is not cold. Except death, nothing is cold.

"The self is very cold. The self is death. Those who live in the self are already dead, or maybe they were never born in the first place. They missed their birth. To be born, to be alive, means to be flowing, to be warm, to be melting, to be dissolving, to not know where you end and where existence begins, to not know the boundaries, to remain in that diffused consciousness. You are conscious, certainly, but there is no self-consciousness in it. Consciousness in itself is unself-consciousness.

"Consciousness can make man far more happier than anything else on the earth. It is a great opportunity. But there is a danger lurking just by the side."