"The body cannot survive without food, and the soul cannot survive without love. In fact, without love the soul is never born – there is no question of its survival.

"You simply think that you have a soul; you believe that you have a soul because of your fear of death. But you have not known unless you have loved. Only in love does one come to feel that one is more than the body, more than the mind.

"That's why I say compassion is therapeutic. What is compassion? Compassion is the purest form of love. Sex is the lowest form of love, compassion the highest form of love. In sex the contact is basically physical; in compassion the contact is basically spiritual. In love, compassion and sex are both mixed, the physical and the spiritual are both mixed. Love is midway between sex and compassion.

"You can also call compassion prayerfulness. You can also call compassion meditation. The highest form of energy is compassion. The word compassion is beautiful: half of it is passion – somehow passion has become so refined that it is no longer like passion. It has become compassion.

"In sex, you use the other, you reduce the other to a means, you reduce the other to a thing. That's why in a sexual relationship you feel guilty. That guilt has nothing to do with religious teachings; that guilt is deeper than religious teachings. In a sexual relationship as such you feel guilty. You feel guilty because you are reducing a human being to a thing, to a commodity to be used and thrown away.

"That's why in sex you also feel a sort of bondage – you are also being reduced to a thing. And when you are a thing your freedom disappears, because your freedom exists only when you are a person: the more you are a person, the more free; the more you are a thing, the less free.

"The furniture in your room is not free. If you leave the room locked and you come after many years, the furniture will be in the same place, in the same way; it will not arrange itself in a new way."