"So that is the first thing to be understood. It is not creation in itself or destruction in itself which is significant. What is significant is to what it leads, what it is a seed of? What is going to be the outcome? On the surface it may look destructive.

"When the child is born out of the mother's womb as far as the womb is concerned the child is dying because the womb has no way of knowing that the child is being born. The child was there for nine months; it inhabited the world of the womb. The womb was no longer empty, it was full of life. And today comes a sad moment: the life that was filling the womb is disappearing, going somewhere which is inconceivable, simply evaporating.

"For the womb, it is a death. And if you can under stand the psychology of the child who is being born, to him also it appears like a death – because the child has lived a certain kind of life for all those nine months. Scientists say that perhaps never again will he live so pleasantly – no possibility of ever being more comfortable, no possibility of ever being without any worry, work, responsibility, duty. He lived in tremendous tranquility, silence, without being in any way influenced, impressed, forced, directed.

"He was free, and alone, and sufficient, not in any need of the other. And there was not a single thing that was missing. Everything that was needed was provided by the mother's body automatically. You cannot conceive a better period of nine months in the coming seventy years of life when life will be so pleasant, so sufficient unto itself; so without worry, without responsibility, so without fear; so without tomorrows, yesterdays; so free from the crowd.

"You will always feel – even though you are crowded every moment of your life – you are missing the other. In the very crowd you are lonely. And in the mother's womb, in that very loneliness, you were simply alone. There was no question of the other; the other had not even arisen in your mind.

"So the child also feels that it is going to be a death, certainly the death of the life that he has known."