Jesus says: Love your enemies as you love yourself…and you would think that it is a very difficult thing to love your enemies. No, it is not. The real difficulty is to love yourself. You can love your enemies, that is not that difficult at all. The real difficulty is to love yourself, to respect yourself, to accept yourself as you are, unconditionally. And that is the beginning of the revolution, the beginning of the transformation.

My whole teaching can be condensed into these two words: Be yourself:

Just the other day I quoted Morarji Desai as saying that he had only one ambition to be fulfilled: to know God and attain the heights of truth. What harm has God done to Morarji Desai? Why should he be after God? Is it not enough to know oneself? Does one have to know God? Why? For what? And what are you going to do even if you know God? You will be as foolish as you are – even if you come across God, what are you going to do? You will say, “Hello, how are you? The weather is fine!” What else? What are you really going to do? And by knowing God you will not know yourself and an ignorant person who does not know himself, how can he know God?

The authentic seeker has nothing to do with God; he wants to know himself. That is the most fundamental thing – to know oneself – because out of that all knowing, all light arises. If one knows oneself one will know God too. In fact, only by knowing oneself does one become capable of knowing the ultimate, because at the very core of your being the ultimate is present. But religions say: Know God, try to realize God! That is again a strategy, the same strategy – to distract you from yourself.

And these people like Morarji Desai think they are religious; they are not religious at all. The religious person has only one longing…and remember, it is not an ambition, it is a longing. And there is a difference, a tremendous difference, between ambition and longing. Ambition is of the mind, longing is of the heart. They belong to different centers.

When you fall in love with somebody it is not an ambition. You feel the pain in the heart, not in the head. You don’t have a headache! I have never heard of anybody falling in love who feels a headache, but heartache certainly everybody who has fallen in love has felt. Heartache…and that is a totally different phenomenon. Whenever you talk about love you don’t put your hand on the head, you put your hand on the heart. Your body knows better than you where exactly the center is. The heart longs, thirsts, yearns, but there is no ambition.

Morarji Desai is a poor politician; he knows only the language of ambition. Now he has fulfilled his one ambition of being the prime minister of India; there is no higher post in India than prime minister. Now that he has been prime minister the only ambition the political mind can have is to know God.

It is very strange. In the first place, how do you know that God exists? If you have not known God yet, how can you start being ambitious for God? One thing is absolutely certain, indubitably certain, that “I exist.” You cannot deny yourself, because even your denial will prove that you are.