The most difficult thing in the world is to accept that you are ignorant. Even the most ignorant person will not be ready to accept it. Only the greatest geniuses like Socrates have been able to accept that they know nothing.

The normal, the mediocre, the common people love to believe that they know, they know everything. And anybody who creates a question, creates a doubt, creates an air of skepticism, is dangerous because he is disturbing so many people’s comfortable lives of ignorance. He cannot be tolerated.

This is the greatest crime known to man.

So it is not my leela, not my game; nor is it nature trying to have a perfect balance – because the perfect balance will be absolute silence. There will be no opposition to it.

The situation is created because the society has lived in ignorance, believing it is knowledge. It has lived in all kinds of immoralities, believing they are moral. It has believed in all kinds of things, thinking that they are true; in reality, they are only fictions.

And anybody who tries to expose all these fictions and lies…he will be silent, because only a silent person can do that, only a person whose silence cannot be disturbed even by death. Then suddenly, all around him there is trouble of all kinds – lies, allegations – and every effort is made to prove that the majority of the world cannot be wrong.

It is a strange thing that truth is not democratic. What is true is not to be decided by votes; otherwise, we could never come to any truth ever. People would vote for what is comfortable – and lies are very comfortable because you don’t have to do anything about them, you just have to believe…. Truth needs great effort, discovery, risk, and to walk alone on a path which nobody has traveled before.

Just today, Anando was giving me some information. One piece was very significant: all schizophrenic people, neurotic people, psychotic people, or any other kind of mentally disturbed people, always want to be in the crowd – they don’t want to be alone. This was discovered by psychoanalysts who have been working with these mental cases for years – that these people have a great fear of being alone and that they are very comfortable in the crowd.

The reverse is also true – if you feel comfortable in the crowd, that means unconsciously you have a tendency to fall mentally sick if you go out of the crowd, if you are left alone.

In jails, the greatest punishment is the isolation cell. When a person is put into a dark isolation cell, just a piece of bread is slipped underneath the door; that is the only communication between himself and humanity. Nobody speaks to him, nobody comes to see him. And within three weeks he starts losing his sanity, he starts seeing things he has never seen – hallucinations, all kinds of illusions…the crowd was a protection.