It is good that a great clarity is coming to you. But still somewhere deep down in the unconscious there are hangovers, hence you are puzzled. You are puzzled because you cannot understand: “How come I love you?” Because saints are to be respected, not loved. They are so high, there in the heavens, and you are so low, how can you love them? Love means equality. Love means we are standing on the same plane. Saints are so holy and you are so unholy! Yes, respect is okay, but love? – seems to be impossible. These are hangovers.

But I would like to say to you: respect is an ugly word; it has more letters than four, but actually it is a four-letter word. Respect is bound to be ugly in two ways: if you respect somebody you degrade yourself into inferiority; unless you start feeling inferior to somebody you cannot respect them. Hence all your saints go on condemning you; unless you are condemned they cannot be respected. The respect from your side is dependent on the condemnation from their side. They call you sinners, only then can you call them saints. They condemn everything that you do: your eating, your drinking, your living…. Your whole life, in every minute detail, has to be condemned. All that is natural has to be condemned; then their unnatural lives become very respectable.

All the saints – the so-called saints I mean – have been condemning humanity down the ages. And, slowly, slowly hearing for centuries that you are sinners, you have become sinners. They have conditioned you into such inferiority that it has almost become a reality. You have started fulfilling what they have been saying about you.

If you want a man to be a criminal, go on telling him that he is a criminal. Go on repeating it and he will slowly be hypnotized. And if everybody repeats that he is a criminal, he will start believing that it must be so: “How can so many people be wrong? And how can so many saints be wrong? I must be a criminal.” And once a person accepts that he is a criminal he becomes one. He starts behaving to prove that he is a criminal. How can he prove the saints wrong? The saints have to be proved right, and the only way to prove them right is to behave the way they say you are. Their saintliness depends on your being sinners. The greater you are in your sin, the higher is their saintliness. I am not a saint!

And because they have to condemn your natural instincts they become unnatural, pathological They start standing on their heads just to show that they are totally different from you. If you enjoy eating, they hate eating. If you love beauty, they condemn beauty. If you are enchanted with the world, they call the world illusion, maya – they say it does not exist at all. If you love your body, they destroy their bodies. Whatsoever you do they have to do just the opposite, because that is the only way to prove their superiority.