India, to me, is not only a country, but a concept…not just a land, but a way of life, a tremendously significant philosophy. So when I talk about India, it does not matter at all that they have treated me badly, that they would like me to be killed. They have made efforts – unfortunately they failed. These are small things, and I don’t take them into consideration.

My consideration is for the India as a concept. It is the only part of the world which has gone deep into the interiority of man, which has discovered for the first time the ultimate in consciousness, the universality of individual beings. Science has discovered much, but no discovery of science can be compared to the discovery that India has made in the past. For ten thousand years continuously it has devoted its whole energy to finding out the meaning of life, the very essence of existence – and it has found it.

So when I talk about India, I do not talk about the India that you see on the map, I do not talk about the India that exists today. I am talking about a concept is centuries’ work of discovery. Nowhere has religion ever reached such heights. No community has ever given all her geniuses to the discovery of man’s inner world. And that is the most precious thing in life.

You can have everything and all, but if you don’t have yourself…you can know everything around you, but if you don’t know what is within you, all your knowledge, all your wealth, all your power is futile – and sooner or later you will be drowned in your own wealth, in your own power. It will destroy you because it will go on increasing, becoming bigger and bigger, and you will be shrinking, becoming smaller and smaller.

The scientist is denying that he is, and asserting truths about things and objects. It is a very strange phenomenon. Then who is discovering all these things and objects? Every genuine scientific genius feels embarrassed – anybody like Albert Einstein – because he cannot say anything about himself…and he knows about the farthest star in the world, its whole history millions of years before it was created, and he knows how many more million years it will remain and then it will dissolve. His knowledge is vast, but he knows nothing about the knower.

What use is this knowledge? Not only is it useless, it is going to be harmful. We know now that the whole of science is in the service of the war mechanism – that is, in the service of death. The objective experimentation, the inquiry into the outside world, has reached a stage which can only be called a global suicide; while in India the search was inner, and it culminated in the universal experience of life, of joy, of blissfulness, of nirvana.