You need not be a follower: every follower is going in a wrong direction – just by following. You need not choose the path: the very choice is to begin the journey in a wrong direction. You need not have an ideal of Gautam Buddha or Jesus or Mahavira or Krishna, because to have an ideal will not allow you to be alone. Those ideals in your imagination will go with you. Hence, tremendous sayings: Gautam Buddha says, “If you meet me on the path, kill me immediately.” Zarathustra says, “Beware of the so-called saviors, and most precisely beware of Zarathustra.”

If you fall in love with a man like Zarathustra – which is very easy, very consoling – your very love will become a hindrance, an obstacle in the search of your purity, of your innocence, of your authentic self. The statements this evening are very significant.

Zarathustra says:

Man is difficult to discover, most of all to himself; the spirit often tells lies about the soul.

The first difficulty in discovering yourself is that your mind is full of lies about yourself, which you have learned, which you have gathered from all over the place. From scriptures, from priests, from saints, you are collecting all kinds of garbage about yourself, and none of them knows you. None of them can know you. The possibility to know yourself exists only for you. It is absolutely your privilege – nobody else can enter into your privacy. This is a fundamental truth to be remembered: your innermost being cannot be enslaved, cannot be even touched.

Alexander had come to India, and when he was going back, he remembered that his master, Aristotle, who is the father of logic in the West, had asked him, “You may be bringing many things and many gifts to many people. For me, I would like you to bring a sannyasin, because only the East knows what a sannyasin is – a man who has made it his life’s task to discover himself, who has sacrificed everything, staked everything for a single point: he wants to know himself. I would love,” Aristotle said to him, “to see such a man,” because the West was still unaware of the inner search.

Unfortunately even today it is unaware of the inner search. Its whole effort is scientific, objective – how to know more about the world, how to know more about the farthest star. But nobody seems to be very interested in knowing oneself. It seems as if it is taken for granted: what is the need to know oneself? You are yourself already.

It is true you are yourself already – but who are you? You are not alert of your own being. You have not tasted the joy, the song, the dance of one who knows himself.