You can only be yourself; that is the ideal of totality. If you have to follow somebody, you have to be like somebody else, then you are after perfection. Perfection is a dirty word: drop it. That is one of the most dangerous words ever used by humanity. Drop it, be total.

Totality is not an ideal that somewhere in the future you can be here. While you are angry, be really angry – it is part of life. And out of anger comes compassion. When you are sexual, be really sexual – because out of sexuality arises the fragrance called brahmacharya, celibacy. But it is always out of the opposite.

You say: “I got the feeling that I am perfect as I am right now.” No, you are not, and nobody ever is. Existence is never exhausted; potentiality is infinite. So when I say you are gods, what do I mean? I don’t mean that you are perfect; even gods are not perfect – because gods are alive. What do I mean when I say you are gods? I mean your potential is infinite. “God” means infinite potential – you can go on growing, and you can go on growing, and there is no end to it. Wherever you are, you can still go on growing.

Death never happens. That’s what I mean when I say you are gods, I mean you are deathless. The Vedas say: amritasya putrah – you are the sons of immortality, deathlessness. You come out of nectar, you are made of the stuff of which nectar is made – amritasya putrah. You are sons of God, daughters of God – it simply means your potential is infinite, it can never be exhausted. Whatsoever you become, you will again find new doors opening, new peaks challenging, new adventures waiting for you, new dimensions calling you forth, invoking, provoking. One never comes to the dead end.

That’s what I mean when I call you gods. God does not mean perfection, god simply means the energy that goes on moving. Each moment, you can be total. And from one totality you can slip into another totality; one totality helps you to be total in another moment. If you were angry totally, then you will be loving totally – the totality in anger helped you to be totally in love.

But you are incomplete; everything is incomplete. That’s why things are growing, that’s why there is so much evolution. God, to me, is an evolving concept. I am not talking about others’ gods – they are dead things. If you ask a Hindu, he will say God is perfect. But perfect means dead. If you ask again, “How long has he been perfect?” then they will be in difficulty. If they say he has been perfect always, then he is dead; he was never born. Then Nietzsche is right that God is dead. Perfect gods are dead gods.

God, to be at all, has to be as imperfect as you are. Then what is the difference between you and God? He is total and you are not total. He accepts his imperfections; you don’t accept, you go on rejecting. That is the difference. The difference is not in perfection, the difference is in acceptance. You deny, you reject, you hide, you defend, you remain closed, you are afraid. You never go into anything really, you remain out of it – afraid, fearful, scared, ready to escape if sometimes things become too much. You go only so far.