And that’s why people are against me: I declare I am God, the Upanishads are fulfilled in me. And not only that, I declare you are Gods, and all the prophets and all the seers are waiting just to be fulfilled in you too! But you are so condemnatory about yourself, you are so deadly against yourself. You reject yourself so deeply that you cannot believe that God is possible in you. And if he is not possible in you, how can he be possible in me? Maybe it was possible in Krishna – he had come from paradise. Maybe it was possible in Buddha – he was an incarnation of God. But you know I am just as much the body as you are, as fragile as you are, as prone to illness, disease and death as you are. I am human.

Once I am gone people will not be offended by me. Then you can fabricate mythologies around me, you can create fictions. And the same people who are offended will become worshippers. This has always been so. Now they say Buddha was an incarnation of God, but what were they saying in his time? Now they say Jesus was a Messiah, half the earth worships him as God. What were they saying when he was alive?

This has always been so. And it seems, unfortunately, that it is going to always be so.

Man does not trust himself. Man cannot trust this idea that God is possible on earth. Maybe he is there high in the heavens, far away, distant. The closer God comes to you, the more difficult it becomes to accept. And then naturally, there are a thousand and one things that I do and say which go against their prejudices, which go against their settled habits, which go against their concepts. They are always happy with the priests, they are never happy with the prophet, because the priest simply goes on nourishing their prejudices, he helps them. The priest is a prop: whatsoever you believe in, he goes on watering it, he goes on strengthening it. Whenever you start feeling a little suspicion about your belief, you go to the priest and he again gives you support.

Here, I am taking all supports away from you. I am not here to renovate the old rotten house in which you are living. I am dead-set to demolish it – because only when the old is utterly demolished can the new be created. When you end as the old, as the past, only then will you be born as new.

The prophet, the Messiah, the Christ, the Buddha – they cannot be accepted by people while they are alive. People can only accept them when they are dead, when they cannot do any harm to them – harm in their eyes – because Buddha is not there to do any harm to you. It looks like harm to you. It hurts, because he has to do an operation; it is surgical.