And in the crowd, the idea is very strong that you can gain knowledge from others, that you can become wise from others’ advice, that you can become religious by believing in others, that you can become spiritual if you are obedient to the commandments of God. But it is always others you have to look up to: you yourself are absolutely worthless. Anything of value is going to happen to you only through others. This idea has been propagated and everybody has been poisoned by this idea. That is the fear when you start moving on a small footpath, leaving the superhighway.

They say – or they used to say in the past, but it is no longer relevant – that all roads lead to Rome. But not all footpaths! Every footpath moves on its own, to its own destiny. Now even the roads are revolting; they have forgotten Rome completely. It is very rare that any old rotten road may be going to the Vatican.

The fear is natural, but it has to be dropped. To be carried away by the fear will be very unintelligent.

Secondly, experience shows that in the beginning, by being alone in your own silent spaces of the heart, you feel you are losing contact with others. But don’t you see me? Can you find a man who is more an outsider and a stranger in the whole world? Yes, I have lost contact with all kinds of idiots. Now I only have contact with those who are thirsty and those who are understanding and those who want to evolve into spiritual beings. Now this commune of friends and fellow travelers has a totally different meaning than being in the crowd.

The crowd crushes individuality, destroys your freedom, humiliates you to such a point that you start hating yourself instead of loving yourself. The society has been dominated by a very wrong psychology. It looks logical but it is not psychological. And logic is something man-made; psychology is not something man-made.

The logic behind humiliating each individual to such a point that he cannot love himself is that if you love yourself, how are you going to love others? And the society and the family and the nation and the religion – everyone is interested in your loving others. Love your wife, love your children, love your parents, love your teachers…love everybody except yourself. It is a simple logic: if you love yourself you will not care much about the wife or the husband or the children or the parents or the priests.

This fear has dominated humanity for thousands of years. But this fear was absolutely wrong because it has not created what they were thinking of. It is a simple psychological fact that a man who cannot love himself cannot love anybody else – but that is not logical, that is a psychological truth.

If you cannot love yourself you don’t know even the taste – what love means. So you can pretend: you love your children, you love your wife, you love your husband, you love your parents – but it is all pretension. If so many people in the world were loving, where does war come from? From where are all kinds of violence continuously coming? From where is hatred arising if everybody is so loving?