It is now almost an agreed idea that man was born in the ocean as a fish, millions of years ago. All those millions of years, the child passes through in days. From the fish to the monkey is a long way; from the monkey to man is also not a short way.

In nine months he moves exactly, step by step, as the whole humanity has moved. He repeats the whole history. So it is absolutely clear that the way he grows in the mother’s womb…the speed is phenomenal. He will not grow that fast in a lifetime of seventy years. In fact, in those seventy years he will simply grow old. He will become less and less alive. In those seventy years he is moving towards his grave. He is not growing up, he is going down – down the drain. So there is no need to be afraid of being reborn.

I can assure you only of one thing: there is no question of belief. You can see the point yourself, that without being a Christian, without being a Jew, without being a Hindu, without being a communist, you were perfectly alive and kicking.

In that innocence you have known the most wonderful experience ever.

Sigmund Freud has many beautiful insights. One of his insights is that everybody on the earth has some idea of a paradise. There is no culture, no civilization in the past, in the present, which has not had some kind of idea about a paradise. From where does this idea come?

Sigmund Freud’s insight is that this idea comes from the womb of the mother. Those nine months were of tremendous comfort, of absolute luxury. You had no responsibility, no burden on your head; you had no duty. You were not doing anything at all except living – and living alone! You were so full of life that there was no need for someone else to fulfill you.

Those nine months in the mother’s womb you have forgotten consciously, but your unconscious remembers them. In deep hypnosis you can be made to remember that experience. That unconscious experience of the most beautiful life for nine months is the reason that people are searching for a paradise – the paradise they have lost.

That is the basic root of the story of Adam and Eve being thrown out of the garden of God. That story is not a historical truth, but it has a psychological insight. And around the world, in every religion, there is something similar to it: that there was a day when you lost contact with all that is beautiful, glorious. The story is simply symbolic. The child leaving the womb of the mother is really being thrown out of the Garden of Eden.

Now begins a tedious journey – from the very beginning, painful. As he opens his eyes…. His eyes are very delicate: for nine months he has lived in darkness. There was no need for him to open his eyes, or even if he had opened them there was nothing to see. Now he opens his eyes – glaring lights; he starts being hurt.

In the mother’s womb he was not breathing for himself, it was the mother who was breathing for him. Even that much responsibility was not placed on him, that he has to breath for himself.